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June 2009

Moving house

Feeling slightly elated after receiving my results a couple of days ago. Only 40% is required to pass and the grades from this year have no value in the overall degree. Hence, it would have been easy to adopt the attitude that this will be easy therefore only the effort required to do this should be made. To use the vernacular: that would have been something of an epic fail. (Yes, I had to look up 'vernacular' in the dictionary as well. Continue reading →

UMAP 2009 Day 1

I'm in Trento, Italy for the second conference of my academic career: UMAP (User Modelling And Personalisation) 2009. The first was back in November at DIGITEL 2008, in Banff, Canada, but someone convinced me not to take my laptop and typing a blog entry on my phone was too much hard work!! Conferences are an important part of the research world, as they are where academics present their work to their peers and receive feedback. Continue reading →

Performance and concurrency

Performance and concurrency A technical post today, methinks. After having been assigned to my project supervisor for next year, it seems the thing we are most compatible on is exploring concurrency patterns in software. To that end, I have been researching some of the issues surrounding concurrency by analysing the design of some of my code at work. I am not at liberty to post real source code, so I have given the architectural overview below. Continue reading →

One Year Down….

Well, that's it! It's the end of my first year at Southampton University and boy has time flown by. I can't believe that this time last year I was still revising hard for the last of my A-level exams and yet now Part I is all over. My final exam was last Tuesday and overall I was very pleased with how they went. Continue reading →

Group Revision

At last, the end is in sight. Three exams have been beaten back, leaving just maths skulking in the corner, hissing menacingly. Come Tuesday, one of us will be a gibbering wreck. For now, I've got two more days to sharpen my lance and work out what in the name of engineering is up with the Laurant expansion. Maybe I should get the dream-team to explain it to me. On my course, we decided a while back that exams were a beast best conquered as a group. Continue reading →