Below are the 18 most recent journal entries recorded in Tom Adams' LiveJournal:

Wednesday, June 4th, 2008
4:08 pm	Using Google Maps to measure one's average speed So, I went to the bank today to pay in a couple of cheques, and on the way back I decided to measure my average walking speed. I looked at my phone as I walked past Texaco, and then I checked it when I got to Oxfam (and had a look around). I then used Google Maps to find out the distance between the two, and used Google Search to convert miles to kilometres. I then used Python 2.5 and from __future__ import division, then divided the distance by my time. I walked at 1.9 m/s. (Comment on this)
Saturday, May 24th, 2008
9:53 pm	Academia sucks because ... Whenever you want to read a research paper, it is inevitably stuck behind paywalls on several different Web sites which your university _apparently_ doesn't subscribe to, and you can find the citation on the author's homepage, but they don't have a copy of it there. Oh look, I've found a Web site that the university subscribes to (they were lying about just having to log into their WebCT-integrated portal - it seems you need the uni's IP address)... now I just have to work out what button in lynx to press to download something rather than show it to me in uber-slow X-forwarded evince (because at some point the department stopped allowing SOCKS proxying when SSHing). Now maybe I can read the bleeding paper and stop complaining about not being able to find it. Update: oh for fuck's sake, it's the wrong bloody paper. Now I'm going to have to email the module lecturer to see if he can find a copy ... and hopefully get a copy before the exam on Tuesday. The exam which I'm going to fail anyway. And I need 60% on the exam just to soft-pass the module because I got 0% on the 30%-weighted coursework. I _so_ can't wait to finish this course. You know, in 2009 after I've resat a few modules. Ugh. In other news, my chart parser for NLP is finished. The bad news is that the copyright is held by the university, but the good news is that for fun I decided to reimplement it in Ruby after a quick search for "ruby chart parser" came up with nothing relevant. Since this is not related to my course, it shall be ISC-licensed. Permissive free software licences FTW. (Comment on this)
Sunday, May 11th, 2008
8:23 pm	XCF to PNG in GIMP-Python The documentation on GIMP-Python seems a little sparse, so it took me a while. Run this with Python to convert *.xcf to PNGs: http://holizz.com/software/xcfpng.py It uses a cute little test to check whether or not it's running within the GIMP's batch environment (i.e. is the 'gimp' module already defined), and executes itself within the GIMP if it's not. I hadn't seen anything else that did this (self-executing GIMP-Python scripts) throughout my travels so I thought it noteworthy enough to publish. I chose the ISC license for this. It's functionally equivalent to the MIT license, but more concise. P.S. I'm not sure if convert from ImageMagick does the same thing or not, but who cares? It's written now. Oh, and by the way, this was written for general use and was not written specifically for my course (HLT) therefore the copyright of this piece of software belongs to me, and not to the University of Sheffield, therefore I am free to publish it and license it how I wish. Just thought I'd make that clear since everything we do related to the course is copyright the University of Sheffield. (Comment on this)
Monday, May 5th, 2008
8:46 am	History Meme What an exciting meme. I haven't posted in ages, let alone done a meme. Here's Tim Bray's History, which got me interested. 08:43 holizz:~% history -1000|awk '{a[$2]++} END{for(i in a){printf "%5d\t%s \n",a[i],i}}'|sort -rn|head 254 git 148 ls 144 vi 92 cd 63 espeak 34 sudo 27 cat 22 echo 20 rm 17 man git is at the top because I've been getting to grips with it lately. vi is symlinked to vim, which I now use much more often than emacs. espeak is there because I've been playing with that, and trying to integrate it with vim (stay tuned). cat I use to copy/paste into blank files because with vim you have to :set paste and then :set nopaste afterwards. echo is testing with espeak. man is for git and espeak. (Comment on this)
Saturday, December 29th, 2007
8:31 pm	End of Year Quiz 2007 Stolen from Neil's End of Year Quiz 2007. A fair few questions didn't make much sense to me, or rather in my context, so I gave locutions that indicated that I was thinking about them instead of actual answers. What did you do in 2007 that you’d never done before? Umm? Did you keep your new year’s resolutions, and will you make more for next year? I don't make empty promises to myself or anybody else. Did anyone close to you give birth? We used to be close. Did anyone close to you die? Nobody I know. What countries did you visit? I didn't leave England. What would you like to have in 2008 that you lacked in 2007? A Masters would be nice (although with January graduations that would be impossible). What date(s) from 2007 will remain etched upon your memory, and why? The only date I can recall is the 18th of August, my graduation. What was your biggest achievement of the year? Graduating, I guess. What was your biggest failure? I slacked off far too much in my final year and got a 2:1. Did you suffer illness or injury? Not particularly. What was the best thing you bought? ニンテンドーDS, なぞっておぼえる大人の漢字練習, and 漢字そのままＤＳ楽引辞典. They've been extremely useful (the DS plays games too, did you know?). Whose behaviour merited celebration? Ehh? Whose