So, circumstances have conspired that I'm working with a load of tech I used to work with, five or so years ago. Strange! It's funny how things come full circle sometimes.

I don't really want to say a lot about it - it's security stuff and I don't want people stealing my ideas quite yet - but hopefully, it'll yield some fruit and I can do a proper write-up at that point.

Got some parts in the post yesterday so I can get cracking on some MIDI HW I want to make. I'm juggling like a squillion projects, though, so I don't know how long it'll be before I get around to that one!

Not a lot else to say. "Busy with a project I'd rather not talk about" seems to be a waste of an LJ update.. but ho hum.

Ooops, I haven't posted for a while!

Anyway, since coming back to my place in Manchester on Monday (I write this on Wednesday evening) I've been working pretty solidly my some chess-related code.

You see, I was casually talking to Dave (who is doing a PhD in Artificial Intelligence) and I mentioned that I have a mostly-finished chess engine/AI written in DoktorChess. He mentioned that he needs a platform to write a particular type of AI module on, and asks if he could possibly use DoktorChess? Ahhh.

So I said yes, then looked at the code and realised it needed some tidying up. I decided I should make some kind of 'tournament server', so that Dave can upload his AI module and have it automatically played against a handful of players (like mine, and Steeve's, once I egg him in to writing one).

Hrmph. I seem to have accidentally challenged Dave (doing a PhD) and Steeve (MSc) in their specialist subjects. Crap.

So that tournament server is what I've spent the last three days (ish) writing. Given that I suck (hard) at webdev, I'm quite pleased with what I've been able to come up with!


(click (twice!) for bigger version!

Not quite finished (I think 'losses' and 'draws' should be the other way around, looking at it) but almost there. Quite impressed with how not-shit I've made it look (YAY TABLES).

It runs each AI in its own AppDomain under partial trust, so it should be safe to expose to the whole internet if I want (well, when I filter out the many XSS which are in there at the mo). I'm tempted to do just that - make the game engine available and invite anyone that wants to play. I tried asking on YakYak but no-one was interested, which seemed a shame.

All I've got left to do is authentication, time control (ie, losing game if a player if it takes too long to think), and perhaps some code to pull in other AI programs to play against (though I'm not sure me/dave/steeve will make any AI strong enough to sensibly compete).

Sooooo. Haven't updated for a few weeks! oops. You see, I'm staying at my mum's house up north, and the only machine I have is my teeny tiny netbook (which is also in dire need of some TLC - soo slooww!). The keyboard on said teeny tiny netbook is really, really hard to type on, so much so that I don't really want to write a huge blog entry on it.

No, really! Usability is a huge thing! The keyboard I use at home is a proper old-school Dell thing, which was old when I got given it (back when I worked in a school, before I even started uni - seven years ago, maybe?). It's so lovely and chunky and haas so much 'positive auditory feedback' that I think every girlfriend has been too scared to use early in the morning, it in case they woke me up. Lovely thing. (BTW, if anyone wants to buy me an early xmas gift, a proper clicky Model M with windows keys would be lovely, thankyouverymuch [1] ).

Wait, where was I?

Oh yeah. Staying at my mum's place.

So, I'm watching terrible TV - 'the real hustle' - instead of my awesome usual TV ('The Jersey Shore'). Wasting time and relaxing, letting myself re-generate, and trying to use the time to read up on basic electronics when I'm not relaxing. Still trying to do this online MIT thing, and I've eased in to the basic maths as I'd hoped - which is good - but the more advanced stuff (AREA UNDER A CURVE, WTF) is leaving me a bit dazed and confused. To be fair, MIT list the course with prerequisites - which I don't meet - so you know. I'm not complaining as long as I learn _something_ which I can use in the 'real world', and I've definitely got some of that so far. Hopefully more will follow!

What else? Oh, went to a party at Steeves for his birthday, which was great fun. I spent pretty much all weekend on one night's sleep - catching a coach to Wokingham at midnight and getting in at like 6am is hard work! - but had a fun time. Met some old friends, made friends with a dude named Raresh (I hope that's the right spelling!) who is a really good dude, and trying to keep myself tolerant by meeting disagreeable people, too! Good times.

Speaking of disagreeable people, I got drunk a few weeks back and agreed to 'bury the hatchet' with Dave - ex co-worker and uni friend - on facebook. Arse! Now I have to be civil to him, or beak my own 'don't be a cock' ethical rule. Bahhhhh.

