Rory Franklin

So yesterday was the due date for my final year project (the BlueJ Java IDE GUI Builder extension). It was a stressful day to say the least with us handing it in right as the office was closing. I wasn’t particularly happy with that, as I was hoping to get it in a few hours before. But oh well, it’s in and now I just have to write an Individual Report and have an interview with some examiners regarding it.

On another note, I just want to point out how incredibly annoying it is that Grand Theft Auto IV comes out on April 29th, just a few days before my final exams start!

I guess I’ll have have to wait until May 23rd to buy it (that is the day after my last exam). Very annoying.

The title of this entry is somewhat misleading, but it does hold true in some respects. More and more services are appearing on the internet that allow you to publish information about yourself in some for or another. Whether it is information about what you are currently doing (Twitter) or photos you’ve taken (Flickr), user generated content is booming. Just look at how popular websites like YouTube are.

There are various other sites that allow you to publish information about yourself however, and they are slightly more interesting to me. It’s all well and good letting someone know that you are currently eating last nights leftover meal (Ok, so I may have told Nicola that I was eating reheated Dominos pizza earlier), but that doesn’t really tell me all that much. Seeing what people have been listening to recently and having music recommended to you based on your own personal music habits is something that is quite exciting.
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http://www.hypebeast.com/2008/03/carnegie-mellon-university-sneakerology-101

Why is this course not available over here?!???!?? I’m a bit of a sneaker freak… I own 6 different colourways of the same trainer style (Nike Dunk), one of which are a pair of Nike iD’s (you get to choose what colour each section is and add a personalised tag), and a pair of special edition Dunk SB’s (the Stussy Team Manager editions), along with another 5 or so pairs of trainers that I wear regularly. I’ll get some pictures up eventually.

I don’t know what it is about trainers, I just like being able to wear different colours and styles depending on the clothes that I am wearing. I tend to colour co-ordinate my trainers and t-shirts, bags, jackets - basically whatever I’m wearing!

Don’t judge me!

How many people associate certain songs, artists or albums with certain periods of their lives or even just a particular moment?

I know I do, and I guess that lots of other people do too but it is something that I find rather interesting. I listen to a lot of music, I’m usually listening to music unless I’m somewhere that requires me to have full use of my hearing or if I’m sleeping. I’ll be the first to admit that my music tastes are a little bit rubbish, but I’ve been branching out a lot more in recent years (I’m fairly sure I’ve blogged about this in the past).

So, back on to the subject of this entry… There are albums that remind me of periods of weeks because during that time all I listened to was that album, or there are songs and artists that remind me of particular people either because they recommended them to me, discovered said artist/song at the same time as me or the song itself has some kind of association with someone (their name is in the title/lyrics somewhere etc.).

I couldn’t quite get the title all B’s, but I tried!

Things have been really hectic recently and it’s all come out of nowhere - honest! Well, that’s not strictly true, but I will elaborate:

In just over two weeks time I have to hand in my final year project. This includes the finished program, documentation, technical report and then 4 days later an individual report too (it is a group project). The project that I have been working on this year with three other guys is a Graphical User Interface Builder extension for the BlueJ Java IDE. Essentially, people new to Java that are learning using the BlueJ IDE might want to build a GUI for their projects and so we have been developing an extension that allows users to create simple GUIs for their projects.
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I’m back in London this weekend visiting my family and found myself with a fair bit of free time this afternoon. Whilst generally browsing the internet on the family computer (formally my main computer), I came to the conclusion that it was running quite badly.

Now, because I am studying a technical course at University (Computer Science), the department that I am taught by have a MSDN Academic Alliance account. This means that I am able to download various pieces of Microsoft Software for free, from Microsoft (read: totally legitimate).

Over the last few weeks I’ve been badgered by one of my housemates and some friends from Uni to install Ubuntu on my PC at Uni. I’ve been holding off because I am planning on dual-booting with XP, but just haven’t found the time to get myself properly organised and backed up etc. I thought that this was the perfect opportunity to try out re-installing Windows XP on an old machine that isn’t too important (OK, so my father needs to be able to access his work emails, as he is currently on leave for 6 months or so [he still needs to be in contact etc.]).
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Today has been a long day…

One of my modules at University requires me to go into a school once a week (or in my case, twice every other week) and help out in Computing related lessons. The school I go into is a 40 minute walk from my house on campus and i need to be there by 8:40am (that is when their first lesson starts), so I usually get up at about 6:30am to make sure I’ve had a proper breakfast and ironed a shirt etc.

