Blog: The Life Of A Supreme Ruler

Tick… tick… tick…

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— orudge @ 19/05/2009 9:30 pm

That’s time there, ticking away rather quickly. I had my last ever exam today! (Well, for the foreseeable future, at least.) It’s rather nice to know that I am done with academia. The past four years have been quite the experience – very interesting, of course, and I have learnt much, both inside and outside of the lecture theatre! So anyway, for the next few weeks I get to relax a bit and generally enjoy things, before my graduation at the end of June.

I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned it on the blog before, but I currently do have a job lined up for after my graduation, working for a company in the US. I’m hoping to start working remotely in August (after visiting my Dad in Brazil during July), but the long-term plan is to move out to the US in October. So the other thing I’ll be doing over the next little while is applying for a visa. Specifically, the company has to apply for the visa (an H1-B visa), and I will no doubt have to provide lots of paperwork and the like during that process. In a way it’s quite lucky really – the past few years, demand for H1-B visas has been incredibly high, with something like 3 times as many applicants as there were places last year. This year though, with the recession and so on, there are still some 20,000 visas left, going down at around 1,000/week, so there are still lots available just now. Hopefully I’ll hear more about this over the coming weeks.

Right, well, I’m rather tired, and have Ashes to Ashes and Prison Break to catch up on. Night, all!

Oh, and I know I still have lots of photos to upload from various trips and so on. I shall try to do that over the coming weeks, too. 😉

How awesome

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— orudge @ 29/04/2009 1:23 pm

You’re probably familiar with the likes of TinyURL, which converts a URL into a shorter form. Well, DickensURL lets you convert a URL into a piece of Dickens’s finest prose. I highly recommend visiting http://dickensurl.com/55/%27No_one_is_useless_in_this_world,
%27_retorted_the_Secretary,_%27who_lightens_the_burden_of_it_for_any_one_else.%27, for instance.

And that’s my Link of the Day for today.

Time is ticking on

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— orudge @ 23/04/2009 11:35 pm

Two weeks tomorrow, I shall have had my last ever day of classes at university. Then I’ll have my final two exams, and I’ll be done with university. Mad, eh?

Got my senior honours project handed in last week, and gave a presentation on it yesterday. Overall I’m quite pleased with it, and I think the presentation went quite well. The project itself is a GUI-based configuration file editor for the Apache web server, and it is my intention, once the project has been graded and so on, to release it for anybody to download from this very site. As it is currently implemented, it is quite functional and makes setting up an Apache server really quite easy. It’s portable, too, running on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. Keep an eye out on the site in the future if you’d like to try it.

Off to North Wales for the weekend tomorrow afternoon/evening – taking some of my stuff down in advance of me taking lots of stuff down in May/June, and it’ll be nice to see Grandad again, if only for a few days.

And that’s about it for me just now.

Easter holiday

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— orudge @ 10/04/2009 1:21 am

Well, the past couple of weeks have been the Easter holiday (or “spring break” as I guess we’re meant to call it these days, since it doesn’t actually fall over Easter any more). It’s not been much of a holiday for me at all, alas, as my senior honours project is due in next Friday, and lots of work has had to be done. (Some 115 revisions committed to my Subversion repository since the 28th.) Things are looking a lot better now than they were before, though, so that’s something. I’m very much looking forward to getting this all handed in and done with, though, for sure.

In other news, time is ticking on, and in just over a month’s time, it’ll be exam time again. Provisionally my exams are on the 18th and 19th of May, and then that’s me done until graduation at the end of June. Hard to think my university career will soon be at an end…

Prolific PL-2303 driver woes

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— orudge @ 24/03/2009 3:53 pm

I figured I’d post this in case anybody else out there on the Internet is having problems. I’ve been looking for drivers for my Prolific PL-2303 USB to serial port cable – specifically, 64-bit drivers for Windows XP x64/Vista x64. There are some on the official web site, but they didn’t like to work for me. It turns out some bright spark decided to create two incompatible devices, the PL-2303 and the PL-2303-X (also PL-2303-H, PL-2303-HX), but give them the same USB vendor and device ID. If you happen to have a PL-2303 and can’t get the drivers to work, I found that the drivers here worked for me. (Thanks to the links in the comments on Rob Garrett’s blog for those.)

And please, to any hardware manufacturers: if you’re going to create incompatible devices, please don’t give them the same device ID.

