Arcoarena

RFC –

www.fogma.co.uk/summerball – Anyone got any comments on looks? I may ignore them, however make them in case I agree

[Gary Ewer]

You can tell Gary’s revision’s going well – not only has he spent his time writing a summer ball website instead but he’s also using terms from one of his courses in the titles. For the less Geeky of you RFC stands for Request for Comment. Ironically this is actually a standard for various cryptography thingies and if you actually commented on them you’d probably be told to sod off.

and behind. I’ve been to Newcastle to see Andrea. It was cool to see her again, it’s been horribly long since I last did. I had quite a nice quiet weekend, following a surprisingly relaxed (for me anyway) carnival, it’s been a while since I wasn’t really involved but I kinda stepped back and did very little to be honest. It’s quite nice to not be under so much stress.

Speaking of stress Easter sounds fun. Revision (which I’ve sort of started already – Bayesian Networks; confusing to start with, easy when you realize what’s going on (from what I remember anyway)), Fuzzy, IC Design, Digital Synthesis and Roman Empire courseworks, Final Year Project. Yay! I’m going to have so much fun.

And Looking even further ahead – Summer. I though summers were meant to be long spaces with not much to do. So following the end of term: I’m planning to help at the Guildford Festival, followed rapidly by MT Soc Tour and moving swiftly on to St Petersberg via Bejiing. Of course there are some morons (actually that’s a bit unfair, an insult to morons everywhere. Let me correct that – incompetent morons ) that could through a spanner in the works but it’s a long long long story and, in my opinion anyway, quite outrageous.

Anyway back to coursework – lots of numbers on a screen and not a clue what’s going on…..

Well I’m back in labs again. I did get a slight rest yesterday as we visited Surrey Universities version of Dramsoc Crew yesterday evening. They had a lot of kit, quite a lot of smaller stuff unlike the good old ‘lets buy the biggest things we can’ approach Dramsoc normally takes. It means they have quite a few lights for union nights but they might not have the capability to do such large events as we do. I think I prefer our way of doing things – more varied, larger events once in a while rather than having a union night to do twice a week. They do have more crew to share it between though (about 50 compared to our 15). It just so happened that it was the Bedrock tour of unions so John Digweed was busy playing his progressive house stuff. It was cool – just shows you can have fun even if you are sober (I can now truly turn into a Radio 4 listener now – not that I was ever in to getting totally legless anyway) since I was having to drive back afterwards. I’d also like to think that I could have made a better job of the lighting (like using more than 2 gobos and more than two different movements) but I guess if I had to do it every week I’d get bored.

I also went to see Elly’s final recital. She was very good, it’s quite odd really. I always end up in a world of my own whilst listening to ‘classical’ music. She played some Mozart and some Spanish sounding thing then some Ludwig Van (as the bloke from ‘A Clockwork Orange’ would say). I can’t say I’ve ever been big on Ludwig Van. Oh well, I think my (classical) musical taste is a bit like my artistic one – centered around the 1900s generally, usually not later than 1950. A bit of a contrast from the night at Surrey thought.

Digital beckons. More later I’m sure we might get a bit bored.

May be I should have used the “Disagree Strongly” option for the “Workload is Managable” question of the SOLE questionaire for the 4th Year Digital IC Design Coursework

See www.fogma.co.uk/foggylog for more details

Things that might be useful for IRSIM,

• The manual can be found here
• Q: I want to save the state of my simulation, so that I don’t have to keep running my dorky setup command file every time. How can I do this?

  There are 2 ways to save the state of a simulation in irsim. The first way saves the state of the sim as well as the history. The second way only saves the state.

  The command dumph will dump the history of the simulation to a specified file. The readh command will read that history back out. Please take a look at the irsim manual page for specifics.

  The > command will write only the state (not the history) of a simulation to a file. The < command will read this back out. This is especially useful for running very long tests, where the history buffer of irsim gets huge. You can break up your test and at the end of each piece, write the state to a file. When you start up the next piece, just read that state back in.