behaviour made you appalled and depressed? Ummm? Where did most of your money go? Rent. What did you get really, really, really excited about? Ummm. What song will always remind you of 2007? Wha? Compared to this time last year, are you: happier or sadder? Happier, but having less fun. thinner or fatter? The same, I guess? richer or poorer? Richer. What do you wish you’d done more of? Study. What do you wish you’d done less of? Study, maybe. How did you spend 2007-12-25? The same way I spend that date every year, I had a curry with my mum. Did you fall in love in 2007? No. How many one-night stands? They can be counted on the fingers of zero hands. What was your favourite TV programme? Quite possibly Battlestar Galactica. Doctor Who was good too. Do you hate anyone now that you didn’t hate this time last year? I don't hate anybody. What was the best book you read? Maybe The Reality Dysfunction, which I still haven't finished. What was your greatest musical discovery? I played Guitar Hero for the first time, if that counts. What did you want and get? I wanted to start a Masters and I did. Same sort of story with the DS. What did you want and not get? Nothing significant. What was your favourite film of this year? I don't remember that far back. Most of the good films I saw this year were either at the NMPFT or downloaded and not neccessarily originally released this year. Ones I can think of: Razor, I Am Legend, パプリカ (Paprika). What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you? I think there was cake and a curry. 21. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying? Um? Playing SSBM some more? How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2007? I wouldn't. What kept you sane? University work. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most? Fancy? Sure I think people are attractive but I wouldn't go so far as to say fancy. If pressed I'd say Sharon from BSG. What political issue stirred you the most? Pfft, nothing stirs me. Who did you miss? Will was still absent. I'll probably start to miss Wil now that he's gone too. Who was the best new person you met? IRL, Wil. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2007. 言語は半分文法で半分慣用句。 Language is half grammar and half idiom. This was initially applied to Perl and Python, where in one case it's a criticism of the language, and in the other it's a complement. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year. 「歩こう歩こう、私は元気。歩くの大好き、どんどん行こう。」But then again maybe that doesn't sum up my year. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, December 27th, 2007
4:34 pm	I Am Legend Last night and this morning I've been reading lots of blogs about gender in video games. Far too many, perhaps. Or then again perhaps not enough. I still have two bars worth of tabs open. On one of them I found something praising I Am Legend for being generally good, and for having good portrayals of people of gender and people of colour. I figured I'd download it since I think Will Smith is a competant actor and he's appeared in some good films, and also it's recent so it was here in probably half an hour. As it turns out, it was a good film. Very good, I'd say. It even taught me something about history - about Bob Marley, specifically. The one comment I have to make about it (SPOILERS) is that even though his dog just died, and his family previously, he of all people should know that those people are still humans and can be cured (unlike some other zombie flicks where zombies will never become human again and so killing them is always acceptable). So when he went out there at night to kill and be killed, it just seemed a little odd - he's been working to save these people for a very long time and he believes that they can be cured yet he goes out there with the intention of killing as many of them as possible. Maybe at that point he'd given up hope on finding a cure, but I couldn't help thinking that he was killing to make himself feel better. Maybe it's true to the book, and it's better explained in there (I haven't read it), but it seemed wrong. (Comment on this)
Sunday, December 16th, 2007
3:58 pm	I have another essay Usually when writing essays my classmates say something depressing like "oh I've written [word limit + 500]" and I just can't remove another word, while I'm there being unhappy and going "I've written [word limit / 4] and I can't write one more word". There was actually a phase in the Spoken Dialogue Systems essay when I was all write-write-write, write-write-write, for about a day of work. It was very satisfying at the time, but after that I had 1000 out of the 4000 word limit, and I only wrote another 300 words (yes, that three has two zeroes following it). I don't think I've had a better day spent writing an essay in my life. I probably haven't written that many words towards an essay in any other day. Hell, I probably haven't written that many words for a single essay before. How to Write a Research Paper@Everything2.com is a very useful writeup, until it gets to the "Put the pen to the paper" heading and all that the paragraph contains is summarised as "write". They assume that writing doesn't need further elaboration. I haven't had much luck Googling for other guides on how to write essays - they're all pretty much of the form "blah blah blah. write it. blah blah blah.". In other news I completely failed to do the first part of the Machine Learning assignment. My feature set started out being 1.7GB in ARFF format, then I used chi-squared on the stuff and it took 35.6 hours to execute, and