Uni

QUB Relevant: Mostly PGR or prospective PGR Just out of a great meeting with QUB Information Services regarding: Researcher/ Student webspace Email Wifi and VPN Web Space For a while now, this has been a bee in my bonnet; many other institutions provide User-Dirs or Public Facing Pages that, while being slightly monitored, are in the control of individual researchers and students. These draw attention to the bleeding edge of an institutions academic research while maintaining ownership of the content. ...

Biblio Sorbi, Toni, Dio De Capua, Rossi TERA, Genova Grade 1 What is this work about? Collaborative target tracking behaviours What are the main findings of this work? No surprise; two AUVs with a comms link are better at tracking, and that tracking is easier when the targets are stupid/random. What gap in our understanding does this work fill? Highlights MLO tracking operations, and provides insight into globally aware control systems ...

Biblio Carreras, Batlle, Ridao, and Roberts; An Overview on Behaviour based methods for AUV control, Girona, Spain What is this work about? A review and analysis of four AUV behaviour based reactionary control architectures, presenting four control architectures; Scheme, Subsumption, PDL, and Action Selection Dynamics, i.e. cooperative (schema, PDL) and competitive (Sub, ASD) What are the main findings of this work? Competitive models are often easier to design as only one behaviour is resident at a time, however this leads to ’jaunty’ and often sub-optimal results, as in this case where authors say the resultant pats for both competitive models are non-optimal ...

Hold on, what? I attended a Postgraduate Training event over the weekend, ‘Starting to Write in the First year of your PhD’, presented by the brilliantly wise and entertaining Daniel Soule. What I expected: How to start writing your thesis in the first year of your PhD What I got: Start writing in the first year of your PhD, for your own sanity and academic security Now, depending on your academic background, these may sound exactly the same. They’re not. This post summarises the ‘best bits’ of the very very good course. ...

** So today is the start of the rest of your life. Seems kind of appropriate today. Had a meeting with my PhD Supervisor to start to develop my project. Of course at this point it would help to explain what the project is, but I can’t right now, so shush. What was innocuous about the meeting was the relatively small pile of papers that I was handed; that was until I flicked through and saw that the actual material he wanted researched had been highlighted in the bibloigraphies. In fact, it would have been more efficient to highlight the ones NOT to read. ...

EDIT - 2017 Updated broken links thanks to heads up from Paul @ Art of Blog Ok, its been a busy few weeks, and I’ve let the blog slip again, but coming up: Implementing Google Webfonts Ubuntu Dot-File Dropbox Synchronisation Drupal 6 Installation of Ubuntu 10.04 My Revision Scheduling/Tracking System Summer Plans including VPN work for Dr David Laverty and CUDA research with Alastair Mckinley and Dr Alan Marshall

I had been looking at this years Google Summer Of Code google group and saw the list of organisations that are getting involved. While i was alooking at it, I knew i didn’t want to even consider the big boys (I’m looking at you, Debian, Drupal, KDE, Apache, X.Org, etc), they’re too big to get my teeth into, and I’m currently in the throws of ‘WHAT THE HELL AM I GOING TO DO MY FINAL YEAR PROJECT ON!!! ’ (For any Americans, that means ‘dissertation’). ...

So I have a piece of coursework for a CS module I’m taking at Queen’s University Belfast and one of the focal points of it is the recent RockYou! SQL-injection breach that released 32million passwords into the internet, and I thought I’d have a closer look at that list. I ‘acquired’ the password list from your regular neighbourhood tracker, and thought I could walk through the process of getting a probability-sorted password dictionary. ...

If anyone is interested in Erlang B Calculations, very relevent to any communications or engineering students, I’ve written a little quick piece of code to calculate them. There are several levels of functionality in the code. Erlang B itself only has 2 variables, System load in Erlangs, and the number of “trunks” (read: servers/call center operators/phone lines), and its output is a blocking probability from 0 to 1 All three of these variables or none atall can be defined at runtime; ...