Category: Stuff

Man, I just keep surprising myself:

——– Original Message ——–
Subject: MSc CS project prize
Date: Fri, 04 May 2007 11:59:01 +0100
From: Szabolcs

Gentlemen,
As you may know, each year we choose the best MSc CS project.
This year, your projects were shortlisted.
Well done to all of you and congratulations to David for the win.
David, could you please send me your current address so that
I can send you the prize (a cheque for £100).
Hopefully, you will find the comments below useful.
Regards, Szabolcs

>
> I’ve now had the opportunity to read each of the three M.Sc. Project
> Reports which you kindly sent me. As in previous years, these were
> extensive, well presented, and covered an interesting range of topics.
> In judging which should receive the prize, I evaluated each of the
> reports on four critieria:
>
> – importance of the problem addressed
> – quality and originality of the project work,
> – discussion of related research and development work, and
> – results achieved.
>
> Once again, competition was close but a clear winner emerged. I would
> therefore like announce _David Keen_ as the overall winner, and
> congratulate him warmly on his achievement.
>
>
> AJUDICATOR’S NOTE:
> Each of the finalists had included useful background information and
> bibliography. However, it was disappointing find that little effort
> had been made to give an effective context for each project by
> reviewing related work and examples of comparable existing
> implementations. Simple Google searches revealed the existence of
> numerous similar implementations which might usefully have been
> discussed. Since awareness of the “competitive” environment is
> essential both in commercial projects and in the research world, and
> usually improves the value of the work done, this should be an
> essential element of any project report.
>
>
> Attached are brief comments on each of the projects, for distribution
> to their authors. I will arrange for the documents to be returned to
> you in due course.
>
> Sincere regards,
>
> Dr Geoff Sharman FBCS CITP
> Visiting Professor in Computer Science, Birkbeck College, London
>
—————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————-

[snip]

> _David Keen, “A Mobile Phone Instrument Tuner”_
>
> The idea of a mobile telephone providing the functions of a hand-held
> metronome/instrument tuner seems stunningly obvious (in
> retrospect), and has clear relevance to musicians who frequently play
> away from home. But it appears to be an original idea since I was
> able to find only one reference to a similar implementation on a
> mobile phone:
>
http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/software/item/InTune_musical_instrument_tuner1.php
(although
> there are a number implementations available for use on a PC). This
> clearly has less functionality than the implementation described in
> this project, which would seem to meet the needs of most musicians.
>
> The author has provided a very useful summary of musical notation, its
> relationship to harmonic waveforms, and the Fourier Transform method
> of analysing waveforms which is used to detect pitch. This enables a
> clear understanding of how the proposed function is intended to work,
> and is coupled with a description of the MMAPI services of J2ME which
> formed the basis of the implementation. The approach taken is also
> clearly described, together with the design for the Instrument Tuner
> which enables the frequency spectrum of the sampled sound to be
> displayed on the mobile phone handset. There is also a very useful
> description of the challenges encountered in testing this function on
> a range of mobile hardware emulators.
>
> I was unable to test the function provided but I am satisfied that the
> objectives of this project have been achieved in almost all respects.
> (It might be useful to provide a URL giving access to a simulation of
> the function, together with the opportunity to download the function
> to a mobile phone for those who wish to evaluate it in detail.) The
> resulting functionality is not only useful but potentially has
> commercial value and I would strongly advise the author to seek
> intellectual property protection for his invention, if he has not done
> so already.

After five years, I have decided to consign the old site design to the archives and move frogcake.net over to WordPress.

The old site worked ok but it wasn’t the easiest to update with new articles or pictures and until yesterday the RSS feed was updated manually by hand! It was as I was incorporating a new RSS class into my site that I realised it was time to either rewrite a whole chunk of code, or move the site across to a more professionally built product.

It was interesting looking back over the last eight years’ worth of posts and seeing how my attitudes (and writing style) have changed.

Back in the summer of 1999 we were a couple of young Aussies just off the boat. I seemed constantly surprised by the scale and cost of everything and I remember we were literally down to our last £50 when we both managed to get jobs (we used to share a ready-meal to save money).