Going all Web 2.0…

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— orudge @ 22/03/2009 7:14 pm

Well, I went and got myself a Flickr account in January, as I mentioned before. (On that note, I’m still to upload my California/Nevada photos from January – I did start uploading them a while ago with the Uploadr, then it kept timing out and being a pain, and I haven’t yet got around to retagging and reuploading them.) I also seem to have ended up getting a Twitter account. I’d never really been a fan of it before, but it’s mainly during the past few days with the union elections that I’ve found it can be quite handy. So I may well end up updating that a bit more often.

In other news, my senior honours project is due in on the 17th of April. This means I have a lot of work to get done. I’ll probably be relatively quiet until then!

SFO

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— orudge @ 08/02/2009 1:47 am

(or KSFO if you are RPharazon and prefer ICAO codes…)

So, today was my last day in the US, and I’m sitting at gate 94 of San Francisco International Airport waiting for my flight to Heathrow. We should be boarding in about half an hour, and I’ll arrive in London around about 1pm tomorrow, I believe. I have an essay to finish on the plane, which will be fun. On the plus side, SFO actually seems to have power sockets readily available (unlikely LHR), so I can go onto the plane with a full charge on my laptop (which should last about 4 hours) and the wifi here is priced pretty reasonably, too.

Today was a rather good day. We were in San Francisco doing the touristy thing, and the weather was fantastic – we went up to Twin Peaks, and got lots of good photos – last time I was there, in June/July 2006, it was foggy, and the photos were not so good! Ate at a very pleasant Italian restaurant/café, and visited the Exploritorium again to see the bits I missed with Rachel. All in all, a nice day.

Anyway, I think I am going to have a look for a drink before getting on the plane, I’m thirsty. See you in the UK.

Tahoe

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— orudge @ 05/02/2009 12:34 am

So, I’ve spent the past couple of weeks staying with Rachel at Incline Village, Lake Tahoe, just over the border in Nevada. It’s rather nice here, with Lake Tahoe being rather large and picturesque (and many photos will follow once I get home and upload them all). It’s been surprisingly warm and sunny here (considering it would normally be quite snowy) – in fact, a lot of the snow has been melting. Tahoe is one of the best places for skiing in the US, so I figured it was something I had to try. Before last week, the first (and last) time I had skied was in 2000, when I was on a school trip to Edinburgh. I seem to recall that I only began to feel vaguely comfortable when it was time to leave…

This time, though, things were a bit different. I went last Tuesday afternoon with Rachel, and Rachel attempted to teach me the basics. Alas, this didn’t go very well, and I fell over a lot. In fact, I pretty much spent more time on the ground than I did standing up. So I decided it would make more sense for me to get a proper lesson. Went in on Wednesday morning, and got the “early bird special” private lesson package, with a great instructor called George. Somehow, everything seemed to make a lot more sense, and the lesson seemed to go really well. I stuck to the basic “schoolyard” slope for the rest of the morning, and in the afternoon got a cheaper group lesson. (I also managed not to fall over, instead of the previous day where I barely managed to stay up.) Since the place was so quiet though, there were only two people in our group, and the other person dropped out after a while because they weren’t quite as comfortable as they thought they were at skiing (it was a “2nd time skiing”-type lesson). So effectively I got a two hour private lesson for $25. Winner.

The instructor that afternoon took me up “Lodge Pole”, the more ‘difficult’ of the beginner slopes. I was somewhat apprehensive about this (particularly since the previous day, Rachel had recommended we go up for the view – which was fine, but getting down proved to be a problem… I ended up getting a trip down on a snowmobile!), but it turned out to be fine and dandy. Did a few runs of this, and the instructor seemed to think I was fairly good at it. So for the last event of the day, we went up “Lake View”, which leads to more intermediate runs, and we took “Freeway” down. I did manage to fall over a couple of times here, mainly because I was afraid I was going to end up accidentally going down some of the more difficult runs instead of going where I was meant to. When I think about it now, I’m not quite sure why I did this, but I guess it was my first time up on one of the “intermediate” runs, so I was a bit nervous!

Anyway, next day, I came back, and was on my own for the day. Ended up trying out Freeway again (which had got quite icy due to the snow melting in places), and after a few runs of that, made the choice to try some of the more tricky intermediate slopes, such as “Popular” and “Penguin”. These were a fair bit tricker – steeper and longer, but rather good fun. Came back again a couple more times over the past few days, and I’m now reasonably confident about some of these runs. Today Rachel and I decided to take a group lesson (and again, ended up being the only people in the group!) to improve our skills a bit – I wanted to try to master parallel turns. This is something I didn’t quite manage to do, but apparently I’m a lot better at it now than I was. In the afternoon, we went up the “Crystal Express”, which is the lift that takes you to the very top of the mountain. The view was quite something – see the photo above – and it wasn’t too bad down, if rather tiring due to my inability to properly perform parallel turns!

