Reading

Another year passes as i march steadily towards middle age, and again I went to the Reading (Rock ?) Festival. Aside from a couple of gripes it was another reasonable year. Lets get the good points out of the way first.

1) Drinking. Another classic year for that, My liver takes its normal battering and held up reasonably well.

2) Company. Aside from the Kids on the last night (see below) it was a good year for company, Standard issue crew went My Bruv, Harry,Kev, James, Mat, Ben and we met up with some of kids Harry found on the Internet who on the whole wernt bad.

3) Bands, When they were good they were good. Got to see a reasonable line up, with the new favourite being enter shikari.Some old school goodness with Mad Caddies, Ash and the Living End.

Now the bad points.

1) Organisation. Someone should be shot. Unfortunately due to a bit of rain some of the camping was unusable so the normal car park was moved somewhere just south of oxford (As i cant shoot god for organising the rain, it will have to be the festival organisers for the carpark). This meant a 3 hour wait to get into the place as we were taken across the Thames by "More ships than the
Royal Navy" (quote from Festival website). This meant 3 little ferry's that chugged across the 20 meters of water. One word chaps. "BRIDGE". Easy to knock up and they do it for loads of other events.

2) The Kids. too many kids and the line up was designed for kids too. What happened to the Reading ROCK festival. It may as well be called the Reading EMO - Hippidy Hop - Power Pop Festival. Then there's the fact that they are all talking about GCSE results. Instead of 'real' subjects. Secondly i have managed to last a fair few years of these without any prick trying to set fire to the tent. This year some idiot put a deodorant can on the fire and damn near blew me up. Worst still was the fact it was my can that was blown up.

3) Me getting Old. If it wasn't bad enough that most of the population of the festival appears to be 10 years younger than me now, I was really feeling it this year. Me and the Bruv went for a skank and only could manages a couple of songs, Next year i am taking a knee brace.

Anyway that's a good enough rant on that subject for now.
Overall I got to see some good bands, some bad bands, had a laugh and a drink with some old friends. Cant wait till next year

New Look. and Bloggin with Emacs

Right then. Got some time off and i have decided to put my affairs in
order. One of the first things on the list was to sort the blog out,
From now in i plan on putting real (ish) and useful posts here, as
well as update a little more often. Its all a bit like new years
resolution's really and time will tell if I get past the mid January
phase.

So here comes informative post No 1:. Bloggin with Emacs (or any
other text editor of choice even Vi).

I now use Emacs to write my Blog, Email and Wiki entry's, This means i
can spell cheque what i white, a major advantage for those of us who
are dyslexic. (see Harry's blog).

Those of you who use win Doh's probably wont be familiar with Emacs
and those into 'Nix have almost certainly experienced the Emacs / Vi
argument. But i digress and its not the editor but the web browser that's
important here.

Its really quite simple. Use the Excellent It's All Text plug-in for Firefox.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4125 this allows any
text box on a web page to be opened in a external
editor. (Again Windows users may have to download this excellent
browser) Once installed and configured your off and wont look back.

For those of you who work with Wiki's the same plugin can be used to
edit Wiki text from within Emacs. I would also recommend getting a
wiki mode, then you can take advantage of font-lock highlighting.

CGI

Enjoying tormenting myself with the more 'interesting' subjects at Uni, I am taking Computer Graphics and visualisation. Which deals with CGI. Unfortuntely its not the Maya or Max side of CGI, but the theory behind it.

Taking a break from revision i thought i would post a link to my first coursework.
This was hand coded in Pov-Ray using a custom Keyframe interpolation script I wrote.

This version is what I submitted getting the very reasonable mark of 95%, Hopefully some time soon when I no exams or other such nonsense to think about I will add the little lamp, if i can discover a cunning way of animating the power cord, without driving myself up the wall hand coding each keyframe.



Some small technical details,

Its Keyframe animation using a custom interpolation script to move between each keyframe.

The only controll points used on the lamp are the Lower arm, Upper Arm, and Head all other positions are derived from these.

The ball is also animated using keyframes, any rotation is generated procedually

The Extra bits like the hinge mechinism drove me up the wall, It automatically updates its position depending on where the two main arms are, calculating where it should be using the unit circle.

The spring also uses this calculation and a bit of Trig to calculate its roatation and length, Extruding a sphere along the curve to give the impression of expansion and contraction.


Anyhow back to Revision.

In the future there will be robots.

Robotics Amazing, this is the sort of stuff that I would love to do.

First off we have a skateboarding robot



Then...... Image the shopping list
Robot arm, Wii controller, laptop, and sword.. Serious Awesomeness

Link to their page.
http://www.usmechatronics.com/usmgarage/WiiBot.html

The moves are preprogrammed though. Could it be done in real-time with Gumsitx and Accelerometers ???, Looking for a project if anyone wants to sponsor it ???

Work, and bit torrent

Well, Its been some time since i posted here. Problem is that i have been snowed under with work, far too much of the stuff but its been enjoyable leaning all sorts of cool new stuff.

Anyway I feel its time for a rant.

Now i seem to spend a inordinate amount of time on the computer (just as the wife) especially now as deadlines come up. Unfortunately it never seems to be doing stuff like this, i don't have the time to write into my blog. Damm unless i start thunderbird i can go days without checking my e-mail, It just doesn't cross my mind.

So why cant i download simple html pages from time to time. One member of my household has decided to download the entire Internet via torrents. I don't want to get into a argument about p2p software, i rarely use it but what the hell, if someone wants to listen to the odd album then wheres the problem especially if they treat it as a trial and buy it if they like it. What does bother me is when i ask my flatmate what hes downloading and he replies Queen. he doesn't mean greatest hits, but the entire discography including those weird japan only singles releases.
What irks me even more is the aforementioned downloaded then has the cheek to moan that the Internet is slow. Turning the router off and breaking my connection to the python website.