(also, the tv just informed me - via some childrens tv for the deaf - that the sign-language 'sign' for 'champion' is to bang on your boobs with your fists, king-Kong style. Of course, I could be very wrong - I bet whisperkit could confirm!

Met up with Kim a couple of days ago! Yaaaaay. Growing even closer to her as time progresses. It's wonderful how we've adopted elements of each other's personalities since we fell out years ago. Now we've made up again, we can look at each other and understand so much more than we ever could before. And she's so grown-up and responsible now! Ahwww. Emotiony bits!

Had a brief natter with Louisa, too, online. S'interesting to hear her talk about 'how I used to be' in comparison to how I am now. Apparently I'm a lot calmer and less aggressive. I do hope so.

What else has happened? IDK. Lots I've forgotten, probably.

Oh! I bought an isolating transformer on ebay. Now I can be brave and do stuff with mains power with less fear of blowing myself up. I've still got that scope psu to fix (if I'm brave) and I'll probably make a dekatron spinner in the process of making 'stuff' with the dekatrons. Driving them from a microcontroller may be fun - I have yet to look in to it seriously, since I've been away or busy since this c# contract finished a couple weeks back.
Speaking of making stuff - which I was, opaquely - I've found a really easy way to make one of my 'things to make' much, much simpler (and cheaper, in the process). It means I don't get to drop a CPLD in it (boo) but means I don't have to put a CPLD in it (yay) and that I don't need to master digital filters (thank fuck for that). I could probably bodge my way through a digital filter or two I think - we did at uni with poles/zeros/step response/etc that would probably transfer across - but it would defo take some time and some learning so if I can make the thing without that, for cheaper, I'm all for that.

I still have to decide what projects I'm going to take forward (and I can't even enumerate them here since it's a public post and SSSH SECRETS - I'd do it without thinking if I knew that only the people I knew would read it, but I don't want some random person googling 'shit to make' and stealing the ideas, you know?).
I've pretty much settled on a mini-mill to buy, as well - the Peatol ('Taig' in the USA) mini-mill, with a CNC kit (so I can convert and/or use it to manual and back). Plan is to replace the spindle with something highspeed - other people have done similar with a Kress-made spindle. Then it's just the CNC driving electronics to do - I might buy some (£££) or just try to build some. The most complex thing is microstepping, which I'm confident I can do, but I'm slightly unsure I'll get something wrong and not get the full power of my mill. Then again, Gecko want close to £200 for a 4-axis driver, which is a _lot_ more than I could build one for. Undecided there.
The whole CNC project, once I've added in bits I'll need (vise, tooling..), comes to a bit more than my budget (is it showing-off if I talk about numbers?), so I'm holding fire for now. Kat's keen that I buy it, once I'd explained she can design shit and send it to the mill (she loves 3D modelling!), and she also seems to think we could make money with it quite easily. We probably could, in theory at least - the thing is versatile enough to do, for example, metal engraving - but I've unsuccessfully 'bought things to make money' before so I'm quite apprehensive.
The mill fits in to my 'making shit' plan, too, since it could mill semi-custom enclosures for stuff I make, which I think may give me a bit of an edge, since I'll be doing pretty low-volume stuff. It'll never make its purchase price back, but it may well make enough that I can afford it as a 'luxury toy'.

(what the hell have they done to 'countdown' on the telly?! Ahhh, wish Whitely was still alive!)

My mum's well, btw (I feel silly saying this, but srsly, most of my friends who meet my mum talk about how wonderful she is, so I thought I'd say it here). I've gotten a bit better at telling her how much I love her, too, so that's really good. Of course, she didn't react at all to my emotional revelation, since she already knew.. but yeah. Good to say it.
Me and kat spent £70 on her in Manchester when she came to visit - a meal and the cinema - which we couldn't reaaaallly afford, but we didn't mind (kat never minds about anything involving money, and I never mind about anything involving my mother).

So yeah, all in all, I'm really happy with life at the moment. My biggest thing is what to do with it now, which I _always_ wonder about. PLANS PLANS AND MORE PLANS.

[1] I'm not being cheeky! Last xmas kat couldn't think of anything to buy me so I said I'd keep mentioning things through the year! Plus, my mum is dropping hints about her birthday (in a couple months I think) already! So I don't feel bad about it.

Also, I love it when I find a song that I love in a genre that I totally hate.



I mean, I loev glitch, so I guess it's not reaaallly 'I hate the genre', but I think this is one of the two dubstep songs I like (the other being 'First of the year').