it was still bigger than my quota at university. Programming, I thought, was my speciality but I couldn't do this assignment in a week. I kept thinking "oh, I'll try to finish this by Monday", "I'll finish this by Wednesday and then get started on the AVSP essay"... but it just kept going wrong. So in summation, I suck at the things that I know I suck at and I apparently suck at the things that I thought I was good at. This course isn't just challenging, it's probably too hard. I can only be consoled by the amount of ways I can not fail. Soft fails and retakes and such. Also, Pokemon. I can console myself by playing Pokemon because it's easy and fun and despite its ease it's very rewarding somehow. Thus ends my procrastination on writing the essay. I'll get back to reading the lecture slides over again with a view to reading some research papers ... with a view to understanding enough to start writing. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Wednesday, December 5th, 2007
5:28 pm	Reinforcement Learning in Spoken Dialogue Systems Well, I think I wrote everything I know about reinforcement learning in spoken dialogue systems. But it's 1,200 words as opposed to the 4,000 we were meant to write. And I have lots of claims with no citations, and lots of references that aren't cited. And I'm not really sure how to join them up because I've read the papers enough times. I've sat in front of the screen enough times to know that I can't write any more. (Comment on this)
Friday, November 30th, 2007
9:30 pm	South Park My housemate above me watches a lot of South Park. Often rather loudly. But that's alright because if he plays it too loudly he obediently turns it off when I tell him to. So thanks to him I've been experiencing South Park once again. I've also been experiencing it through his South Park-inspired bits of humour. I've come to the conclusion that it's pretty much 4chan toned down to appeal to the more mainstream people who think the same "racist, sexist, and pedophiliac" things, but feel the need to repress them. Or maybe to those people who think nobody could possibly think such things, assume they must be joking and laugh along accordingly (and of course, think such things). Thus concludes my essay on South Park. I just wish my other, slightly more important, essay would go so swimmingly. I suppose the other essay requires approximately 3,936 more words than this one, and a little more research though. Current Music: Some South Park-related music coming from upstairs (Comment on this)
Wednesday, November 28th, 2007
3:01 pm	Dove Management This Monday Dove Management came to show people around our house... completely unannounced. They claimed a text message had been sent to us, but that was a lie (or they were too stupid to actually do it right). Then they were supposed to come around on Tuesday. They didn't. Then they came round today, an hour and a half before they said they were going to. Last week after showing some people around Mike's room Mike got home and found his DVD player on the floor (evidently it had fallen a few feet), and when he asked the guy that showed people around he said it was probably one of the people and he wasn't very apologetic at all. This lead me to leave a sign on my door, my door locked, and a piece of paper in the door to check if they'd been in or not. Ironically, if they'd been at the correct time the sign wouldn't have been on the door and I'd have been here letting them into my room. But instead they got angry and told my housemates who were in that I ought to not leave signs like that up. The sign said "Dear Dove Management, After hearing what happened in Mike's room, I shall by keeping my door locked. Tom". It certainly does stipulate in the contract that the landlord may show people around, and that I must facilitate this, but nowhere does it state that they can come into our rooms and break our things. So I feel justified in breaking rules for my small protest against their lacklustre customer-relation skills. Sure it was probably an accident, but when you take people into a house it's your responsibility to make sure they don't break anything or nick anything. The landlord himself is a nice guy, but he obviously doesn't want the hassle of doing the actual landlording, which is where Dove Management get involved. Teh suck. (Comment on this)
Sunday, November 25th, 2007
11:34 am	Razor "Lieutenant Thrace was here earlier" ... "which is why I only have enough for half a glass of whisky each". I really liked the film, including the posthumous "X is gay" moment (that Six). And obviously nobody particularly cared (either that or they were afraid of being shot - I do like her style more than Roslin's out-the-airlock strategy; more direct and brutal). But what I really liked was the introduction of a rival for Kara Thrace. She was really something. Probably the best character that died, aside from Sharon (I omitted Kara not because I believe that she didn't die, but because I believe that Kendra is better than Kara). I wish she were a Cylon... BSG Razorを観てる。Kendra大好き。 (Translation) Watching BSG Razor. I love Kendra. ~ Tom Adams I hope everybody else noticed that President Roslin has outlawed abortion. I wonder if there'll be more mention of this in season 4. Anyway, I should read some research papers... or maybe just read Everything2 (and maybe eventually do another writeup). (Comment on this)
Monday, November 12th, 2007