All in all, the past week or so skiing has seen me go from falling over a lot, to managing to get down from the top of the mountain without falling over. So I’m pretty pleased about that. It seems skiing is something I shall have to try again in the future.

Over the next couple of days, we’re going to visit some of the local towns and so on and see some of the non-skiing-related sites, before I head home on Saturday. Get in on Sunday (back in St Andrews by the evening), and then the new semester starts on Monday! Project work and an essay due next week too, though, so there’ll be lots of work to be done while I’m here…

Speaking of work, I got my exam results back yesterday. One exam wasn’t quite as good as I expected, but otherwise I’m fairly pleased with the results. 🙂

Well, I’d best try to do some of that work, I guess, now. See you back in St Andrews.

The video is up now

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— orudge @ 25/01/2009 1:01 am

The video of my Google Tech Talk is now up on YouTube. If you haven’t already, check it out. 😉

Exams, cameras, Flickr, California, Google…

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— orudge @ 23/01/2009 7:37 pm

Well, it’s been a busy few weeks, that’s for sure. What have I been up to since my last post?

I finished my move to Thunderbird, and indeed my move to Windows Vista on my main PC. After tweaking it significantly and getting rid of a lot of the guff, it seems to be working alright. A few niggly features, but oh well. Installed the Windows 7 beta in a VM, too – looks like it should be everything Vista should have been!

I revised for exams. And procrastinated instead of revising for exams…

I bought a new camera, a Nikon D40. It’s shiny and nice. After having to wait a few days for things like the memory card to arrive, I took some photos. Here are a selection of photos of St Andrews at night, some of which turned out quite nicely, I think! The camera has accompanied me to California, so I will describe more about that later.

I created a Flickr account, and indeed, migrated my entire photo gallery to Flickr. (Although it seems I need to reupload a few videos that didn’t quite get copied over properly.) I’m going to integrate that into the blog a bit better, but that’ll probably have to wait until I’m back in the UK. Eventually, my plan is to tag my photos properly and so on, although with 5000 photos, it’ll be a slow process! I’m likely to be a bit more selective with new uploads, too – there are a lot of bad photos in that 5000. While I’m not planning on removing any of the existing ones, I may just upload the good photos in the future (I only uploaded a quarter of the photos I took in the St Andrews at night gallery, for instance, since the rest were all a bit too blurry or poor.) Thoughts on this may be appreciated!

I revised a bit more, and procrastinated a bit more.

I sat my exams. Multimedia was the first one, which seemed to go quite well. Artificial Intelligence was next, which everybody found kind of tough, including myself – in a way, though, it’s good that everybody found it hard, rather than just a few people finding it hard and the rest thinking it easy! The last exam was Distributed Systems, which I think everybody was quite positive about.

I went to the dentist on the afternoon after my last exam (to check that everything was OK after my root canal a few months ago), and frantically tried to sort things out (packing, etc) for my trip to California the next day.

I got about 2 hours sleep, then had to drive down to the airport. Well, I drove down to the park and ride, where it seems I can park my car for two weeks free, and just have to pay £4.50 for the bus. Bargain compared to the official airport parking! I then flew down to London, waited a few more hours, and got on my flight to San Francisco. I was flying with United, and economy class was seated in a 2-5-2 configuration. I was in seat C, and there was somebody else in the equivalent seat on the other side – so there were 3 ‘free seats’ in the middle, since the plane wasn’t full. This meant I had a bit more room to stretch out, which was nice! The flight was fine enough, if not overly exciting (11 hours is a long time on a plane). I did rather like the channel on the entertainment system that let you listen to air traffic control though – the ATC channel at Heathrow Airport seemed incredibly busy, the people who work there must be very good at what they do! Anyway, got into San Francisco around 4pm, and got back into Napa by around 6.30pm – rather tired! I’m staying here with my friend Rachel, as I did in June 2006.