Over the years we’ve been to most parts of the British Isles and a fair chunk of Western Europe as well. We’ve been to the west coast of Ireland and the north coast of Scotland. We’ve seen castles in Wales and the Pyramids in Egypt. We’ve strolled through Central Park and cruised down the Grand Canal in a gondola.

We’ve seen Mozart at the Coliseum, Strauss at the Royal Opera House and Beethoven at Glyndebourne. We’ve been to the Last Night of the Proms and seen the Medici Quartet play in the Reform Club on Pall Mall.

I’ve conducted concerts in St Pauls’ Covent Garden and Kathryn has sung in the choir at the Royal Hospital. We’ve recorded Beethoven with the Corinthian Chamber Orchestra and sung Rachmaninov with Collegium Musicum of London.

We got married, became British citizens, I got an MSc and Kathryn works for an architecture practice that has had more influence on the London skyline in the 20th century than any other.

We are both a bit older and wiser now but London is still an amazing, fascinating place to live. Looking back on what we have achieved, having arrived in the UK with not much more than a couple of suitcases, I’m actually rather proud.

Andrew’s been blogging about service lately and it made me think of an experience I had recently.

My BT line is rubbish so I thought I would try cable. NTL had a deal where I could get broadband and a phone for £25 a month so I thought I would give them a go. My problems started when I tried to arrange installation on their website; it was only February so naturally they hadn’t updated their website to allow bookings to be made in 2007. I tried selecting 2006 from the drop-down but that wouldn’t validate as it wouldn’t let me make bookings in the past. So to get around their broken website (I wanted to sign up online because there was a £25 discount) I used a cool Firefox extension called Tamper Data to intercept the posted form and manually change the date to 2007.

Naturally NTL ignored my installation request so I ended up arranging installation over the phone when I chased them up the following week. They said they would still give me the £25 online discount but they had a weird way of processing this. They needed to charge me the £25 immediately and then this would be refunded on my first statement. OK, whatever. So they charged me £25 and fixed an installation date.

Five minutes later, they called me back saying that actually they couldn’t provide a phone service to my address, only broadband and TV. Since the whole point of this was to get rid of BT I said I wanted to cancel. Ok, he said, he would refund the £25 but this could take up to fourteen days. Great.

When I realised that during this time Virgin Media had bought NTL I knew I was going to have a fun time trying to get my money back. I called NTL/Virgin after fourteen days without a refund and of course (once I got through the horrible phone system) the person I spoke to had no idea about anything. She took my details again and said it would be about fourteen days for the refund department to process it. Fourteen days later, I called again with the exact same result…

About a week after the second follow-up call I received a letter from Virgin payment processing asking for a copy of my bank statement showing the £25. I sent this off a couple of weeks ago and am yet to hear back or receive my refund.

The whole thing is ridiculous, I was charged £25 for a service that I never received and that £25 was meant to be an online discount in the first place!

I had a totally different customer service experience the other week when I bought a MacBook. I won’t go into how nice the machine is but the way the Apple Store works is really cool. I told one of the assistants I was interested in buying a MacBook and he then spent some time asking me about how I was going to use it, what I was looking for and he showed me some stuff on one of the MacBooks they have set up all over the store. He clearly knew his products and he seemed genuinely interested in helping me make the right choice.

Once that choice had been made, he went to request the machine and came back with a handheld that read my credit card. He gave me my receipt and then went to fetch my new MacBook. I didn’t have to queue at a counter or anything. It was really cool.

Some stores just get customer service. They understand that if you provide excellent service you don’t need to be the cheapest. HMV understands that while you might be able to buy DVDs cheaper at Tesco you’re not going to be able to talk to the girl behind the checkout about film recommendations. Apple understands that while you can buy a cheaper laptop elsewhere, they can charge more for beautiful equipment sold by knowledgeable staff in a pleasant atmosphere. I’m sticking with my ISP Zen because although Virgin Media can sell me broadband for a cheaper monthly price they lock you into a twelve month contract and their service is shit.

Yesterday was my graduation ceremony for my MSc in Computer Science. I got to wear a funny hat and there are pictures in the gallery.

There are also pictures from the CCO recording and our trip to Paris with my mum and dad.

