A lot has happened in this time, I’ve finished my exams. Most of which went relatively well, barring of course the Grid Computing exam which was always going to be a wildcard. I’m now officially finished University as well after handing in my research dissertation last Monday. All-in-all it went well, however running out of time towards the end, my personal calling card, did mean that the report tends to tapper off in quality towards the final sections – but at least it’s finished.

Since finishing I’ve been looking after the pub at home as my parents were on holiday and returned yesterday. Other than that I’ve been sitting here at my computer playing World of Warcraft a hell of a lot, watching the majority of the Friends seasons on DVD and over the past two days watching Supernatural season one on DVD as well.

After only a week and a half of freedom from University I’m starting to feel lost as there’s no paticular direction to my life just now. I’m hoping to start a PhD next year but that all depends upon a funding grant from the EPSRC, so I’m currently caught in limbo between either finding a real job or a filler one until I hear for sure about the funding.

Procrastinating isn’t half as fun as it is when you’re meant to be doing something else. Sitting playing WoW doesn’t appeal as much now as it did when I had work which I was supposed to be doing at the time. Doing things you do to “take a break” from something doesn’t appeal when the thing you’re doing is actually the thing you’re taking a break from [some punctuation was harmed in the making of this sentance].

Other than playing world of warcraft and starting to keep a World of Warcraft blog to track your progress in the game (killer of a good few hours that could’ve been used for work), watching DVDs and playing cards I’ve not done anything. It sounds great but not doing anything when there’s nothing to do is pretty damn boring.

Other than doing nothing I’ve also managed to break my new XDA Exec which is currently en-route to O2 who will be replacing it with a new unit. Somehow whilst trying to flash the new WM5 version onto the device it seems to have deleted the original version, as expected, but not written the new version, not as expected. This means that when I did a hard reset on the device to update the OS there was nothing there to install and the device would just hang at an O2 splash screen. After some searching on the web and trying some wierd fixes nothing worked so it was on to O2 who asked me to send the device to them.

There’s nothing much left to add really, suppose I’d best start looking for a job to fill in the time between watching DVDs, playing World of Warcraft and sleeping; but I’ll get around to that later as it’s Friday night and I can hear a game of cards a-calling me from the pub…
- Chris

I am currently running a questionnaire into how people organise and browse their music collections in order to investigate browsing techniques for browsing large collections (in this case of music) from a sonified and gesture controlled interface. The study will look at the applicability of this type of interface for browsing large collections and attempt to find a suitable browsing method for doing so.

I would kindly ask anyone reading this to fill in a relatively short music questionnaire about how you browse and organise your music collections. It doesn’t matter if your collection is large or small, digital or CDs, all input is welcomed.

If you would take the time to fill in the questionnaire I would be very grateful.
- Chris

I’ve just had nothing worth saying… until now!

It’s that time of the year for an obligitory exams-are-coming post, here it is.

I have in total, 8 exams this year, 1 less than the grand total last year although starting 9 days earlier.

Before that starts I’ve got to hand in my proposal for my project, it’s nearly done and has to be handed in on Tuesday 2nd May. Once that’s out of the way it’s onto exams, the line up is as follows:

• Wed 3rd May: Enterprise Computing (M) – Business / Computing type course
• Mon 8th May: Information Retrieval (M) – Search engines, retrieval functions
• Tue 9th May: Professoinal Skills (M) – PI for dummies
• Wed 10th May: Grid Computing (M) – DAS and some
• Fri 12th May: Compilers 4 – Writing machine code
• Thur 18th May: Network Communication Technology 4 – Cables and RFCs
• Tue 23rd May: Advanced Research Readings in Computing Science (Software Engineering) – Readings in the area of Web Engineering
• Thur 25th May: Types and Programming Languages (M) – Functional language implementations

So it looks like a fun month ahead for me then!
- Chris

The project I’m undertaking is entitled 3D Sonification with Gestures. It is a self proposed project which myself and Steve Brewster came up with, and thus Steve will be supervising the project.

I wrote a small blurb (below) which presents the main idea of the project, which was then submitted to the projects coordinator (who this year happens to be David Watt) and it was accepted.

There has been a lot of work over recent years into the use of gestures with computers, work in this area continues and is constantly being integrated with different technologies and other types of interactions to create new and more sophisticated interactions between humans and computers.

The project proposed here is to combine gestures with sonification on a handheld device such as a PDA for an application such as the browsing and selection of music through the use of 3D spacial audio.

