Coming to Aberystwyth back in 2006, I recall moving into my house in PJM (91, room C) with my family, Mum fussing about unpacking everything in my room, and my sister shoving all of my kitchen stuff in my cupboard (I never knew exactly what I had in that cupboard until I moved out the following summer).  I recall them leaving and being terrified to go downstairs, when I had plucked up the courage to go downstairs to meet my new housemates I was greeted by a friendly face offering me a cup of tea.  This friendly face was, of course, Faye’s and we spent many hours sitting in that kitchen drinking tea.
The year went on and I met new people, learnt new things, and had some wonderful times.  Perhaps most memorable is the ‘snow day’ in late February 2007, the revision sessions with seven of us crammed into my PJM room and generally ended up with Street Fighter being played on my SNES, and the long summer days playing frisbee on the University grounds.

After a long summer working, second year was upon me.  New lessons to be learnt, both in University (computer architecture, network programming, data structures and more) and in life (managing bills and other household issues).  Shortly into my second year Faye and I started going out, meaning we’ve been together just over two and a half years as I write this.
The second year saw me get an interview with Sun Microsystems and after an exam in January 2008, I was offered the job.  Revisions sessions got bigger and moved to lecture halls with projectors and elaborate slide shows.
The most memorable events of second year has to include mine and Faye’s “one month anniversary” dinner (after spending all day working, we were just about to get ready to go out when a friend knocked on the door and had us talking for three hours.  After getting ready and finding a restaurant that was still serving, we managed to order lots of tapas, but they refused to make us paella), and going to see Bill Bailey perform Tinselworm in Birmingham.

As soon as second year finished, I was plunged into yet new situations.  Moving from Aberystwyth to Camberley, I started work at Sun Microsystems.  Rather than go into any sort of detail here, I’ll direct you to my various postings of which there was one a week detailing what I was up to in Sun.
Sun gave me a lot of new skills, and made me realise what I was interested in and that what I learnt at University might actually not be much use in the big wide world…
I loved being at Sun, everything about working, and working for a company that did what I wanted to do, and in a way in which I wanted to do it.  I hope that I have a similar employer in the future.

After spending the summer working for the MOD, I entered my final year of University.  It was difficult to get back into lectures, and I found coursework terribly difficult to get on with.  I was constantly pining to be back at Sun, back at my desk in GMP03 collecting tickets, tinkering with servers, and having a chat and a laught with the great people around me.
Of course, I had to go on.  The first semester didn’t hold much for me, apart from an overly crowded timetable.  After a terrible Christmas, I was back to do terribly in my exams (all passes, but not great ones).
Semester two came and went.  It was filled with loathing for my degree and a want to break out of the formalities and just learn things that would be relevant to me.

So would I do it again?  If I knew then what I do now, well, I wouldn’t do a computer science degree would I?  I’d already know it all
Seriously, University itself hasn’t always been a happy experience, and of late it’s been the cause of much anger.  But the people I have met and the relationships I have gained have been so great, how could I turn that down?

So, after four years, it comes to a rather awkward end: I’m still here in Aberystwyth, I will be for the next 24-30 months as Faye finishes her masters in fine art.  I am looking for work, hopefully something IT based, but I’ve just got to pay the bills.
If you are thinking of coming to Aberystwyth University, I’d advise that you have made the correct choice.  If you want to email me about it, I’d be happy to answer your email, and if you have an interest in anything you see on my blog or on my website, I would be thrilled to meet up and share a quiet pint chatting about it with you!  Drop me a line to arrange a time.

If you know me and are reading this, now, in six months time, or six years time, send me an email and say hi, I’d love to hear from you too

Back in April (April 22nd to be precise) I handed in two copies of my 72 page document which outlines everything about my project.  I wanted to blog about my dissertation while I was doing it, but the thought was always pushed back by other thoughts of actually doing the project.