So, I got into California on Wednesday, and yesterday was my first full day here. And the first thing I had to do was go down to visit Google, with Rachel, where I gave a tech talk on Wine – specifically, the Wine user experience. I went and met up with Leslie Hawthorn and Ellen Ko, at the Google Open Source Programs Office. These are the people who are responsible for running Google Summer of Code, which I took part in last summer. And what can I say… the experience was fantastic. The talk seemed to go well – it will be put up on YouTube in the coming days, I believe, so you can watch that if you should like. Then we had a brief tour of Google (I’ll put the photos I took up sometime soon, probably when I get back to St Andrews), and we then all sat down for lunch at one of Google’s 19(!) cafeterias! Now, the Google lunch is famous, and rightly so – it was rather good, and best of all, free! There’s no such thing as a free lunch, except at Google it seems! We then went back to the Open Source office and got lots of free swag. I think both Rachel and I very much enjoyed our trip there, and it was very nice to meet Leslie and Ellen “in real life”! Thanks to both of them for having us, and also for putting all the hard work they do into Summer of Code! (As I have said before, I would highly recommend that any students out there interested in programming for open source take a look at the SoC programme, and take part in it!)

After Google we went to the Exploratorium in San Francisco, which is a museum-type thing with lots of sciencey displays, much of which was rather interesting. We didn’t really have enough time there to look at everything, unfortunately, but it made for a fascinating afternoon’s trip!

Today we’re heading off to Tahoe (and my first trip into Nevada), up in the mountains. I shall report more – and take lots more photos – when we get there!

Owen out for now.

A new year, a new operating system

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— orudge @ 05/01/2009 9:37 pm

So, it’s now 2009. I spent Christmas at my Grandad’s in North Wales, and new year with my brother and mum in mid-Wales. I’m back up to St Andrews now, since my first exam is on Saturday, and there is work to be done! Then I have another exam next Wednesday, and my final exam the Tuesday after that. Then, the following day, I shall be flying out to California to see my friend Rachel (who I stayed with back in June 2006). While I’m there, I’ll be visiting Google, which I’m quite excited about, and giving a Tech Talk (assuming I manage to get it written in between all these exams and so on!). It should be fun indeed, although I’ll also have to continue to do work on my senior honours project, for which a deliverable is due in February once I’m back.

In the mean time, I’m planning to finally move to Windows Vista, something which I’ve not really had any desire to do in the past. Having a new DirectX 10-capable graphics card, however (a GTX 260) is one incentive for me to upgrade, though, and I found that Vista isn’t too bad when you turn off a lot of the annoying stuff. So, I’m going to take the plunge and install it on my new hard disk. But one of my major issues is that Windows Vista doesn’t support/include Outlook Express, which I’ve used to manage my mail for some 10 years now – I have approximately half a million pieces of e-mail in my OE installation, which take up about 5GB of space in OE’s .dbx format. I have a couple of options here: I could move to Windows Mail (or Windows Live Mail), which is effectively a newer version of OE, or I could move to a client such as Thunderbird. I’ve used Thunderbird for years on my Mac for accessing various IMAP accounts, but it had (and still has) a few quirks that meant I didn’t really want to adopt it as my main e-mail client. But the alternative, Windows (Live) Mail, wouldn’t be ideal either, as not all that many programs support conversion from it. Plus, W(L)M stores each e-mail as an individual file, instead of one file per mail folder – with 500,000 e-mails, that’s highly inefficient! So, I’ve decided to move to Thunderbird.

I’ve got Thunderbird more or less set up in a way I like (although there are still a few niggly things, some of which I believe will be fixed in Thunderbird 3.0). The main issue then is converting all my existing e-mail. Thunderbird can import mail from Outlook Express, but it then loses read/unread status (I still have a lot of unread mail in my folders), and it doesn’t transfer things like reply/forwarded status in messages. So, I’ve decided to do things in a more laborious, but ultimately better, manner: copy all my messages to an IMAP server (which I’ve set up on obiwan), and copy them back – this way will preserve the attributes and so on. It is, however, a lot slower than the automatic conversion. It’ll take a while, but once it’s done, it’ll be worth it. Also, with Thunderbird, I’ll be able to stick my profile on my local server (obiwan), and share it between platforms, should I want to, which could be quite handy.

Anyway, I really should get back to revision – it’s funny how all these other distractions appear when one has exams or deadlines looming.

Merry Christmas, all!

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— orudge @ 25/12/2008 10:20 am

Well, it now appears to be the 25th of December, so I hope you all have a very merry Christmas. I’ll be somewhat busy over the next few weeks, with exams coming up, so it’s nice to have a break of a few days if nothing else! Enjoy yourselves!

owenrudge.net is 9 (and a bit) years old!