5:54 pm	A2 Mathematics For the first time I'm starting to think dropping A2 maths wasn't such a good idea. Machine Learning has been ridiculously hard from the outset, and Speech Processing today introduced complex numbers. To Thomas Hain's credit, his single slide explaining complex numbers was perfectly clear and I feel I know exactly what they are in theory, but he did have some slides with very nasty looking equations. Supposedly we needed A-Level maths for the BSc Computer Science at Bradford. Nothing difficult came up in terms of maths. Nothing at all. But this course... there's so much maths everywhere. I used to be able to read an equation really easily, but now I'm struggling. It all just looks like a black mess on the page. And there are new methods of multiplication... dot products or inside products. I still don't know what they are. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, November 6th, 2007
6:44 pm	The Real Perils of Facebook After seeing yet another Facebook will steal our privacies, oh noes! on the frontpage of Slashdot, I felt like writing up my own view on Facebook. I quite like Facebook. It's a fairly nice SNS. But, there are some fundamental flaws in the philosophy of the system. The main problem is networks. They seem fairly sensible at first glance, but why can't I see the profiles of people who aren't in the same networks I'm in? I much prefer the usual approach of everybody being able to see everybody, which is present in most other SNSes and is how things work throughout most of the Internet. It's a very odd, proprietary notion to only be able to see the profiles of people in your locale. It poses practical problems too, because it's often hard to tell if I know somebody when their profile picture is of them when they were 4. And why can't I belong to more than one geographic network? I'm living in Sheffield, sure, but my hometown is Bradford, so surely I should be able to belong to both? And that's another thing about Facebook - the networks are decided by Facebook and nobody else. This means that if you live in Bradford, then you have to choose Leeds as your network because Facebook's staff don't deem Bradford important enough (there's a group petitioning Facebook to add a Bradford network). Also, I want an ignore application requests button. It's the same sort of fundamental flaw that Blackboard/WebCT has. In that system, if you're not on a course, you're not permitted to view the material. Another very proprietary idea, but for some reason many universities (Bradford and Sheffield) still persist in using the system, even if it's at odds with the idea of the freedom of knowledge which is what universities supposedly stand for (but then I suppose universities still support the idea of research papers which you have to pay for unless your institution has a subscription). (Comment on this)
Saturday, September 15th, 2007
3:00 pm	PyConUK 2007 - Monday Monday is pretty relaxed in the morning compared to other days. I get up, have a light breakfast (consisting entirely of toast and condement, as usual), laze around a bit, then I head off for the Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery. Of course I'm not lazy enough to arrive there at 10, so I wander off and visit a Waterstones and browse their books to kill time. I find an interesting, but obviously based-on-a-false-premise book called The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture and Assaulting Our Economy, which seems to be one of those essays by journalists complaining that blogs aren't newspapers, although perhaps a little more extreme in that he seems to argue that any kind of thing distributed free-of-charge or free-of-restriction is but a cheap knock-off that will rot your brain in a way that newspapers do not. He also seems to believe that stuff you read on the Internet could be made up or vastly inaccurate, yet doesn't seem to believe that newspapers could make this mistake. I get to the museum a little early so I ring Sibila's restaurant. They open at 11, but only have some kind of buffet thing before 12 that I didn't really feel like trying my luck with. Then I ring The Warehouse Café to check their opening times. They open at 11 too, which is good because my train is at 12.30. Then I visit the museum, which didn't have much in the way of modern art, unfortunately. There were rooms and rooms of classical stuff. As far as I can tell, once you've seen one landscape or portrait from the ['%sth'%r for r in range(15, 20)] centuary, you've seen them all. I have a little trouble locating The Warehouse Café, but I go into Digbeth Coach - 乗り場? - and work out where I am. I manage to arrive there at just after 11. It's only me, so I go and sit down, and find out that it's only the snacks menu until 12. But there are falafel, so all is well. And I have Banana Cake for pudding, so I'm pretty happy. Eventually I wander off on my way, not before paying, and taking a leaflet about a Japanese food event (including a bilingual menu). It's on the 20th, when I am specifically in Thornton, so it's not possible, unfortunately, even if I did feel like a two-hour train ride. It's pretty 楽々 finding the station. As I thought, the first station I went to didn't have the train I wanted, but it was on the way so it didn't hurt. I think I walked through the major shopping areas of Birmingham including the Bullring and some other shopping place that was connected to it, eventually emerging on the other side of the concrete mass, stepping out on to some more concrete, and eventully getting to the station, which was potentially made of concrete. I think I'd have liked to have seen a