Don't worry, I'm still here

It's been a while since I last posted on my blag, and I feel guilty as I have several topics in the pipeline, sitting as half-finished Word documents on my hard drive. I might do a posting spree at some point, but finding the time is difficult.
On the cards are my forays into Ubuntu Linux (codenamed "Ubunwha?"), Eurovision 2009 (it hits us this weekend), a film review of Watchmen (which I saw over 2 months ago now), then probably some random spiel about stuff on the iPlayer I view these days (e.g. the cluster-fuck of a plotline that is Heroes). Oh, and that "Blog Fu" topic I should have done yonks back, hehe. And finally, the momentous occasion of my easter vacation, when my hard drive crashed.

Cambridge has hit Easter Term, mostly known as Exam Term to anyone who isn't on a slacker subject like Land Economy, so certain things have to take priority sadly.

Image of choice is xkcd's 'Useless' T-shirt, which I have been meaning to order for a while, and now have a more compulsive desire to. The first four items I have known for a minimum of two years now (matrices being the last of the four I encountered), but now the engineering mathematics lectures have hit the 5th and final one - Laplace Transformations. Filled with the power of ornate L notation! Side note: the comic strip original goes for a Fourier Transform.

You may also want to know that I post intermittently on Twatter... Dobblesworth resides here in the tweetiverse.

<3
<=4
!=5

The Audacity of Soap

Disclaimer: This is in no way a post on politics, Barack Obama, or his book The Audacity of Hope. It is merely... "Thoughts on the 4-hour Commute up the A1 (North) from Cambridge". I just so happened to be reading that book in the car.

So yes, Saturday March 14th I packed up several bags & boxes worth of textbooks, clothes and the random paraphernalia that a Cambridge nerd needs to make his assigned room feel like home. I then proceeded to hit the road in father's Audi, then load up the sat nav and my 'Generic Player of Digital Media'. I say such terms because a) I never use Apple products so it's no jPod, & b) it doesn't just play .mp3 music, but also some video files, .wma etc.

Random events of the journey...

- Glancing at the satnav at a random point in the journey, shortly after passing Girton, I noticed that we were passing the settlement of "Lolworth". I find this particularly 'lolworthy' enough to document.

- Exchange between my dad and I while passing the below-mentioned landmark...
"There's nothing that welcomes me back more to Newcastle than the Angel of the North."
"Despite it being in Gateshead."

I thought I had more to say about the journey, but I guess I don't. Either that or it's all faded to dust.

Engineering Humour

Second term (Lent Term) of first year (Part IA) of my Engineering course (Tripos) is drawing to a close. The Cambridge week ends on a Wednesday, starting on a Thursday. Lectures and courses finished yesterday, having started on a Thursday eight weeks beforehand. heading home to Newcastle is restricted by college residence requirements until Friday, but I shall be loading up and hitting the road on Saturday. So essentially I'm in dossing mode, having finished supervisions for the term.

Final supervision was focusing on the wonderful world of Digital Circuits, Combinational Logic & Boolean Algebra.

As is the case of supervisions where you show up with little to no difficulty with the material, discussions often get sidetracked into wider real-world applications and systems. Talk of CMOS brought up its competitor, Bipolar Transistors. They are hereby dubbed "Stephen Fry Transistors"* © {Dobblesworth Inc. 2009}.

A previous quote of mine was...
"I can't wait for the day when they decide to release Thévenin Internet Security."** [Also © Dobblesworth Inc. 2009, to stop software companies getting their grubby paws on it.]

If/when I have further flashes of wit and inspiration, I'll be sure to share them with you.

* - Stephen Fry, Alumnus of Queens' College Cambridge, has bipolarity disorder.
{Afterthought, not so much an Edit} - Wi'pedia tells me he only has the milder form 'Cyclothymia'. Ah well, learn something new every day.

** - Norton Internet Security, produced by Symantec.
'Norton' is also used in electronics and electrical engineering to denote a certain theorem of consideration of linear circuit networks. Its counterpart is 'Thévenin', which gives you a perfectly equivalent representation of the same chunk of electronics stuff in your network.

How to screw over some mathmo's

Picture the scene, of sitting bored in your university/college common room, or "JCR" as they are known in these parts, in the void period between two supervisions, or tutorials as they would be known over at That Other Place. Your preparation work for the second is complete, and the JCR/location of second supervision is too far from halls of residence to feasibly head back and doss for a brief period in between. Luckily, you spy an untarnished back page of The Times 2, and hit the Sudoku puzzles...

Now, bring in the other consideration: your first supervision/tutorial of the two had been on the Eigenvalues & Eigenvectors elements of Matrices Mathematics, so certain items are whizzing around your head...

What is the resultant of the Venn diagram-like intersection of these two conditions? Why, the answer is simple of course! You've only just thought of one of the most sick and twisted-minded method to set some advanced mathematics exam questions...

