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; ...

Jeff Han, a researcher at NYU, surpassed himself again with the most georgous multitouch display interface I’ve ever seen (surface/iphone eat your heart out). I always love watching TED talks, and if anyone really wants to see a good reason why Powerpoint should be killed, I’d recomment Hans Roslings talk on global poverty here Please at least pretend to click my ads. I know they’re a joke, but still, it dont cost ya anything!

Just off the phone with Clove saying that my shiny new black eee 900 is winging its way to my homestead, which unfortunatly is not wer i am, but at least i wont be losing any time for revision (read: have any other reasons not to study) I have to say I’m really disappointed with Asus’s attitude to they’re british customers regarding the battery issue and i really cant say any more about it except that were paying above the board globally, and not getting an equivalent product and an even less equivilant service. ...

I’ve been folding for a while now, and I’d previously written a really very cobbled together way of parsing my unitinfo.txt files, but, searching for something to do other than revise, I’ve written a similarly cobbled together but much shorter way of parsing my folding progress and telling me (as in speech) how far its going. Required: Espeak, basic bash knowledge to adjust. note: the espeak adjustments are just personal preference, so change them at will. ...

Afternoon folks, I’m supposed to be studying but dont have the heart to, so I’m documenting a recent project from Uni. The remit was to be able to parse RS232 data coming in from a GPS unit and reformat it for a LCD display. I dont have the part numbers handy but I was programming on a 18F series PIC that supported C. Most of the ancillary code is more platform dependant, such as working with the PIC interrupts etc, so for the purposes of this code snippit, assumme that a NMEA sentence (I used RMC and some RMB, but never really finished that bit) stored as a character buffer, and a structure, as defined, to store relevent data in. ...

Yeah, suprise suprise, I’m actually gonna try and keep this up. One of the major reasons for the delay since my last documented fiddle as been job hunting for a placement year next year, but I’ve wonderfully secured a position with Ericsson Ireland in their Athlone R&D centre. Pays good, experience is even better. Beyond that a few other things have been making things hectic, not least of which is the impending Examination period so about the only techy thing I’ve been able to come up with has been a wipe and reinstall to upgrade to Hardy Heron (8.04) (I didnt update because i dont trust dist-upgrade’s ability to do things my way, also meant i could blow out the cobwebs in my filesystem.) ...

Ok, its been a bit quiet in the old experimentalism, but im just taking in Bill Gates’ CES keynote, and there are a few things i wanted to comment on. I HAVE NOT SEEN ANYTHING THAT IS NOT ALREADY EXISTING Calendars with multiple events and shared events : GCal Calendar integration with events: GCal + Facebook Video Search: Gootube Uploading Videos from cellphones: Depends on provider, but combination of twitter and a mobile email ...

So, to do most of this playing about, I need a virtualisation environment, and VMware is the easiest, simplest and, at the moment, cheapest. VMWare released their server virtualisation tool to “free"dom recently, and the newest version (2.0) is currently sitting in beta. I have tried it out before but it didnt feel as solid as the older versions so I’m sticking with the oldskool 1.0.3 The Setup itself is just a simple “next, next, finish” with a free registration key provided. I recommend also downloading and installing the client console package; this is handy both for administring and viewing the VM’s in situ, but also to administer remote installations. ...

So…. I’m Andrew, I’m a technical person, and I’m gonna use this blog to post out some of my technical musings and little experiments. Currently, I’m working off of three systems, Athena, Apollo and Hermes. Athena:Headless Ubuntu Server 7.10, 2.6 Kernel AMD Semperon 3200+, 512MB RAM, 3 Hard Drives Totalling Just Under 1TB (mostly storage and backup archives) Apollo:WinXP AMD Athlon64 X2 6000+ (3GHz), 4GB RAM (32bit xp only sees 3.5 tho.) GeForce 7600 GS (512MB) and a 500GB SATA drive (My Workhorse for classes and heavy experiments eg VMWare) ...

This post is a little different from my usual fare; Basically, there was a tweet from MATRIX NI that caught my eye; the latest Office of National Statistics report on Internet Use in the UK. @MATRIX_NI @ONS And the tables show Northern Ireland being around 7% behind the Avg and 2% behind the next-worst-region... — Andrew Bolster (@Bolster) May 22, 2015 Basically, NI “lost”. So I thought it was a good opportunity to play around with the data a little bit instead of my usual stuff. ...