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— orudge @ 29/11/2008 1:03 am

Well, I’m an hour late, but yesterday, owenrudge.net turned 9 years old! Yep, on the 28th of November 1999 I launched “Owen’s Visual Basic Workshop”, which gradually evolved into the site you see today. 🙂

News and suchlike

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— orudge @ 26/11/2008 4:55 pm

Well, it’s been a while since I’ve posted a blog, as I’ve been quite busy lately (well, that’s not new now, is it?). Anyway, note to self: owenrudge.net is 9 years old on Friday! Nearly the big 1-0!

So what have I been up to? Well, academic work of course – my senior honours project planning has been going on, and specification documents have been written up. Ents work too – I’ve been appointed Technical Co-ordinator for the year, which is nice, but a bit of extra work! I’ve also been in the process of job-hunting, which has gone quite well – I have a job offer from CodeWeavers, working on Wine, which should hopefully all go well – the plan would be to move to Minnesota once visas are sorted (which is hopefully going to be October 2009, or October 2010 at the latest), and until then, work remotely like I did this summer in Summer of Code. I’m rather excited about this opportunity, and I’m looking forward to working on Wine again. 🙂

There’s probably much more to mention, but I have a meeting to get to in the next 5 minutes or so. So briefly: I’ve been playing Left 4 Dead, Valve’s new zombie thriller, which is quite enjoyable. I also attended a couple of Sigur Rós’s UK concerts recently, which were both rather excellent – very nice to see them live at long last.

Right, time to go…

WineConf photos

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— orudge @ 07/10/2008 7:49 pm

My photos from WineConf are up, should you be interested in them. They’re not that fantastic, most are a bit blurry, but I figured I’d put them up anyway. A few other people have uploaded photos, you can see those from the Photos section of the WineConf 2008 wiki page.

I came across a random web site…

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— orudge @ 03/10/2008 9:08 pm

… where the author had written “wierd”, a common spelling mistake, several times. It pains me every time I read this misspelling – it’s just wrong! I wondered how many other people found this annoying. Quite a few, it seems. In fact, I found this blog entry which contains a nice list of mistakes, the majority of which bug me a lot. So next time you’re about to write “wierd”, or mix up your “their”, “there” and “they’re”s, or type “CD’s”, “80’s” or “pizza’s”, please check that site, bang your head against the table, and write the correct thing instead. 😉

En route to home

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— orudge @ 29/09/2008 9:21 am

A brief hello from Amsterdam Schiphol airport. I’m not long off the plane from Minneapolis, and have a flight to Edinburgh to catch soon. WineConf was good, I shall post pictures and more news shortly. 🙂

Things going on

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— orudge @ 25/09/2008 11:08 pm

Hmm, it’s been a while since I last blogged. It’s been a busy few weeks. I’ve been up in St Andrews, pottering around. It’s currently freshers week, so I spent all of last week in Venue 1 getting everything ready, and then the first half of this week in venue 1, actually running things. So far so good, anyway.

You’ll have to excuse the brevity of this post, because I’m currently quite tired. Tomorrow (by which I mean in about 6 hours time), I’m heading to the USA for WineConf 2008, the annual Wine developer’s conference, in Minneapolis. This has come about as a result of my work on Google Summer of Code, which I finished in August (although I still intend to contribute features and patches where possible in the future). My flight leaves at 6am however, which means I have to be at the airport by 3-4am, which means setting off at 2-3am from here. I then get into the USA at about 1pm local time, and still have the best part of a day to sit through. I’m going to be very tired by the end of tomorrow, for sure. Then the conference itself is on Saturday and Sunday, and I’ll be flying back on Sunday night, to get back here Monday afternoon!

So that’s about it for me for now. There are perhaps other things I was going to say, but I can’t really remember what, so eh. I’ll try to update you soon, once the new semester has started next week!

TT meet photos up

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— orudge @ 19/08/2008 3:27 pm

My photos from this year’s TT meet are up in the gallery. Also included are some photos I took of my sightseeing in London the following day. The film of the meet will be following in the probably somewhat distant future.

The TT-Forums Meet 2008

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— orudge @ 09/08/2008 10:26 pm

… was rather good fun. Photos and video coming soon, once I’m on a decent connection. I’m in London until Monday, shall be seeing some of the sights tomorrow, and then getting the train back up on Monday afternoon.

More on that story later.

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