I already had a Google Calendar with birthdays in, but as these were recurring events, it only had names, not ages… The Solution: auto-generated ICS files to output the ages along with the names!

Please feel free to use this yourself. You can find it at http://calendar.clempaul.me.uk/. You don’t need to create an account, simply sign in with an OpenID (Google and Yahoo! accounts support this) and add your birthdays!

Exams went about as well as I’d expected, and my project was generally well received. I guess if they weren’t I’d probably not have got a first…

It’s a shame I don’t get a student discount anywhere anymore… surely my ID card should expire at the same time as my email account is deactivated… (that’s to say in a year’s time )

I’ve moved out of my house now, so I’m back home in Surrey for a bit until I’ve found somewhere new to live. I shouldn’t be away from London for too long though, after all I do have a job to start at the end of August.

Other than finding somewhere to live and a couple of programming exercises for Bloomberg, I’ve basically got nothing to do for a few weeks . I fully intend to use this time to sleep a lot and watch lots of TV, after all, what else is there to do with my time…

Thank you to everyone that’s made the last four years such a good experience. I’ve certainly gained a lot, and have made friends that I intent (and expect) to keep for life! Congratulations to everyone else who’s just graduated! I hope you all did as well as you wanted to!

PS: If you want to grab a copy of my individual project (although I’m not overly sure why you would), head over to SongHawk.net. This will give you a link to an installer for the Windows version. I probably won’t bother releasing the Windows Phone 7 version – it’s not like I have a Windows Phone to find/test fixes for any potential bugs….

No more lectures…

No more courseworks…

Of course, that’s not to say it’s all over (yet!) – I still have my exams and the rest of my project to complete, but that all seems rather minor in the grand scheme of things.

Looking at my calendar, it would appear that I just have a large amount of free time coming up, but there is unfortunately still a lot of stuff to fit in. On the other hand, I do plan to use some of that time to just relax and enjoy my remaining time as a student – after all, if time keeps going as quickly as it has, it won’t be too long until it’s all over…

With a bit of luck, the rest of my time at Imperial will go well, and I’ll have fun whilst doing it! (Although I do envisage a few late nights in Huxley as we plough through all the stuff that we’re supposed to know but don’t)

Let the revision (or should I say learning?) begin!

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.

I’ve had a few good days out since my last post… Back in July I attended the Bloomberg Summer Party which was a brilliant day out with lots of free food and drink, and lots of activities including hovercrafting! In August I went to the Notting Hill Carnival which was good fun… It certainly helped that the weather was fine

I’ve also been making good use of my evenings, seeing Dara O’Briain at the Hammersmith Apollo in September, Avenue Q and Have I Got News For You in October, Battersea Park fireworks in November, and Zane Lowe & Deadmau5 at Earl’s Court in December, all mixed in with nights out at various pubs/clubs…

I spent five days on holiday in Spain with Dave & Hugh, which was five days well spent! The weather was really hot the whole time, and I even went in the sea every day (it certainly helped with the sunburn…)! It’s also nice that the Spanish don’t really have any idea about measures… spirits seem to be served by pouring into a glass for an arbitrary amount of time, which was fine by me

The last term has gone really quickly… it feels as if it’s only just started, despite the fact that it’s actually just finished! The workload was pretty high, and it all seemed to pile up into the last week. Fortunately that’s all done now, so I can concentrate on my individual project for a bit before next term’s coursework comes round. It’ll also help that I’m only taking three options next term as opposed to the five I took this term.

Amazingly, getting home from London seemed to go without any issue whatsoever, despite the large amounts of snow across London and Surrey. There is however more forecast in the next few days, so hopefully it wont cause any problems with my plans for Christmas or New Year’s Eve (when I intend to be back in London).

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

Once again, most of the country’s been brought to a standstill by snow… It might just be justified where I live though, with over a foot of snow falling from 5pm on Tuesday night, and for most of Wednesday. It’s more snow than I’ve ever seen in England, and caused many people to be stranded on the A3 overnight… Roads all around the town were essentially impassable causing all sorts of transport problems.

It was quite tricky to walk through it, with it being up to my knees in some places, but there were quite a few places where it had made a really nice view. After walking around for a while, we ended up at the pub for a drink before heading back home. Later in the afternoon, we helped next door build their igloo, finishing it just after it got dark.

All in all, it was a nice day, I’m just hoping it will have cleared enough for me to get back to London at the weekend…

The snow was a nice surprise for December, with it very nearly being a White Christmas for me! Unfortunately the snow had just about melted by Christmas Day. Luckily, the snow didn’t have any effect on my exams, despite it snowing the night before. It’s probably just as well that there wasn’t more snow in London that week, as the last time it snowed, TfL didn’t really seem to manage very well!

My exams for the term (because we’re not around to have them in the Summer) seemed to go quite well, although starting at 9am was a little bit tough. They were both over by lunchtime, leaving us time to have a nice lunch in Eastside before our trip around the not-so-Circle Line. We also did Secret Santa whilst we were there, and I got a giant Gummi Bear, which really is a great present!

Once again, I saw in the New Year at the Fireworks on Embankment, surrounded with food and drink down in Stockwell. The fireworks were great as normal, and just afterwards it started to snow, albeit only for a short time. It’s just a slight shame that the hot dog seller didn’t seem to have cooked the onions very well…

Have a very happy 2010!

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…

The group project went fairly well, despite us trying to demonstrate some broken functionality in the presentation. Our game probably could have been much better if we’d only had more time, but I guess they didn’t expect anything too spectacular with only 4 weeks to write it.

I did quite enjoy the hot weather of the past couple of weeks, although I probably should have tried to get out more in it. It’s just a shame that the tube doesn’t really have any way to cool the carriages down… the Central Line was really hot in the sunshine, and I would probably have been a bit better off taking the bus instead.

I managed to watch quite a bit of Wimbledon on TV this year. It was good, although it would probably have been nice to see Murray get to the final, but there’s always next year. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to watch the final between Federer and Roddick, and from the score and the clips I have seen, I missed a good match. I suppose I can always watch the highlights on iPlayer…