Well, last night I didn’t really sleep too well. I’m fairly sure I kept on waking up because I thought it was CTU agent being chased or something (I’ll blog about my newfound addiction to 24 soon), but I basically had a rather interrupted sleep. Not ideal when I had to spend 3 hours and 40 minutes in school (and the 40 minutes each way traveling)!

School went well though, I was discussing health issues with computers as well as helping out with 2D arrays in Java. The two classes I help with are both great and I don’t get any trouble from the students.

After I trekked back up to campus I went straight to the computer labs to work on my final year project (will blog about that soon too!) before meeting with my project supervisor at 3pm. After that meeting I was meeting with one of the guys in my group who couldn’t make the meeting with the supervisor. We talked about the project for about 2 hours discussing what he needs to do and what we had already done, and generally things went well and hopefully he’ll be able to get something concrete done soon.

I’m back at home now absolutely shattered and have to prepare a presentation for tomorrow morning. I need to present a business idea that I wrote a business plan for last term. It is a formal affair (suit and tie), but only lasts about 8 minutes which is good. We were only told what the presentation consisted of, and when we were scheduled to give our presentations, last Thursday though.

I’m back in school on Wednesday and although I thought it was project week this week, apparently it’s not! So that means lectures and seminars still… woo! Ugh.

Back during Christmas I contemplated buying the HD-DVD player for my Xbox 360. I thought, I’ve got an HDTV (one of the things I bought during my time working last year) and the quality really is fantastic (my boss lent me his HD-DVD player and I watched King Kong on it). However, I couldn’t really justify the ~£110 for it at the time as well as the premium you have to pay for the films themselves.

It turned out this was a good decision, with Toshiba announcing that they are ceasing to promote the format after losing key supporters to the Blu-Ray camp.

Although this currently doesn’t affect me (because I don’t own a high-definition player, it is good for the consumer because now there isn’t the uncertainty about which format will succeed (although there is now the issue of when everything will be done via online distribution - but that is another matter).

Anyway, the reason I posted this is because I found this article about the uses of the Microsoft HD-DVD player at Kotaku rather amusing.

Due to recent circumstances, I am now traveling a lot between Canterbury (where I go to University) and south east London (where my parents live, and where I live when on holiday from University). I’m going back most weekends, Friday through till Sunday evening (or sometimes Monday morning) and this takes out a large chunk of my week.

I tend to have a reasonable amount of work to do over the weekends and this presented a problem for me as the computer we have back in London isn’t particularly good (slow) and I find it difficult to use (cluttered and full of software that probably doesn’t need to be on there!), so getting work done is usually rather unlikely. So I decided it was about time for me to get a laptop. Why a laptop and not just a new computer for home? Well, although there is a price premium when buying a laptop (I wouldn’t have needed to buy a new screen for the home PC) the convenience of being able to use a laptop on the train back home or up on campus made me think it was worth paying that bit extra. This led me on a search for a good laptop…
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Ok, well, I’m not really back in town as such. I’ve just finally redesigned my blog. Having seen Seth’s latest redesign, and Nicola’s new blog, I thought I really should get around to fixing this place up!

Unfortunately I’m not as design orientated as they are, so it looks a little rough around the edges but I am happy with it! There are probably a few issues I’ve not noticed (or that you think are issues and I think are supposed to be like that!), so please let me know if you see anything. I’ve only really tested this in IE6 and FireFox. IE7 might throw a spanner in the works and I’ve not had a chance to look at it on Safari yet.

I’ll post an update about what I’ve been doing in recent months soon! Honest!

Edit: Oh, if anyone can help me figure out how to replace a link within a H1 with an image, I’d muchos appreciatos it. I’m currently doing it a bad way (H1 inside the A tag, doesn’t validate) and would love to get it semantic and looking right!

Edit 2: I’ve fixed the above problem. I was being a spanner. Basically, I have my A tag within an H1 tag. I’ve set the A tag to display:block and given it a height/width the same as the header image. I’ve then used text-index:-9999px; to shunt it off the page.