The research would study the effectiveness of use of 3D spacial audio for the selection of items which are placed around a user at different angles and distances, the study would specifically look into the way in which users would use such a system and any possible implications in the area of handheld/mobile devices.

My project proposal has to be finished and in for the 2nd May and the whole project and dissertation finished for the 11th September. Hopefully I’ll get a fair bit of reading done over Christmas (but is that really likely?).
- Chris

As mentioned, Thursday saw the handing in of the 4th year solo projects and the 3rd year group projects, after this was the compsoc end of term event at Café West followed by the GU.

My project was finished and ready for handing in at 3:30 (30 minutes early!), after handing it in it was off to Jim’s Bar via the food factory to grab some lunch.

Then after a few drinks it was Café West time, whilst there we were kept entertained by Stevie, Neil, Steve and Derek all having a pop at DJing for the night. After a lot more drink there it was off to the GU and to The Hive.

Finishing the project is strange, it has been coming for so long, yet now that it’s done I’m kind of missing not having to do it. On Friday, after my project demo, I was feeling really charged and ready to do some more work on the project even though I had nothing more to do. I’m sure I’ll be able to channel all this drive into my revision, or perhaps playing some computer games!

My photos from the night out are available on flickr. There is a set containing all the photos from the night, or you can view the photos as a slideshow.

I encourage everyone to join flickr and also to join the Glasgow DCS group, here you can add any photos you have of nights out or other things relating to the department, as well as post to the group only forums.

Hope everyone had a fun night and your easter holidays are relaxed and fun.
- Chris

We talked about the project in general and about what it is that I should be building. We decided that instead of building a tool which would be specific to visiualising and editing say HTML 1.0 or XHTML 1.1 Strict I would build a framework for such a tool. This framework would have pluggable parts which would then be used to create specific tools. For instance we will have plugins for parsing XHTML 1.1 Strict and for parsing HTML 1.0, we will also have plugins for editing HTML markup and PHP code. Through a combonation of these plugins we can visualise and edit a site written in HTML which has HTML 1.0 valid markup or edit a site written in PHP which generates XHTML 1.1 Strict markup. Having a pluggable framework will allow the software to be much more extensible than having a specific tool.

As well as deciding this we agreed that it would be useful to look at similar tools to see what types of tools are already existing. This will be worth doing not only to see what existing tools are available but also to see which facilities are available/lacking in them.

Other things we discussed were the general meeting times, and work I will do for next week. It was agreed that we would meet on Friday afternoons (a nice wind down to the week) and that by next week I would have produced a project plan and have a more strictly defined outline for the start of the project.

Best get on with it then,
- Chris

I had proposed a project as I mentioned earlier which will be supervised by Ray Welland. And today the project lists came out matching everyone to their selected projects…

I was matched with my project which I suggested the last week, I can’t wait to start getting into it. Matt was matched up with his Pie Menus on Mac OS X which he suggested. Some other people got projects which they suggested and the majority got choices they had put on their forms. Although most people I have spoken to have ended up with their 2nd or 3rd choice. This does not seem to be the most student friendly way of allocating projects but will probably work out for the best in the end.

I would think it better to allow students an opportunity to all propose their own projects (perhaps before the start of the university year). This would give each person enough time to work out a feasible project, find a supervisor and get a jump on the project selection. It would also allow each student to propose something which they would really like to do, rather than make a compromise for the next best thing.

Anyway, all the projects are up, everyone has one and we are all raring to go! On a side, Neil got the integration of DECS into Eclipse project… um, good for you dude. I can sell you inside information on the DECS stuff and recommend a good man to talk to about it. But, it all comes at a price… that’s right, all the tea.
- Chris

So we’re back at university. Life is good, lectures have started and we are all basically back into the fray of that which is University. Seeing everyone again is ace and getting back into the swing of studying has been easily done. This is a good thing as it has been straight back into the thick of things, no pissy week course on Unix or much of an introduction at all. After all we are the truly hardcore!

Anyway this post is mainly to bring about the attention of my new project which I have proposed. After working on the DECS project over the Summer I was very interested in building some sort of CASE tool. When I consulted the list of 100+ projects I was upset to find nothing of this nature (except of course the DECS extension projects). Therefore after the first of Ray Welland’s SEP4 lectures I went to talk to him supervising me building some sort of CASE tool.

After agreeing to this we had a preliminary meeting in which we pulled together all the ideas we had and came up with a rough idea for a project. I then went off and wrote the project proposal which would be officially handed to the university as the details of the project.

Therefore VisiSite was born, I wont go into details here, but the details will be available from the VisiSite home page and the synopsis of the project also available.