---

1) Attached to your question paper is the back page of tomorrow's Times2. Choosing any two of the Sudoku grids given on this page, produce the completed grid for both of your choices, ensuring you follow the common rules: integers 1 to 9 in all nine rows, columns and boxes, once and only once, ensuring there are no clashes.

More maximum marks are available to those opting to solve the Killer Sudoku puzzle as one of their two choices, and less marks are attainable if you go for the noddy-maths "Easy" difficulty grid.

We give you tomorrow's copy to ensure those of you who do these Sudoku pages daily would have no advantage by knowing the answers. It's not fair to just memorise the 9x9 grid now is it?

Please ensure that you indicate on your answers paper which two Sudoku grids were attempted.


2) The perceptive among you will note that your two solved Sudoku grids form a pair of 9x9 matrices. Denoting one of your grids as Matrix A and the other as Matrix B, solve:

a) 9x9 matrix multiplication of A B

b) Calculate the eigenvalues and eigenvectors for both matrices A & B

---

I wouldn't say this question would be insolvable at all, but, I dunno, the perfect collision of heavy-duty mathematics with a modern-day pastime of logic and deduction would make for a rather hilariously synoptic final exam question. I'm also sure 2(c) could be developed, as could q3 etc... The exam paper suggested above is hardly exhaustive.

So yes, go find a mathmo' and tell him (or her) to have fun with this geezer! I suppose it's not simply the mathematicians who would embrace this jocularity, NatSci's, Engineers, CompSci's too I suppose. It would be a bitch of a paper for whoever's marking them though, haha.

// Commented

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using namespace std;

int main()
{


Today I meandered over to the Guildhall, where the Cambridge University Engineering Society today hosted its Annual Careers Fair. An assortment of companies were present, including the likely suspects of BP, Shell & Rolls Royce, as well as others like British Sugar, who apparently don't just do sugar but also tomatoes, and various others who, as is the case with most of these corporate events, are only interesting for the freebies.

My shopping bag today consisted of:

2x highlighter - Faber Maunsell | Aecom, Shell

3x biro pens - Faber Maunsell (again), ARM, British Sugar

1x blue plastic 'Frisbee'/non-aligned flying disk toy you play Ultimate with - Sentec

1x orange foam boomerang - Tandberg. I've given this a try and for the most part it just flies in a vague forward arc with little suggestion of a return path. Might need more space.

1x stress ball in the form of a ripe red tomato - British Sugar

1x blue squidgy foam armchair for the resting of mobile phones - ARM [geddit?]

1x hand-crank dynamo-powered emergency mobile phone charger/torch - ARM. Bearing the cunning text of "ARM-powered". I c wut u did thar.

I also gave this item a trial run, and the torch element wouldn't be something I'd immediately leap for in a crisis. Takes a good deal of gyrating to get a current going, and the bulb promptly cuts out when the crank stops turning. Needs a capacitor mode I reckon.


The image of note from today's post is a screenshot I took of the Faber Maunsell website. Now, being a cautious Firefox user, I browse almost always with the NoScript addon active. This handy little device essentially blocks all JavaScript, flash plug-ins and coding that websites have by default, but informs me of elements that are being blocked, who owns them, and whether I want them on my whitelist or not. Essentially, I don't want my browser to pick me up a keylogger on my travels.

So anyways I take a trip to Faber Maunsell out of common interest and see the crazy text:

// Provide alternate content for browsers that do not support scripting
// or for those that have scripting disabled.

and it made me smile. Having dabbled my hand with C++ these past weeks and following a few years of awareness to the xkcd community, it amused me to see // COMMENTED! lines appearing in a website's final display to the viewer. It also seems like the second line was an after-thought or edit from a second developer. First goes in there, types the code with either normal users or those stuck on Netscape in mind. Second checks it out and adds the third category - overly cautious JavaScript annihilators.

But yeh, // for the win really.


Those concerned about yesterday's musings reading "2nd post in a week" and seeing it paralleled with one listed for 12 days beforehand: here's an explanation. That post was initially drafted a few days after seeing QoS, but it wasn't until last Friday, 14th November, that I finished it off and posted it. Curse ye Blogger and your definition of 'post date'. Those who are seriously pedantic can have the "two posts that went from start to finish in a seven-day timespan" now I suppose.

return 0;
}

It's the Suantum of Quolace!

Good evening world. How goes?

The new Bond film, Quantum of Solace has been met with mixed ratings among the media. It certainly receives one from me. A few weeks ago I went along with a few members of a covert and nameless society of the university I am currently an undergraduate at to check it out. I thought that, on the whole, "Bond 22"/"The Quantum of Solace"/"The Thingy of Whatsit" had its merits and was a good use of 2hrs of my Saturday evening. However, it also had its downfalls, which will merge in here in due course...

- Interesting switch from the more one-off episodes of the Bond franchise, in that it leads directly off the ending of Casino Royale. Oh, mild spoiler warning for this entry by the way ;-)
Whereas your Moonraker's, Goldeneye's and Thunderball's would all introduce the villain, the Bond Girl, the master plan and its demise in a 2hr burst, QoS builds upon the workings of Royale, and implicates CR's antagonists in a wider plot and a shadowy organisation that, much to the concern of surveillance state proposers, even MI6 couldn't track.