The project investigated how one could use virtualisation techniques of today and use them to virtualise every application on a machine.  Here’s a copy of my abstract:

In computing, occasionally an application can cause a whole system to be brought down. This wastes valuable time for users and has the potential to lose unsaved data. This project sets out to create a concept whereby applications are virtualised for overall system stability and which appears completely transparent to the
end user. The project attempts to create a system based on this concept using OpenSolaris 2009.06 and a number of its technologies, most notably: Zones.

The project discovers that the choice of technologies used are not yet mature enough to implement the concept, though they are very close to maturing.

As the abstract says, I used OpenSolaris Zones to implement the concept.  I created a script which wraps around the OpenSolaris `pkg` command which is used to install applications.  My script creates a new Zone and installs the new application into that Zone.  The application is now basically in it’s own operating system, to better describe it, it’s as if the application has been installed onto a whole new machine.  The application is accessed using SSH and tunneling X11 over it, this worked quite well after I had set up the infrastructure, but the user had to input their password when they wanted to launch an application.

The project was really fun, I really enjoyed it and learnt so much.  Now it’s finished I’m rather lost as to what to do with myself…

If anyone would like to read my Dissertation or try implementing my project (with is licensed under the BSD licence), please don’t hesitate to contact me.  At the end of it all, the documentation consisted of 72 pages in PDF form (that was 1086 lines of LaTeX, excluding comments and blank lines), and the project consisted of 1494 lines of Bash script and 1393 comments!

If anyone attended that lecture and is reading this, please feel free email me any questions you might have about OpenSolaris.  If I can’t answer them, I can find an answer

You can still find it at: users.aber.a.uk/bil6

It has been tested using a number of browsers; each work OK, Opera and Safari for iPhone both have slight issues with the CSS…

At 9:30, I moved to the Sun Lounge when a couple of team mates came in. I spent this morning looking at files, formatting them, making sure they were commented right etc. Emails were flying around with new version, new version1, newer version and similar, useful filenames…
We finally got some classes into our Approved code folder:
-rwxrwx— 1 bil6 csgp08 2381 Feb 1 11:51 Channel.java
-rwxrwx— 1 bil6 csgp08 8448 Feb 1 11:51 ClientCommunicator.java
-rwxrwx— 1 bil6 csgp08 5814 Feb 1 11:51 GSearch.java
-rwxrwx— 1 bil6 csgp08 530 Feb 1 11:51 Main.java
-rwxrwx— 1 bil6 csgp08 2636 Feb 1 11:51 Program.java
-rwxrwx— 1 bil6 csgp08 1077 Feb 1 11:51 View.java

At noon I was feeling hungry and decided to treat myself to a Meal Deal in the uni, a packet of crisps and a BLT later, I was back on the case of looking for code, trying to get people to complete classes.

This afternoon has been hectic, people running round, we’ve converted our Application to an Applet, and the UI won’t display some tables properly, but things seem to be making slow progress…A little too slow.

As I write this now, it’s about an hour until hand in. We should start testing and more tidying up soon….

15:45 – All .java files get handed to me to start commenting and formatting.
16:20 – Source files are finished and uploaded into filestore.
16:28 – Burning of the hand-in CD begins
16:30 – CD is handed to Rhys.

It was close, but it got handed in I think it all pretty much worked, everything but the search feature…So that was good. A weight off all our shoulders, can now enjoy my Birthday tomorrow

This afternoon I looked at creating an ANT file.  ANT is like a UNIX make file, except it uses XML with some basic commands.  Once I had gotten to terms with what things did, it was really quite easy.  I made a file that you could issue commands to from the command line to arrange the source files, clean the build directory, clean the source directory, compile all the source code or just the client or the server code.  I even started to look at automating the creation of a jar file.  With no arguments passed it, it would automatically clean the build files then compile everything.  I got to version 1.3 in about two hours.