  Q: I have a vector nodes from a7 to a0. Is there easy way to define vector without typing all vector nodes?

  vector A a{7:0} is equivalent to
  vector A a7 a6 a5 a4 a3 a2 a1 a0

• In the analyzer window you can print the graph to postscript using the print|file option (obviously)
• This pageis good, this one is brief but has some good guidance notes.
• Comments are preceded by ‘//’, Text to be output by IRSIM when it is run is preceded by |
• This article is totally useless for anyone not doing the Digital Chip Design course in the 4th Year, the website of which is here

I’ve got a job!!!!!!!!

They’ve offered me the place so assuming I can fill in all the forms on time (which shouldn’t be too hard) I’ll be heading off to Portsmouth in September.

Cool!

Well I think my second interview at Xyratex went well. I can actually see myself working there too so that’s a good thing. I have to wait and see when I get a call. Mike has just been through the same thing by the sounds of it. He got the job.

It’s almost finished. My face in 3D. Eugghhh. Some screenshots – no thumbnails I can’t be bothered

Me without texture
Me with texture

Rather scarely I look wierd from behind my face (a little like Oliver Pell I think)
Oliver Pell

The AGM was a couple of days ago now but I’ve only got round to writing about it. I needn’t say much about the actual AGM as it’s all recorded in the minutes. What I will say is a few things that struck me during the meeting.

• The Actor-Techie Divide: Call me cynical if you will but I did happen to notice that only the actors seemed to mention the actor-techie divide. That isn’t a criticism, I think it’s because there isn’t a massive acting community. The acting side of the society doesn’t feel a massive part of the society which is a great shame. I think things have got better recently (not that I’m taking any credit for it). More of the actors appear to be talking to each other and the casts of the previous plays are still staying in contact. I think the actor-techie divide doesn’t bother the ‘techies’ because they feel a greater part of the society and, more importantly, the social life. The techies know every other techie and most of the old lags too, this doesn’t apply for the actors. I think before we try and ‘fully integrate the actors’ we should try to build a better and stronger acting community. The workshops that Nia organized have helped I think. The actors-talk list didn’t but that isn’t to say it wasn’t worth trying or is worth getting rid of, hopefully it will become more used in the future. With a stronger acting community the actors might not be as bothered about there being an actor-techie divide (if one does exist through anything other that when the techs/actors do their respective jobs). People work by networking, without a strong acting community each actor has more difficulty getting to know a techie than the other way round. Of course I’m sure many people will disagree with this.
• The Dramsoc Committee It was mentioned in the AGM that ‘acting stuff only came up about once in a years worth of meetings’. I’m actually quite bothered by this. However jovial it was I don’t want people to think that. I have actually just read through the minutes and unless I’m being really weird most of the meetings were acting based, or at the very least Society based (ok so Budgets aren’t ‘acting’ but they have very little to do with the events/technical side in reality due to the union budgeting rules). This is possibly unfair and probably doesn’t help towards the first point. Maybe I’m wrong, but in my defence I did try to make all the meetings as actor based as possible and let the techies sort it out themselves.
• The Ending I won’t be President much longer. Will I miss it? I don’t know. It’s been good, but it has had it’s down sides. It’ll be nice to be involved but to be able to offer an opinion and not be unduly bothered by what the society as a whole thinks/needs. If I was staying another year I don’t think I would’ve stood again. It wouldn’t have been fair on anyone else in Dramsoc anyway as there were 4 people that stood for the position. I think I’ll miss Dramsoc more, probably the events side more, not because I like it more, just because it’s harder to do out of university, how many Amateur Dramatic Societies are there about? (that was rhetorical by the way). I don’t regret doing it, I enjoyed it. The only thing I would regret is not being better. I don’t know how well or badly I did. I don’t think I was awful but I don’t think I’m an amazing President, I guess there’s always a want to be better that one is. One of the hardest things is that whatever you do someone will think it’s a bad decision or get annoyed. With so many conflicting views about the society it’s hard to satisfy everyone. It will be interesting to see what happens over the next few years. It’s a bit odd handing over as Martin has some different view to me, not wrong just different. We’ll see what happens. I’m sure there will be people there to balance everything in the end, that probably happened with me.

The Now Show appear to have picked up on Imperial’s Geeky reputation. It’s cool, listen to it (before next Friday) online. I’ll try and write a transcript once I work out how to record it.