First week

Well half way through my first week as a PhD (well technically MPhil) student and what have I learnt? Mainly that PhDs HURT I've spent the last 2 days trying to cram the better part of a terms worth of electronics (well logic mainly) into my brain. Doing fairly well so far.

I have also learnt that there are far too many annoying webmail systems that don't sync with stuff properly also that the new Microsoft Outlook live sucks utter balls.

anyway that's all I have to report at the moment (yes this was a worthless post but no one reads this so sod it).

will maybe post something more substantial soon when I think of it.

The obligatory late post

Hello again! I'm back (well while I remember this anyway). Various things to report: firstly I'm heading into a PhD so back to uni very soon (which is just awesome!) Also in a new flat (that's my excuse for lack of posts anyway) and finally loving the iPhone - if you use the net a lot while on the go get one.

Anyway on to something slightly less egotistical: interesting developments. The main thing of interest to me at the moment has been the prospect of building a CNC Milling machine (basically a computer controlled router - the type for carving). This is a project between me and a friend and we're hoping to start on it very soon. This will mean I should have access to an amazing carving machine: essentially plug in the information for what you want to build and it will (so long as it can be carved from a block of whatever).

Other cool gubbins that has been circling is that I've recently finished Iain Bank's "Crow Road" this is an amazing book if quite sad. Well worth a read.

Anyway looks like I can't think of much else to post and I'm ready to install Dawn of War II so I'm off to enjoy that

New Comic

Hey Guys,

I'm back again (briefly) to post a link to this a comic a friend of mine is drawing. Should be a good read once a week so take a look - only one up at the moment though so not too much to worry about.

In other news I'm still fighting with VHDL and my lazyness in trying to get my JAVA-fu going again. Will be posting up some more games reviews soon as well (mainly once I've got some second games down), I'm hoping to put up reviews for 'Race for the Galaxy' and 'Crunch' I've had a single game of RftG and a few of crunch and both are very good. As I'm off to a games club tomorrow I should hopefully have a few more games down to pass judgement on.

Lit-bots and Comp-scripts: how the world is getting faster...

I saw this while on holiday published in the International Herald Tribune I was going to blog about it then decided not to becuase it was an isolated case, well I thought it was then I read this about half way down Ben describes this:

"Professional complaints followed in May, mostly about individual chiropractors’ claims. Then, in June, blogger Simon Perry found the BCA database of 1,029 members online, containing 400 website URLs. He wrote a quick computer program to automatically identify all the chiropractors in the UK claiming to treat colic, locate their local Trading Standards office, and report them (more than 500 in total) automatically, followed up with printed letters."

This made me look up. If you haven't read the links here is my main interest in these reasonable disparate stories: they both use simple bots within a legal framework to spam requests. Respectivly one spams buy orders (buy for 1cent more and get a lot of money) the other spams legal letters requests for investigation. This has been online for a while in the form of trawling take down letters, these are simple bots that look for things that may be copyrighted material posted illegally and then spam the ISP of the concerned website with cease and disist letters. My main interest in this is that this sort of thing will produce an arms race, already this is the case on the stock exchange where groups are trying to out do each other with faster systems and smarter algorithms, legally similar systems are likely to evolve: clouds of company bots that exist to absorb the flak of other's take down bots and simlar...

for more ideas read accelerando by charles stross

anyway just thought I'd flag that up as it interests me

DNA databases, Charlie and Ben

This is going to be a pretty short post as there isn't much to add to this discussion other than what is said in these two reports: first Ben Goldacre on the bad evidence used to justify long term retention (ie 24 years retetion) of DNA data taken from those who are arrested but not convicted or cautioned. Second is this article by Charles Stross on the odds of being a false positive in a government database check (in this case CRB check and why he doesn't give school readings of his books).

The only thing really that I want to add to the debate on a database of our DNA etc run by the government is that the risk in terms of security of a database that will ultimately link ALL your information in one place if breached is pretty horrible. I'll briefly expand this: the DNA database would be likely allowed to expand (through ID cards etc) to cover everyone and be multi-use, ie your medical history would be there you NI number what ever. Even if this doesn't happen a single source of information would make identity theft a utterly crippling crime, especially as it would be most likely a random person who would be used to act as a patsy for someone else. Although this is less likely given the current technological state it is likely only a matter of time before the current DNA system starts leaking.

Adventures with VHDL part 1.

Well I've finally got my arse in gear and started playing around with VHDL. I am subjecting myself to this for two reasons: 1) being able to program firmware is cool and useful as well being a reasonably rare skill 2) it's going to be useful for my PhD.

So what am I doing I hear you cry? Firstly I have been lent a very fun piece of kit: a Digilent NEXYS 2 board this is a programmable board with all sorts of ports and switches LEDs and similar to play with. Attaching it to my pc is a basic USB cable and then I have the Xilinx WebPack (a free download containing IDE and other useful programming gubbins). The final thing needed was the digilent program 'Adept' which allows you to upload your program via USB.

Armed with these I have ventured forwards into the world of chip programming.

So what have I learnt? thus far not much, I've got a basic program running that depending on the configuration of 4 switches the 7-segment display will give the number converted from binary into hexadecimal this was done by follow thing this fairly basic tutorial.

I learnt two major things: firstly check the EXACT setting of your card. I had a lot of issues in that I was getting a "device IDCODE conflict" error every time I tried to load the program on to the hardware this was because I had it set for the XC3S500E not the XC3S1200E in the 'Design properties' (right click the any of the files in the 'design' pane). The second thing I learnt was that to set the start up clock you need to right click 'Generate Programming File' in the process pane.

This sort of programming is interesting it that everything has two entries into your code: the first is called the entity which describes the number of inputs and outputs to a given structure; the second is the architecture that actually describes what is to be done with those inputs and outputs.

In my case the inputs are the switches and the outputs are the 7Seg display as well as anodes which switch of the bits of the display that I don't want (there are 4 separate 7seg displays I need only one).

The architecture is where the interesting programming happens (as far as I can tell) with '<=' directing inputs to outputs. In this case 'select' was used select a binary string for controlling the 7seg when a certain value was input via the switches (x0 through to xE). The anodes were all set manually via the line 'anodes <= "1110"; ' (remember that for this '1' is off '0' is on) this was done so that only the right most display was on.

On the entity side ports (inputs/outputs) were declared as a block of '3 downto 0' giving ports 3,2,1,0. each being declared "STD_LOGIC_VECTOR" which I assume defines the arithmetic to which it subscribes.

Finally once your .hdl file is finished you need to declare what physical ports everything attaches to. This is via a .ucf file that simply translates the port from the VHDL file to an actual port (in this case by looking up the number on the board itself).

Cool stuff

Frstly: the Chap Olympiad, a very daft but fun event recently held in London here's a link to an ITN report on it.

Secondly: big news in engineering and opto-electronics (if it gets off the ground) scientists have set up 'circuits' such that light can be used to open and close gates. This is important as it means that fully controlable gates can be made either way here is the report.

Sorry about the lazy reporting feeling tired and working on a programming project. Will probably update some information on it soon