After looking at ANT (which I’ll need to edit sometime)  I started to look over the other classes, checking that every method had javadoc comments and the file was formatted correctly, the formatting was easy though, Eclipse allowed me to pre-set how I wanted the code laid out and just did it for me

Looks like I’ve got a few more classes to do in the morning and that’ll be done.  Hand in for 4, let’s hope it all goes smoothly

I came home for lunch and got back to the workroom for about 3pm, I spent the afternoon looking at trying to get Postgres onto my Mac.  After using this page, I finally had it running, but had no idea how to use it   I gave up and came home at about 5:30.  I think I’ll try and install it on my Fedora box…Actually I think there may have been a Fedora binary…

08:41am – Already we have had a suggestion by a fellow team member that all the XML files should be translated into SQL and then form a database…This undermines everything we worked towards yesterday, but as long as it gets done we’ll get the marks I suppose…

13:12 – The morning has been somewhat of a waste of time again. I looked into the TV-Anytime API again, edited some things and found that although it was throwing errors, it was parsing everything nicely. After looking at it though, it would appear that it would be far simpler to convert the XML to SQL and host it on the department’s Oracle server.

16:10 – One of the team members has a perl script to translate the XML into SQL and we will be hosting it on a Postgres database, the upload is slow at the moment, but it is translating and streaming to the server, so hopefully it should be quicker in the end.

It looks like that’s about all that’ll get done today, I may have to look at Java with Postgres, but well leave that until a tad later…I still need to learn Python…

I got into the computer room to find some of the group huddled around our computers. Me a Steve got stuck in with looking at how to parse XML using Java and query it using XPath. By 10am we had cracked the parsing; the files we had been given declared they were UTF-8 encoded, however, every time we tried to parse the file we got an error stating something about 1 od 1-byte not UTF-8 or some such nonsense…After looking around, we changed the declaration to ISO-8859-1, this seems to work Our data was parsed, or at least displayed no errors!
We battled on with trying to look at XPath, searching various sites, looking at tutorials, but it was useless. We even tried the TV-Anytime API, but our files wouldn’t work correctly, the Genre’s weren’t being recognised…After talking to one of our Project Managers, Rhys Parry, we retreated down into town for lunch.

After lunch we received an email stating that Nigel Hardy (a.k.a. Beardy Nigel) was putting on a Q&A on XML. Steve and myself attending this meeting and asked about XML namespaces and asked questions relating to out XPath problems.
We returned to work feeling very informed, but not overly sure on where to go next. I had already contacted Andrew McParland from the BBC who had worked on the TV-Anytime project, with a stroke of luck he replied just after lunch! He suggested editing the API to recognise the new Genres. The class that needed editing was created in 2002 according to the declaration at the top, the files we were using were time-stamped 2007…

So, two plans formed, look more into XPath, or edit the TVAT API…We chose to persist with XPath. At 4:45 we had got nowhere We decided to go for changing the API. First of all I tried to parse the XML file with the TVAT API, reciving close to 5000 lines of errors about genres…I copy and pasted around 1500 lines into a text editor (it appeared that the list was repeated several times) and reduced these down to 24 genres in the space of about 30 minutes…After changing the API, compiling and running, we were not just receiving errors concerning that genres weren’t recognised, but also some of them weren’t formatted correctly! After looking at an example, I noticed that it was not only formatted the same as all the others, it was the first in the list of genres in the edited class! This at 6pm this evening, after this day…Almost nine straight hours of work, we decided to retire for the day and come back to it in the morning…

So, tomorrow is another day…We are open to all suggestions Comments welcome
But for now…BED!

As I write this I’m one exam down with two to go. Yesterday I had Architecture, C and UNIX, not that there was much UNIX stuff in there This exam centred around the Motorolla 68HC11 microcontroller, it’s assembly language and the like, how CPU’s work, broadly, and a bunch of stuff on the C language.
I am sitting here awaiting 9am when I’ll be heading up to campus to undergo my second exam: Hardware. This too is centred around the Motorolla 68HC11, but it covers more hardware features such as the workings of flip-flops, memory address decoders and the like. I must admit, I’m really not looking forward to it.

Roll on Thursday! Last exam in the afternoon then I’m free for a whole week! Then I’ll be having coding week…