*Spoiler*

LeChiffre in CR is shown to have a certain "Mr. White" working in the shadows behind and around him. This geezer then goes on to blow The Frenchie's brains out when Bond wins in the longest cinema poker match, blackmails Bond's girl Vesper into transferring the casino winnings over to him and his organisation, before off-ing her as well in Venice. Bond shows up before the end credits to blast his kneecaps with what Doom fans might call a Big F***ing Gun Lite at his country mansion. QoS opens with Bond's "Escort Mission" for his foe, bound and gagged in the trunk of a flash Aston Martin.

*End Spoiler, for now*

- In a similar vein, there's some good character development moving off Royale. Daniel Craig may still be a cold-hearted b******, but he's more strongly motivated here, determined mainly by the death of Vesper - a combination of a feeling of betrayal and a desire for revenge. M offers a good line drawing this out in one of the 'board meetings' during it.

*Partial Spoiler*
You don't think about it too much when considering Craig's Bond, but he very sternly states "I am motivated by my duty" at one point; offering insight into the fact that, while he may cause a bit of collateral damage along the way, he's true to his goals, and definitely is going out there 'For Queen and Country'. Especially interesting to see this counter-played by the switching of loyalties and lack of moral conscience of the British politicians and Americans from the CIA.


- Certainly maintained the migration away from over-the-top gadgetry as seen in Moonraker and Die Another Day... Well, to a certain extent:
*Here thar be more spoilers*
~ The Evil Guys take in a performance of Tosca and, spread across a 10,000 seater auditorium, engage in a bit of teleconferencing. Their means of communication? One earphone with a localised wireless network connection to a stylised pinbadge on their lapels concealing a microphone. Not only did they freely chatter together in the auditorium, but I believe they were also linked in internationally.
~ Pulling out his Mobile Phone, Bond manages to get accurate facial recognition shots of moving targets from about 500m away
~ The extent of technology for MI6 offices is ludicrous. Starting on a desk-based touchscreen interface system, features could be effortlessly brought up, shifted along, cross-referenced, before being projected 2 metres across the floor to another system on the wall, then skirted around on to the semi-translucent boardroom window. Somehow through all this mess they get a lead that laundered money was marked by them with a tiny pinprick, this cash was then noticed to have been deposited at point X by man Y who had been seen entering Heathrow at time Z.

- OK that's my discussion of some of the more superficial stuff over. Now, onto the plot. I hope I use the term correctly, but most of the plot seemed to be to be a bit of a MacGuffin. Bond's searching for a root cause of the organisation, yet by the end of it you're left disheartened with a feeling that the surface had only been scratched. You're only really told the name of the umbrella they work for, but essentially the Big Bads for QoS boil down into "Frenchie Neo-Liberal Environmentalist Capitalist" and "Random Army General with aims for a coup in Bolivia". Die Another Day may have had some ludiocrity associated with it, but at least we knew they were pretty big, upper-level Koreans with a more explicit plot for world domination.

- A certain scene features Bond piloting a Ye Olde cargo plane over the desert. It gets peppered with bullets from a fighter. The engine catches fire. The plane is still getting shot at, yet somehow Bond can continue to control it to glide another 15 miles through canyons, before jerking it up the vertical for maximum lift, then flinging themselves out the rear bay door to parachute to safety. Surely they'd have crashed by that point with only one working engine?
- Going directly off this, it takes Bond 95% of his descent to reach his femme fatale with the parachute and yank it open. You see a split-second of footage where it's open before they slam into the ground. Yet somehow they are able to casually walk it off in their dusty evening wear with nary a scratch. I feel like digging out my SUVAT equations here.

- The cataclysmic wrecking of EcoFrenchie's Greenpeace Hotel In The Desert was hilarious. The entire place was filled with biofuel cells, that yes, you guessed it, are hilariously inflammable. Those babies must be pumping out Terawatts of power to explode and combust that vigorously.

- The advertising, oh Lordi Lordi, the advertising. In the 30 mins plus of tripe you get nowadays in advance of a film, heck even in advance of the "These trailers are for films of the same rating standard" spiel, there was so much of the QoS bandwagon jumping.
~ The official game based on the film. AKA slap Quantum of Solace on a generic FPS game and release it on everything from the C64 to the PSP. ... ??? PROFIT!
~ CokeZero tie in with QoS to get a free demo disc of the above. Cunningly done for 007 to be made of CokeZero7.
~ Omega, the watch of James Bond. Yes we know... you said it very explicitly on your empty train to Montenegro...
~ Random plug for the non-memorable arbitrary model classification of the mobile phone Bond uses a heavily modified version of.

Now to finish my ramblings, I present to you a YouTube offering. No the video is not a rickroll, rather a far more impressive theme tune for Quantum of Solace than was given in the movie. Enjoy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMoJRLStD9c