I’m writing this blog post when I really should be doing something useful like working on my final year individual project, but hey, sometimes you just want a break and I’ve played enough Freecell recently…

So, what is my project? I’m writing a program to extract metadata (play counts, track durations etc.) from music libraries such as iTunes and Windows Media Player, display statistics and find additional information about genres, artists and albums from the Internet. That sounds simple enough, but there are a number of different data sources being used, and figuring out how to display all this data isn’t the simplest of problems…

To do all of this, I’m using F#, a functional language that runs on the .NET Framework (part of my project is evaluating how good F# is at being used for this kind of program). I’m liking the language a lot, it’s got all the benefits of being functional as well as all the benefits of running on .NET. If you want to map a function over a list of tuples, that’s fine… if you want to create a GUI using WinForms or WPF, you can… if you want to interact with other programs over COM, that’s still ok… it’s just a shame that using non-F# libraries can’t really be done in a functional style, but that’s far from being the end of the world. As good as functional code is, sometimes it’s just helpful to be using object-oriented code instead.

Visual Studio’s support for F# isn’t as good as that for C#, but it’s sufficient for most of my needs, and it’s certainly far better support than anything had for last year’s group project (but that’s one of the issues with using a new language… no IDE support whatsoever!).

Anyway, that’s probably enough for now… I’ll probably blog about my project again (nearer to completion), but that’s what I’m spending most of my time on at the moment… particularly as lectures are taking up a reasonably small amount of my time this term.

So.. the Spring term… the group project was completed and the presentation went well. Everybody seemed suitably impressed, which we weren’t entirely expecting. Coursework was rather unfairly balanced with some courses having much more than others. Apparently many weeks of work is worth the same 16% of a course as a single, quite short piece… The exams were once again crammed into a single day (apart from the business exam, which was multiple choice anyway). This time, one exam had a third of the paper on something that was only briefly mentioned as a side note on the course website and never even mentioned in the lectures. Suffice to say I couldn’t answer that one, but then that seemed to be a problem faced by most people.

Over my one week Easter holiday, I built my sister’s website. She designed it of course… Other than that I took a bit of time to just relax. Not that there was really enough time for that.

In April, I started my industrial placement at Bloomberg, where I’ll be working until September. It’s a pretty good place to work, with a fairly relaxed atmosphere and lots of fish… not to mention free snacks and coke (Coca-Cola and Pepsi… you’ve got to have a choice ). I seem to be spending my time writing C++ for the server side, and JavaScript for the client, although I’m not going to go into the details of my work, and I am really enjoying it. The money comes in handy too… If you find yourself somewhere around Moorgate station, a trip to Whitecross Street market is quite a good place for lunch with a wide variety of different things to choose from.

Aside from all the work, I’ve had a number of days out in the park enjoying the warm weather (at least the periods of it that we’ve had), as well as a weekend by the sea in Worthing and a few barbecues. That does seem to be the benefit of doing a proper job rather than being a student all the time… the weekends are completely free for me to do what I want, work stays at work.

I’ve also started reading again… It’s been far too long since I really sat down and read a book, so I’m completing my Discworld collection. I’ve just finished the Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic, which for some reason I’d never read before, having only seen the Sky adaptation of them, and am about the start on Moving Pictures… The ones in between are all sat on my shelf at home, so I’ll just fill in the gaps. One day I’ll read the whole series in order, but I think I’ll leave that for a while.

So, that’s what I’ve been up to. There’s probably something I’ve forgotten, but that’s what happens when you don’t post anything for 5 months.. it probably wasn’t important anyway

The only problem I’ve had so far seems to be a rather strange configuration issue in Apache, but I’ve managed to work around that until I find out what’s going wrong. Everything else I’ve tried to install has worked just fine.

All of the hardware that I’ve connected so far has worked without a problem, although I did have to dig around a bit for Memory Card Reader drivers as Acer don’t seem to provide 64-bit drivers for my model.

I quite like some of the new features in 7, for example, the way you can use a slideshow for the desktop background and the new aero features when you hover over a window thumbnail or show desktop. It’s a shame Firefox doesn’t yet have support for giving thumbnails for each tab.

Jump lists are also quite useful, providing quick and easy access to recently used or favourite files. I’ve pinned a few folders that I use frequently to the Explorer jump list on my taskbar.

The new version of Virtual PC for Windows 7 is also a great improvement over the previous version. It seems to run well and allows you to run applications on the guest machines as though they were installed in the host, which is quite useful for testing web sites in IE6. Ubuntu seems to work in it as long as “i8042.noloop” is added as a boot option to make the mouse work, although I can’t seem to get the Virtual Machine Additions to work. Maybe I should try SuSE (which is actually supported with the VMAs).

Overall I’m pretty pleased with the Windows 7 experience and am glad that I've updated from Vista. I’m sure other features will come to my attention as I continue to use it…

Firstly, I updated my gallery a few weeks ago, with all of my pictures and videos being found in the same place. I uploaded a lot of new photos and some additional videos whilst I was at it. This can be found here.

Secondly, we've managed to find a house for next year! It's in East Acton, and all of the paperwork is being processed now, so hopefully it will be ours soon…

Finally, I've been to a couple of weddings so far this month, both family and friends. The family wedding was in Poland, which made a nice change, and that was a really good weekend. I didn't understand most of the service as only a couple of bits were in English, but it all went well and there was plenty of food and drink at the reception (both days of it…).

They also released beta 1 of Silverlight 2. This brings .NET support to Silverlight, so it can be programmed using C# or any other .NET language. Controls are also available now, so you can use things like text boxes and buttons in Silverlight. A Visual Studio plugin for creating Silverlight 2 applications has also been released, as well as a preview release of Expression Blend 2.5.

There are also beta versions of Expression Studio 2 available for download. Expression Web 2 brings support for PHP, as well as improving on the features of Expression Web 1. The other parts of Expression Studio also have new features.

The equation editor itself seems to be missing an export button, if you attempt to publish the document to a blog instead, it seems to completely ignore the equation, and a quick search on Google didn't appear to give me any easy way of doing it either!

Then it dawned on me to try the "Save as web page" feature in Word. Unsurprisingly this saved the equation as both a png and a gif, so if I'd just tried this a little earlier, I'd have saved myself a bit of time and frustration. Nevermind….

I have also added the Dr Who Special from Children in Need last Friday.

You can find both of these at http://video.clempaul.me.uk/

As an existing customer, they have doubled my bandwidth to 5.09TB per month and will be doubling my disk space as well to 512GB ish. I can also have unlimited machine users and email addresses! As though 3000 email addresses wasn't enough!

To view a video full screen, double click on the video, and you can download the videos by clicking the download links.

As my video player has been broken since the Release Candidates, I have started work on a new video player, which will be more interactive than the old one and will hopefully work a little better. Eventually, I will merge this into my gallery so that there is only one place to go for my videos and photos.