The waiting is finally over. I slept in this morning as I needed to recover from an all-nighter working at the colo on Thursday night and as I stumbled to the shower I saw the envelope from Birkbeck lying on the floor. After reading the first paragraph I did a little jump. Here is what it says:

Dear Mr Keen,
I am happy to inform you that the Examination Board has recommended to the University that you be awarded the degree of MSc in Computer Science, with a Mark of Distinction. These are not commonly awarded and reflect your very high level of attainment in the examinations.

I’m pretty proud of myself. I know it sounds corny but for someone who didn’t even do any maths or science in year 12 to get a Distinction in an MSc proves that if you work really hard at something you can achieve what you might never have thought possible.

It took a lot of effort. Every step of the way I was always unsure whether I had what it takes. I didn’t know if I should even apply for the course, but I did; I didn’t know if I’d be accepted, but I was; I didn’t know if I could pass an exam, but I did with high marks.

It was really tiring. Studying part time while working full time was a lot harder than I thought it was going to be. Some terms I was out four nights a week and I learned how to get through the week on five hours sleep a night. This was hard on Kathryn too but she was always completely supportive and a great help to me.

My graduation ceremony is on 20 March. I wonder if will need to get one of those gowns…

Kathryn got me a great present for my thirtieth birthday; tickets to the British Formula One Grand Prix. This was brilliantly timed for the week after my exams so Andrew and I took Friday off and spent three days at Silverstone

It was a fantastic weekend. We had great tickets in the Club Silverstone grand stand at Becketts where we had a great view as the cars swept through the high speed S’s. The weather was really warm so we were very glad to be in the cool, breezy shade of the covered grand stand.

Directly behind Club Silverstone was the BMW Sauber Pit Lane Park. This was a little complex with stands about all the different aspects of the team. But the best bit was a tiny little track where a Formula BMW and a Formula 1 are put through their paces. They had to hose the track down to try to cool it because there was so much grip it was hard to get the wheels spinning. The heat also meant the cars could only be run for about 30 seconds or else they would overheat. The noise from a 750BHP V8 running at 19,000RPM just a few feet away was awesome.

Out on the track the GP2 races proved exciting as did the Historic Sports Car challenge which was comprised of about forty glorious old sports cars of the 60’s and 70’s.

The race itself was also great with Kimi starting well but seeming to lose pace after being jumped by Michael Schumacher during a pit stop.

I took about two hundred photos and I’ve put some of them in the gallery.

All in it was a top weekend!

Now that I have an iPod I have been getting into podcasting. Of course you don’t have to have an iPod to listen to podcasts but iTunes makes it all so easy. If only there was a linux version…

Anyway a couple of my favourite podcasts are the Ricky Gervais Show – pant-wettingly funny – and Dr Karl on triple j.

I hadn’t listened to the ABC for a long time and it is funny to hear how totally paranoid they are about mentioning a particular product by name on air. It is quite extraordinary. Even when identifying some commercial thing by name would make things so much clearer they always have to make these weird allusions to it. I guess it is in their charter or something as a non-commercial broadcaster but the BBC doesn’t seem to have a problem about stuff like that.

Mat and Petrea had their second wedding in Derby a couple of weeks ago. There are pictures in the gallery.

Our lovely dog Rosie died peacefully at the farm on Friday night.

She had lived a happy life, her time split between the farm at Bordertown and home at Coromandel Valley.

I remember when I first met her and her brother, Bluey. They were two little brown balls of fur. I don’t think the plan had been to get two dogs but brother and sister came as a pair.

There was never any question of who was in charge. Despite Bluey being bigger and stronger than Rose, he would always defer to her; whether it was who should be allowed to lie on the couch or who should share the last bit of his meal. I could empathise with him. 😉

In her younger (and leaner) days, Rosie liked to chase rabbits at the farm. She would work in a team with Bluey and they actually managed to run a few of them down.

As they got older (and rounder) the rabbit chasing slowed down but they still loved to go to the farm and had to amuse themselves with digging the garden when they were back in Adelaide.

The last time I was home was January this year and I was worried that it might be the last time I saw one or both of the dogs. But the risk of losing a friend is the unavoidable price we have to pay for friendship.

And it’s worth it.