I know I quote Warren Ellis too much, but I saw this one (while looking for another quote which I can hardly remember) and I thought I better jot it down.

"Writer's block? I've heard of this. This is when a writer cannot write, yes? Then that person isn't a writer anymore. I'm sorry, but the job is getting up in the fucking morning and writing for a living."

I'll drink to that.

So, just thought I'd do a quick update (even though I don't have anything particularly interesting to say).

Been almost-exclusively working on this contract work since my last post. It's busy, and I benchmarked it and found that it's about a quarter of the speed of the reference implementation, which annoyed me (since I was expecting quite a speedup in my version). The client has said it's OK, and that I should leave it and work on other stuff instead (since I only have a week left!) but it's really annoying me. A job worth doing properly, etc.

I've discovered I like pizza, strangely. I've always hated the stuff, but I nabbed some of Kat's the other day and now I just can't get enough! Good times. QUALITY OF LIFE ++

Bought a big plastic-drawers-in-a-metal-cabinet thingy fro Farnell the other day to put all of my sorted resistors in to their own little drawers. It's approaching Uber-nerdery.. but it's so worth it for not scrabbling around trying to remember what resistors are what colours!

Speaking of which, I'm still doing this MIT electronics thing. I'm finding the math slightly too much for me, to be honest - partly because it's been so long since I've Done Maths that I can't remember shit like "how to multiply two fractions" without thinking for a couple of minutes. I'm definitely learning electronics shit tho, and TBH I think that this is the best way to mash the maths in to my thick skull. Hopefully it'll stay there this time! I have trouble remembering which equation does what, as well - I spent ages tracking down a bug in my answer when I'd used the formula for 'total resistance of resistors in parallel' instead of something slightly different. Hopefully this is something that'll become second nature as I crunch more circuits.
So I think I'd get more from the course if I could remember more maths, but I'm learning so much with it anyway that I think it's well worth it.

Off to see Steeeve on Friday. He's throwing a birthday party down in Woking, so I said I'd go along, and see his robotics club while I'm there. It's going to be a really gruelling weekend.. our coach leaves at midnight on friday (I'm too cheap to get a train!) and we'll turn up at his place at like 6 or 7 am. His robotics thing is in the morning, then a party in the evening before we go home on sunday.. busy times.
It doesn't beat his own epic trip to _my_ last party, though, which involved him finding an unlocked bus and sleeping in it. Good times.

Almost two weeks since I last updated! Ooops.

Kat decided she wants a nixie clock, so I decided I could make one with a PIC and an old 10Hz GPS module which has been sitting idle since I bough it four years ago. I bought a couple of teeny nixies online, and a 12v step-up converter, and now I've got a couple of nixies glowing nicely. My plan is to make a two-digit readout, and hook it to Lavalamp, before I go the full hog and buy some more expensive nixies to make in to a clock. Seems to be going well so far - they are much easier to drive than I thought.

I've had a load of other ideas for them, relating to Stuff I Want To Make And Sell, so we'll have to see if those plans go anywhere. Lots and lots of plans! I found some stuff about CE marking that I'm going to look in to in-depth when I find some time. Hopefully I can make/sell stuff.

I've been doing MIT's online electronics course lately, too. It's the same lecturer and course as the OpenCourseWare stuff they released years ago - I remember watching the videos before I left uni! - but this time there are homework assignments, grades, and schedules. Hopefully I'll learn a lot, since there's so much I don't know about basic eletronics.

I'm also doing their cryptography course, although I'm not sure how much success I'll have on that. We'll see (if I have any time).

I got a desk out of storage the other day. Since I made it about 5 years ago, it's spent about three years of that time sat in storage, so I'l quite pleased to have a need for it. Looking at it, it's quite obvious that I wasn't very good at woodwork at the time - the construction is crazy bad! - but it is still in one piece, and it is quite pretty I think (and Kat does, too). It's a deep pink colour, with a glaze of foil hearts on it. Unfortunately it's only half-painted, and I managed to leave the correct paint in storage (D'OH) so me and Kat went to B and Q today and a very helpful attendant scanned the painted piece of wood I brought and mixed up some new paint, which seems to have worked really well. Hopefully I can finish painting that, and then varnish it pretty hard, over the next couple of weeks, and it can become my workbench in the spare room. Kinda worried it'll get damaged, but we'll see.

My contract work is going well. I've got two weeks left on the contract, and after that I'll need to find something else to do. Should be fun.

