Journal: April 2008

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No rest for the weary
Sat 26/4/08 (Link to this entry)

Lately it's seemed like as soon as I get one thing out of the way, another two crop up. I got up this morning with the rather unpleasant realisation that if I'm going to go to the second event in the Scottish Clout Series tomorrow, I've got a fair bit of work to do today. After having to spend much more time than I had planned to get my group's coursework for my AI class finished yesterday, I've now got to get some work done on another piece of coursework which is due next week.

On top of that, I have a fair bit of work to do on the Sun side of things - more bug investigations, and some work reviewing some feedback on a project proposal I made last week (I'm not even thinking about preparing for next week's tech demo yet). And just to add insult to injury, it would appear that a bomb exploded in my parents' kitchen last night.

My mother's cooking skills are fantastic - she's capable of producing really tasty food that's actually healthy too - but when she really gets going on the catering for a big shoot (which the parents are at today), the cleanup afterwards can be a bit of an operation. Suppose I'd better stop wasting time typing here and get on with it...

Tech demo!
Thurs 24/4/08 (Link to this entry)

Two days ago, I finally got the information I needed to organise my first tech demo for the Sun Campus Ambassador program at Strathclyde Uni. 48 frantic hours of planning, promotion and preparation later, I presented a one-hour talk on Sun's open-source technologies to 51 assorted undergrads and postgrads (including one staff member!). I'm really pleased with how well it went, especially since it's been such a long time coming.

There are more pictures on my Sun blog, along with my semi-official take on the day's proceedings. Many thanks to TC who kindly came along and played photographer with his new iPhone (the one thing I forgot was my bloody camera). I'll be holding another demo next week on SunSPOTs, so no rest for the weary - though after two days of frantic work getting all of this sorted out, I'm glad of the chance to sit back for a couple of hours tonight!

Oh bugger I haven't written anything for ages
Mon 21/4/08 (Link to this entry)

It was brought to my attention recently that I hadn't written anything here for more than a month. This was both embarrassing (since they thought I'd given it up) and encouraging (since it means that someone actually bothers to read my deathless prose). Sorry 'bout that folks :-D

The long break is down to two things: firstly, I haven't had a lot of interesting stuff to write about, and secondly I've been utterly sick of the sight of an HTML tag. This is due to the amount of time I've been spending lately on my archery club's website, which now sports a shiny new interactive members-only section coded in utterly horrible self-taught PHP (to go with the horrible self-taught HTML throughout the rest of the site).

Other than that, I've mainly been doing university coursework and some part-time coding for Sun lately. I'm most of the way through the coursework bits for uni now, with just a few bits and pieces left to do over the next two weeks. I actually won an award today for my submission for one of our AI practicals, which was pretty unexpected since it was supposed to be a group practical but I ended up having to do almost all of the work. We've got some more submissions due this week, so hopefully that'll work better now that the others' final-year projects are out of the way.

The ultra-prestigious 1st Place Medal for Satisfycing Planning (I'm getting an Amazon gift voucher too :-D )

On the Sun front, things are looking positive too. Although the campus ambassador thing is still dragging on (seriously, how hard is it for people to answer a bloody email within two weeks), I've been getting some good work done for my old boss Paul on the lab team's booking tool, JLT. I've managed to squish a number of bugs which have been quite problematic lately, and I've been making some design proposals for some interesting projects. On top of that, it's looking like I might well be getting some summer work down south, which is really good news :-)

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