Possibly the third attempt to start using this.

Yo.

Well, as everyone who has a blog is aware, its hard to actually find anything to put in it, never mind actually remembering to write it.

Ok, so personal stuff. Started my studentship at Lancaster University within the EIS(http://eis.comp.lancs.ac.uk) research group. Still unsure of an actual topic, although I will probably swing towards the algorithmic side of localisation in WSN.

Still, I rarely have time to do any personal code, yet some stuff happens. Recently wrote a basic heightmap generator in Ruby, currently porting to Lua, and it outputs some nice images using image tools like RMagick or just plain VT100 colour output.

Post to follow explaining the code.

NSTA - Progress

Woo Progress!

NSTA was progressed to a fully fledged prototype. It now outputs the node position and the connections in the logical graph. Shall do some message browsing and a quick propogation algorithm and release it for you viewing displeasure!

C

Academic Updates

Francois, Hugo and myself have almost finished writing the paper summing up our work on PAMPA for the last 2 years. We shall be submitting to the International Workshop on Middleware for Pervasive, Mobile and Embedded Computing, at Middleware 2009 in Illinois, USA.

I have also been working on making my NS-2 trace anaylser package ready to be released and making a small example program to use. Hopefully shall be released soon. Shall open it and SourceForge it once it is ready.

Cheers all!

Funding Results

Woo,

I am now an officially funded Ph.D student soon to be studying Localisation of mobile nodes in Wireless Sensor Networks.

I will now eat cake.

Degree finished

Ok, so my degree results are in and I passed with first class honours. Sweet.

Now just to wait for my Ph.D funding. Hopefully today or tomorrow.

I am currently working on a C/Lua agent based AI simulation and will soon br poking around with my colleagues game engine to give it physics.

Will post interesting stuff.

Exam 1 Science 0

Well, it has been a while.

I have been working on a paper of my cumulative work from the past 2 years to submit to IEEE LCN 2009 .... however the paper deadline was today. I had an exam, and so time was spent revising.

I decided to pull the paper and look to submit for MobiCom09. This should give me some time to get some more data and show better trends.

Plus any edit time is good time.

So! Exams. Concurrency and Operating Systems today. I think it went ok. Questions I answered were on User/Kernel threads, implementing fork() from first principles, some mutual exclusion questions, spin locks over semaphores and such for the lower level concurrency section.

Discussion piece for System calls, device drivers and then some file system questions and Amdahls Law stuff.

All in all it was a rather decent exam.

Right. Personal stuff.

New house, with FLATMATES. Makes such a difference not coming home to an empty cold flat everyday. There are challengers for Xbox supremacy. I like living here.

Stuck in exam period however, with exams Wednesday and Friday and the following Monday. Cram time.

There is going to be such a weekend after this that Lancaster will not know what hits it.

:D

Later

Ruby and Watir: Sending keyboard events to an element

Ok, so you need to send certain keyboard events to an element to properly test a webpage, but stuck how to do it?

Ive looked at some tutorials on the web, but there doesn't seem a simple solution.

However, I have been experimenting, and this method seems to work fine.

First off create your Watir::IE object

ie = Watir::IE.new

Then navigate to the page you are testing

ie.goto("mypage.myserver.com")

Grab the descriptor of the element you wish to send a keyboard command to (for example, a text field)

element = ie.textField(:id, "myText")

Now, I found that keyboard events only work if the Watir::IE window is on top and has focus, so for example if we wish to send a "Pageup" keyboard command to the element "myText" we would do so by

ie.bring_to_front

element.focus

element.container.focus

element.container.send_keys("{PGUP}")

This method does require Autoit(http://www.autoitscript.com/autoit3/) to be installed, and a full list of keyboard events can be found here: http://www.autoitscript.com/autoit3/docs/appendix/SendKeys.htm

Christmas Time

Well Christmas time has been and gone, and I must say that spending time with my family after 2 years is ... odd.

First off there are the hours they are awake. I don't mind getting up at 7am, however going to bed at 10pm? Thats the half day mark!

Catching up with childhood friends is also quite surreal. Everyone seems to regress 5 or so years back to the mentality of school children and old rivalries emerge. I don't think I shall be staying so long for Easter.

Well the last weekend has ended, and work begins anew! At least I can crawl out of bed to my office this week as working from my folks kitchen table. The joys of programming for a living.

And on the programming for a living note, I will be posting a tutorial on how to send keyboard events to elements using Watir.