I went to a car boot sale with mum the other day - the family dog, Suzie, died so I went up to make sure mum was OK - and picked up a grinding wheel for £7. I've always thought one would come in useful, but not useful enough to justify the £25 they are in the shops, so I'm quite pleased with that. Some TLC later and it's as good as new (minus the rust!).

I need to figure out how I can drill some homemade PCBs. My bench droll will only go to 3K rpm, which is a bit low to do PCBs. Not sure if I can bodge the Dremel multi-tool in to some kind of frame/holster so I can use that.

I've been really in to growing veg lately. I don't know why - I've almost spontaneously gone from 'plants r boring' to 'OMG WHAT HYDRATION DO I NEED FOR MY CARROTS'. I've made a big wooden plant-box and planted some broccoli, lettuice, and butternut squash just a couple of days ago, and they've sprouted nicely. I've been feeding them the leftover water from the fish tank, which must be full of yummy plant-nutrients or something.

Oh, and me and Kat found a bookstore today, and when we got half-way down it, it suddenly became a porn store. Like the first half is used books, then the second is PENISES AND BOOBIES. We saw a comic called 'BUTTMAN'.. we were very amused.

So in short.. Good Times.

* Just had a late pancake day with Kat! Yaaaay. I love pancakes! It's strange because I remember pancake day last year, and we were living in this same flat, and it's like.. idk. One of those rare moments where I gain an extended view of perspective, you know?

* The contract work I'm doing is going well. He wants to release at the end of March, so that implies that my contract work will last till then at the earliest. The app isn't far off ready - I'm actually really pleased with how it has gone, since it _looks like_ we'll glide in smoothly to the deadline and not do the usual OH GOD IT NEEDS TO SHIP NEXT WEEK AND IT HALF WORKS.

* Kat got a job! Yaaay (can't remember if I posted this, but I figure it deserves two posts). She starts the 5th of March IIRC, doing some webdev work involving aggregation of data from consumer power meters. Sounds pretty cool, imho. I'm also pretty stoked about the whole 'dual income; thing! Providing our jobs don't grind us down 'terrible job'-style, it'll be great to stash up some mad savings [1] and really get the house looking good.

* Kat wrote some Lavalamp code for me. She's written an RSS reader and a 'driver' for the LED-sign wallboard I have, so we can now display RSS feeds (eg bash.org) on it. It's pretty cool! It just needs some polishing and it'll be done. I'm sort-of-hoping we can find time/energy to work on lavalamp, but idk if it'd actually benefit anyone other than me/Kat.

* Figured out why I love watching Jersey Shore! I'm deeply fascinated by how much the cast love themselves (in a non-derogatory way), and how they've got so much confidence and shit. Totally envy it - while they might have too much, I definitely have too little. If only they had 'GUIDO CLASSES' or something ;) Snooki advising me of fist-pumping technique!

[1] I SAY THIS EVERY TIME I GET A NEW JOB AND IT NEVER HAPPENS. Oh well!

Just FYI, I seem to have lost access to my MSN account unless I use their web-based browser. I'll be 'offline' on it until I find time and energy to sort it out.

So, since my last update:

* Declared myself a sole trader to the taxman, and opened a business bank account. Scary stuff! The current plan is to get more contract work to bring in some money, build up some capital, and look seriously at the possibility of making electronics stuff to sell. Kat's in on this, too, so hopefully we can Make Stuff and get people to use it!

* Managed to get a refund for the knackered Upgrades I bought on ebay at the start of December. I almost fumbled it and lost it - apparently I should get proof of delivery when I do these things - but the seller was honest and thus was told to give me a refund by ebay. I kinda feel for the guy. Assuming he didn't knowingly post faulty goods, he's of the impression that I broke his stuff then returned it. Kinda sucks. Obviously, I don't feel sorry enough for him to refuse my £300 refund.

* Two people - Ed and Alec - independently recommended me the same textbook to learn more about electronics (well, to re-learn basic electronics).. 'The Art Of Elecronics'. I grabbed a 50MB PDF of it, but I'll buy it too, I think. Hopefully I can get it cheap on ebay instead of paying a load to Amazon!

* We got our new fishtank set up! Well, mostly, anyway. It has water in it, and we bought some plants to go in it, so we moved the fishies in to it and they seem quite pleased with their new home (I hope they are, anyway). Going to buy some more decorations for it, and hopefully get some more fish in the next few weeks. Pretty stoked about this.. could it be that I finally have a non-technical hobby?! :D

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