Last Few Days, Sony Interview

I have picked myself back up from my “Week long Easter Break”, and been pretty productive. Yesterday and the day before included reasonable stints in the library, and I expect another full day’s work tomorrow. I think that Rob’s Tetley is helping a lot. I should probably think about reimbursing him at some point (or maybe buying myself some PG tips, because it’s a slightly less disturbing colour).

Also: sony bprl interview today was fun. It seems like it was organised by the engineers, rather than the hr people, and was a lot more inspiring than IBM’s: It was basically a chance to look at some cool [blue sky and almost-production] projects, see a few of them go wrong, and discuss some cool algorithms.

Included in the example projects was a scene localisation and overlay system (the demo overlays 3d pieces on a chess board, but was jittering horribly, because they were concentrating on detailed precision, and didn’t have a good technique to get a prior belief about where the chess board is likely to be *roughly*)

Another cool project was a content tagging, organisation, search and distribution system (though I heard it was being dropped). The user interface was a bit horrible and buggy, but it had some cool applications of the machine intelligence stuff we’ve done in the image processing and pattern processing courses. Also, I hear “bespoke metadata management system==fail”. Give me RDF any day. I was talking to Sally about that just this morning, before heading off to interview.

Also, there was a video-streaming-over-wifi app for use at football games (broadcast, <2Mbps to the PSP, fine under load test with 200 PSPs, production ready enough to be mentioned on the bprl site. I wonder how much it would cost to fully stress test the system until failure :P); and a set of ASICs for image enlargement and deinterlacing in HD (Shame they failed so horribly on the http://alsuren.wordpress.com/tag/bravia/ )

All considered, I reckon I would really enjoy working at BPRL. Made me realise that my CV was aimed in completely the wrong direction. I have added a section on my icon grid, and actually documented it (at http://www.srcf.ucam.org/~dl325/MenuSystem). Hopefully I can get a placement on one of the interesting projects, even if it is just QA.

I hear this game is made of win.

http://www.teeworlds.com/?page=downloads

Unfortunately, I can’t get to the servers on the internets, so people will need to go to dl315.pet.private.cam.ac.uk:8303

Past few weeks

It seems that I fail horribly. I decided that I would go home over Easter, so that I would be able to go from London to my IBM interview. As a result, I didn’t do any work from Good Friday through to now (I have yet to really start: the last two days have been spent doing only a very few hours each)

I was lent The Fountainhead by Mandy, back in 6th form, so when I saw it and Atlas Shrugged in the library sale, I had to get them. The last 2 weeks have been spent almost exclusively reading Atlas Shrugged. It has some interesting ideas, but I think that The Fountainhead covers a lot of similar ideas in a nicer way. There are parts of Atlas Shrugged where she plays on a theme too long: I was expecting to finish the last few hundred pages pretty quickly, but I got to a certain point, and then noticed that there was a 50-page monologue in front of me, so I just went to sleep instead and skipped the monologue entirely. I have since half-listened to a recording of the monologue, and it doesn’t seem to say much that wasn’t said elsewhere in the book.

One thing that it does do quite well is theorise how “from him according to his ability, to him according to his need” will fail (turning into “to each according to his want”, which could be worse than the capitalist ideal of linking ability and reward).

I am also quite interested in Rand’s concept of love. I won’t try to outline it here, for fear of being corrected, but essentially greed for the {recognition | respect | enjoyment} of another.

In other news, http://news.google.co.uk/news?q=iso+ooxml. While I think that it could have been done less forcefully, I believe that MS office having an ISO branded document format as its default is a step forward compared to .doc. The next step from here is to encourage governments to support at least one (or both) ISO document formats.

IPython

Okay, so when someone said they were trying to use ipython, I thought they meant IronPython(an MS implementation of python). Turns out that they in fact meant. http://ipython.scipy.org/

I checked it out, and Oh My God: I have fallen in love with it already. Basically, it’s an interactive shell for python, but with colour, and with lots of cool features stolen from Ruby, Matlab and Mathematica. (note: I’ve never used mathematica. I hear it is very powerful for algebraic manipulation)

For those of you on linux:
sudo aptitude install python-scipy python-matplotlib ipython
ipython -pylab
t = arange(0, 4*pi, 0.1)
plot t, sin(t)
?

or check out http://www.scipy.org/Getting_Started

For those of you on Windows:
get python either from http://www.python.org/download/ or www.activestate.com/store/activepython/download/
get the latest version of ipython and pyreadline from http://ipython.scipy.org/dist/
good luck (you might want to look at pywin32.sourceforge.net as well. I don’t know what that’s for.)

Long Day

I am now completely dead. Interview day with IBM from 9:15 until about 3, then back into London for dinner and dancing until 10-ish. Wearing the same shoes the whole time.

Interview wasn’t an interview really: more of a test-day. Don’t know why they didn’t start it later, so we could have just gone on the morning train.

Tried to scav dinner off my mum, but apparently she’d taken the day off, Dad too. I’ll have to ask them about that. Ended up eating in wagamamas instead. Not too bad, if I hadn’t eaten the semi-raw red-onion.

