Cardiff and Lands End

So I decided to go on a week long tour of the good bit of the south, namely, the southwest. First though, a stop off at Cardiff to see an old friend.

As Cardiff had been explored before, and I had the car, first on the list of places to go was a pilgrimage to Barry Island, the place where every Welshman should be scarred with. Not quite sure why it is called an Island, as it was inside a cove, but those southern welshies are fairly off most of the time, like those Taven Ferry folk. Apart from children, dodgy amusements, fish and chip shops, and a dirty beach, there really wasn't much there. Some nice photo opportunities though, soon to be on my public Picasa profile. After a scramble up the headland, we decided to go and find a real beach!

The first one we hit ... had a power station firmly attached to it. Nice. So biting the bullet we continued westward, edging towards Bridgend. Luckily, before we hit that town a sign for Southerndown Beach. This was a brilliant little surfer beach and had some excellent photo spots from atop the cliffs and within the ruined castle on the opposite hilltop. As above, photos incoming.

Finally, we head back to Cardiff for food, narrowly missing the general 10pm restaurant deadline by a mere 45min, we opted for Dominos pizza. Dropping the car off in a 24hour place, I then endured the scariest walk of my life to the flat. Cardiff is scary compared to little old Lancaster, deserted hilltops, dense woodland, etc.

After that, I left for Cornwall! First stop was Newquay and a cliff walk from Watergate Bay to Porth, which was stunning! If you want to learn to surf, this seems like the place. Next day I moved towards a small village called Treen, near Penzance, via most of the southern coast. Amazing little village called Mousehole, where on the beach people had stacked rather flimsy towers of beach rocks, ready to be washed by the tide. It was like an art installation, but seemed so natural.

Treen has a history about it, near its headland is what is called the Logain Stone, which you can rock with your hands due to fine balance! Or you used to be able to, until some chap from the navy in the 1800s decided he wanted to prove the navy could topple it. After much complain by the local tourism industry, he paid to have it put back, but it has never rocked as easily since, which is something I can attest to after daring the rather leery scramble to the rock.

Next day found me at Lands End, doing the usual touristy stuff, but I did get some dirty looks off passers by as I did some undaring bouldering to get a good photo. Then to St. Ives to wonder the streets.

Today back to Newquay, and a day at the Eden Project. Brilliant place, if a little inundated with small children, but then, it is for them. Big kids have to fit in I suppose! After chilling out in Watergate Bay again, Im in the pub writing this (Cornish Ale has nothing compared to Lancastrian). Tomorrow, I go bouldering at Carn Brea. Woo. Then back into the Shire.

EDIT: Photos available here.

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.

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