CAT | Uncategorized
Well I know its a little late, but its time for that obligatory 'reflective' and 'philosophical' post that comes but once a year.
Firstly, the last year has seen a wonderfully diverse series of events that have been enlightening, entertaining, educational and occasionally embarassing. I've seen the coming and going of some really good friends, the success of several relationships and the failures of others.
In 2010, I managed to secure myself a sandwich year with IBM after several months of searching for a job. I applied to some really well known companies and organisations such as CERN and Intel but to no avail. Eventually in September, I was invited by IBM to attend an interview and was offered a junior programmer's position. At IBM Hursley, near Winchester in the UK. I'm scheduled to start in July this year and I'm really psyched!
I also passed the first year of my degree with a 1st! I was very excited and it gave me a great opportunity to work as a demonstrator within the Computer Science department and get some experience teaching computer science to the first years.
So what's happening this year? Well, aside from finishing my 2nd year at uni, I'll be starting my year out at IBM, having purchased a car and an appartment on my own for the first time.
New years resolutions? Keep this blog updated with a new post at least weekly and to keep my personal diary up to date too.
See you in the next week readers!
No tags
I'm feeling really bad for neglecting a lot of friendships at the moment. I've been really busy as of late, and its difficult to fit in all the work without putting the play on the subs bench for a while. I promise to be more sociable after all the assignments are handed in and everything is sorted out with uni work.Until then, I'm really sorry, please don't hate me >_<
No tags
I haven't posted this week because I've been on a roadtrip over to Aberystwyth to check out my new flat. The place looks good and I've started unpacking my boxes and making it look a bit more homely. Below you can see a couple of pics of my new room. I have a normal sized bedroom, nothing exciting, but I have a massive cubby hole to store things in. I think the guys want to run a server from in that cupboard which is just as well since the cupboard space itself is not heated. So I move in at the end of August and I'll be looking to find a job as soon as I get over there. Then, its just a matter of time before term starts and my degree continues!
No tags
My friend Martyn is really into the Guitar Hero game series and is pretty good at them. However, he got into the games via a demo and started playing with his traditional XBox controller rather than the guitar. For this reason, he's really good at playing with a standard controller, but can't use a guitar shaped one very well at all. In the last few iterations of the Guitar Hero games, they've stopped you being able to use a joypad to play, instead forcing you into using a guitar shaped control. Martyn wants to play the latest games on his GamePad, so today we started modding a guitar control into the shape of a gamepad.
Upon opening up the case, we found that the circuitry in the controller is actually quite simplistic. There are a lot of complicated ICs for connecting to the XBox itself and transmitting data to and from the system, but the controls are just a series of pressure pads linked to the system in parallel.
The system works by detecting when the guitar has been oplucked (the pluck sensor is on) and figuring out which coloured button in the neck has been pushed. The old system (controller only) relied upon the player simply tapping a single button to play a note. Therefore, the only real electronics I need to do is solder the pluck mechanism to the coloured buttons so that when Martyn pushes one of the buttons, the controller also registers as having been plucked too. This is going to be fairly simple, since I just need to solder connectors to all of the positive terminals on the pressure pads and the ground wires for all of the switches should do the rest.
I drew up a little circuit diagram for the neck and for part of the main system (I'm sure my diagram isn't "standards compliant", its been a long time since I studied electronics) and we went to maplin to pick up a few tools. Next week we're going to put together a prototype using buttons and things bought at maplin. The rest of the photographs can be seen below.
No tags
I've been working on Predtr for weeks now and progress was looking good until the other day I hit a block and two very serious questions occurred to me: 1) What, if anything, will I get out of writing this program? 2) If I do finish PREDTR, is there any evidence that people would want/use it?
Unfortunately, I decided that neither question had desirable answers and have decided to put the project on the back-burner for a bit, while I work on some more useful, profitable projects. My work will almost certainly be open source (you know what I'm like) but I have thought of some ways of making a bit of money from these new projects.
In other news, the lake district trip was a success and I've finally got the car insured meaning I can legally drive once again.
No tags
20
Crackberry and MSN/Facebook chat
No comments · Posted by James Ravenscroft in Uncategorized
I've been looking for a decent BlackBerry MSN/Facebook chat client for a while since I often have problems chatting on my desktop (especially running Linux - an unfortunate truth). I also get bored on trains and like to talk to people. On my previous handset I had Skype and I was able to chat to anyone using the Skype IM service. Unfortunately, I've not been able to find a good BB alternative until now (aside from BBM and not many of my friends have BBs).
The product I'm excited about is BeeJiveIM. This little piece of miracle integrates very nicely into the BlackBerry OS, providing MSN, Facebook, AIM and all the other awesome chat protocols at the palm of your hand. The thing that impresses me most about BeeJive is it's incredibly efficient way of handling (relatively) large quantities of data. I had a quick fiddle with Palringo for BlackBerry, mainly because it was free and looked just as good, and I have to say that I found it to be bloated and underpowered in comparison. BeeJive is a premium application, but I'm currently running it under a 30 day trial license. However, it offers value for money and as far as I'm concerned, is the best BlackBerry IM on the market. I'll be buying it just as soon as the trial runs out.
blackberry · crackberry · facebook · im · messaging · msn
I've just sent of my PyGame GSOC proposal using the Google Summer of Code website. I'm a little bit nervous, simply because I've never tried to get in on GSOC before and I'm not sure exactly how the process runs from here on in. I'm also not entirely sure of my chances of getting in. I guess time will tell.
You can check out my application here
I was unpleasantly suprised this morning by my cat, who seemed to think it would be a good idea to jump on my active external hard drive, knocking it over and effectively writing it off. That drive had most of my recent digital photos on it and a fair amount of dev work, leaving me significantly peeved. I have no backup. I took it back to the suppliers who have promised to either fix it or replace it. However, its unlikely I'll get any of my data back. I'm pretty annoyed 
My Mom asked me to take a look at her Acer Aspire one the other day because it's stopped booting complaining about hard drive failure. Upon closer inspection, I found out that the solid state drive in the machine had gone Kaputt!
I stumbled across TnkGrl's series of posts about modding the Acer Aspire One and instantly discovered that I could fix my Mom's machine by simply opening it up and replacing the built in SSD with a new 1.8" ZIF hard drive. We ordered a HDD immediately.
Unfortunately, I've had some real trouble getting the machine to recognise the new drive. I put this down to the zif cable being incompatible with the new disk drive. I've just been on Ebay and bought a new ZIF cable for the samsung drive and hopefully it will arrive on Thursday when the modding can resume 
Welcome to Funky Monkey Software, the new active blog for me to post about software, development and monkeys. Its been a while since I ran an active blog so I thought it best to start again completely rather than trying to breathe life back into my old blog. FMS is also going to be where I publish my software packages when I finally get around to completing them.
I expect to post at least once a week on varying subjects within the general area of technology and computer science. Check back soon for some useful posts.