Dancing was jitterbugs, marble arch. There’s SO MUCH SPACE. Even my dreadful floorcraft didn’t trip over anyone. I think my dancing became a little Roland-esque at points. Not sure whether that’s a good thing or what. There were a few familiar faces (Carol(?), Cleo :D…). For some reason, I was half-expecting to see J there, but no joy.

Now there’s a stupid bus replacement service to cambs, so I don’t know when i’m getting in. (answer: 1:00-ish)

Dancing, guush

Since last Monday, after Salsa, I’ve been yearning for a decent jazz/blues dance with someone. Something with lots of Guush (sp?). I went to the speakeasy yesterday, and had a load of amazing dances. There were a few new student-types there, who seemed really up for the whole learning random charleston moves thing. I also had a really nice dance with Mirjana. I can’t really explain it, but there was definitely guush. I was talking to her body, and I didn’t notice what her feet were doing to support her (she could have been floating for all I knew). I think maybe it was just that neither of us were really thinking, so it was just a nice relaxed dance: not too much crazyness, and only a few subtle “there’s the break” style pauses etc.

I had a brief discussion with Rosie about Salsa, and at some point during the night, I worked out why I spin her so much (yes: it is me leading it): I think it’s because I don’t feel safe leading her in swing-outs. In Salsa, I guess you want to be made aware of every part of the other person’s body (so I can understand how heels might make it easier), but in Lindy (for me, at least) it’s nicer if you don’t notice the footwork. That way, you can feel the other person’s centre without too much noise. Once you have that, you can add in smooth variations, and you have my perfect dance. I guess if you’re thinking of shoes that are perfect for dancing, they would be the same shoes that you’d play run-outs with your little cousins in, (but with a bit of slide, so that you don’t have to lift your feet too much). Maybe I should find out what size shoe Rosie takes, and duct tape some plim-soles for her… Maybe I should bring some duct-tape for Alex as well.

Also, was reminded that Lara can *definitely* move her body while blues dancing. I suspect that I may not have been the best lead there, because I was thinking more about what she was doing than what I was doing.

The only thing that was missing was a Gill :(. Hopefully she will get better in time for next week.

IBM Extreme Blue Interview

I’m going for an interview on Wed. with IBM. If anyone else is: Shout.

I have a twin room in a B&B on Tuesday night (don’t worry: I’m not paying) so if anyone fancies joining me, they’re more than welcome. http://www.winchesterbandb.com/

Seems that neither google maps nor osm has decent maps of winchester.

Fail

So, erm… Yeah… some of you may have noticed that I’ve stopped dancing. This is because Gill and I broke up, and it was decided that it would be best if one of us stopped going for a bit. This means that I may end up doing salsa or tango or yoga or something to substitute.

This week, I have been mostly being reclusive, and tarting about with telepathy stuffs. It’s quite annoying, because the voice/video chat part of telepathy is mostly “bonged”. I seem to be developing a hacker beard (of sorts) as well. Also: If you hear odd sounds coming from the jcr-mail machine, it’s because I’m trying stuff out (and that’s the only other machine that I have admin access to). I’ll try writing a proposal for what I want voice/video calling to behave like in the next week or so, once I have worked out the extent of the mess it’s in now.

Now, I believe that it is food time, and then work time.

Spellingz

It’s good to know that people are reading the *titles* of my posts at least. I honestly can’t be arsed finding a spellchecker for windows mobile though.

I was talking to my dad the other day on GT, and he was making *loads* of mistakes. It made me wonder what we’re trying to optimize when we’re writing on computers. I know there’s a few information-theoretical motives for not wanting to make mistakes: Random noise makes things harder to compress (higher entropy), and mean that you are less certain what was meant (lower useful information content)

But entropy can be reduced by using simpler english (if you type something in dasher using only the big squares, it will have lower entropy than if you use tiny squares too). So why is it that we have spellcheckers, but not wafflecheckers?

Good purchaces and bad purchaces.

Do you ever get frustrated when you buy something, and it doesn’t do everything you expected it to do? Well the opposite is true of the Apple AirPort Express. I bought it as a present for my dad (well kinda for myself as well, but shush!), and it literally does *everything*.

I only bought it as a remote sound box, so that we can play iTunes through the *decent* speakers. Naturally, it does that job perfectly. It also has wifi on it, which I wasn’t planning to use (because it also has ethernet) but it has one or two more bars reception than the BT box from pretty much anywhere in the house, so I’m currently using it to post this message. It also has a USB port on it (for use with printers) and it turns out that that can be used to charge my phone (and possibly bluetooth headset as well, using the adapter I bought for my palm PDA). Total cost of AirPort:£65

So for the last few days, I have been remote desktopping into the media centre, and playing music while other people watch TV.

Point of note: the media entre/bravia combination falls under the opposite umberella: I have pebably spent in excess of 30 hours trying to get the screen resolution right, and/or the volume control to work I am starting to suspect that getting this working requires extra hardware. This is because sony neglected to put a vga output port on the pc (preferring HDMI). Also, the thing only has one tuner, so…fail. All in all, a pretty shitty purchace. Total cost: £1600 (a while ago) If anyone knows where I can get a (reduced height) PCI-e graphics card, or standard PCI card, please shout. All I need it for is 1366×768 resolution (fullscreen) videos, but it *must* have a vga output. Also, if it has nvidia 6600 compatible heatsink connectors, that would be useful.