few patches of soil with plants in them or something along the way, even if its only purpose was to trick consumers into thinking they weren't 5 kilometres away from the thing that keeps them alive (since it was such a sunny day there was nairy a Cloud™ in sight). New Street Station. Buy ticket, go down to find the train, decide to post a letter. Find the postbox, post it. Go back to the train. I still have part of the Guardian I got on Friday so I read that until Sheffield. Then I meet up with Chris and Mike, we give huge amounts of money to somebody and sign contracts, and then we leave. Go to our new local, have two pints each of OJ, Coca-Cola, and beer (guess which I was drinking). Then I get a Guardian from the station and go home (if you buy tickets from a machine, nobody checks whether you have both cards of your rail "card"). As is to be expected I spent the hours between then and sleep on getting up-to-date with the news, and hacking with various things I heard about at the conference. Thus ends my four-day blogging extravaganza (that's blogging four days of experience, not blogging for four days). (Comment on this)
3:00 pm	PyConUK 2007 - Sunday Sunday was much the same as Saturday, in that I ate lots of toast then went to many talks. Today's lunch was stuffed-peppers, which I was very impressed with. Wow, just so yummy. The baked potato yesterday was rather good as baked potatoes go, but this was a level 56 Stuffed-Pepper King which casts level 6 mega-death every turn. I'm not sure I've had stuffed-peppers before. The most notable talk today was Python in Higher Education, which was very interesting. Now I know who to contact if I need to convince an educational establishment of the worth of Python. After the keynote by Laura Creighton (not quite as good as yesterday's, but still interesting) there were more lightening talks. Then there were some prizes. The guy presenting gSculpt won an XBox 360 for the best lightening talk. Then there was the free prize draw for those that had handed in their surveys. Unfortunately my name was picked out. So I was lugged with Python in a Nutshell, which wasn't too bad since I was travelling pretty light. After it was all over (and after we sent a message back to the German Python event, who had sent us a message the previous day), I just went back to the hotel and read a bit, then watched Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. TTT was pants, it really was. It kept my attention until the end, unlike The Fellowship of the Ring, but it just wasn't that good. And I really didn't feel like the hobbits were small at all - that worked about as well as Hagrid in the Harry Potter films. I have a photograph of Sexy Katie standing outside the church on Market Street holding a large bag of Walkers crisps that looks a thousand times better than those hobbits (obviously it's harder on motion picture, but they have a bigger budget). My tea was just some food I'd taken with me, in the form of fruit and nuts (Morissons' cranberries, it turns out, are half sugar - I wasn't impressed). Then I went to sleep. (Comment on this)
2:57 pm	PyConUK 2007 - Saturday I woke up nice and (too) early at 6, excercised, showered, and went down for breakfast. It was pretty basic (there was a cerial despenser - if I'd got any soy milk it would have been fun to try) so I had about six slices of toast with apricot and rasperry jam, and probably five glasses (only small) of orange juice. I went back to my room and ate the two bananas I'd taken. I found somebody in the foyer about to walk up, so I tagged-along, we chatted. I arrive, get my name tag, get a goody bag. I wait around a little for the introduction. See the schedule. The talks I found interesting: Using Python to hack democracy, The PyPy project and You. Lunch. I had the sandwiches I had prepared without the knowledge that I was going to get fed. I then went towards the "this table is for vegetarians" table, and said I was vegan. The caterer went off into the back to get me some food. It was obviously the "quick, vegan, umm, umm, baked potato!" option, but it was rather nice. After talking to people I felt a little inadequite because everybody else had lots of experience of making really exciting software. But I decided it was good education, and very inspirational, meeting all these people doing enviously clever things and seeing how they did them. Next: a bit of comic-relief in the form of The Great Language Debate. Break. Lightening talks. Five minutes to do a presentation on any subject. Very interesting. Break. Keynote by Simon Willison on OpenID. Really well done, and he explained some parts of OpenID I hadn't previously heard of. Dinner at Novotel. I was at the Overflow table, sitting with some interesting people. I ended up sitting next to a vegan with an interest in language, and 漢字 (Chinese characters). The food was great. The portion of the main course could have done with being a bit bigger, but it was still tasty. I regret not photographing it. After dinner Jono Bacon gave an afterdinner speech. Then I walked back to the hotel, got rather lost, and eventually found somebody who knew where they were going. Went to sleep. (Comment on this)
2:54 pm	PyConUK 2007 - Friday PyConUK 2007 was a great conference. It was my first, so I don't have anything to compare it to except my usual metric - net book profit. By that metric it was a success, since I gained one book and lost none. More on that later. So Friday is pretty usual. Me and Davina (my mum) start out by swimming and then going for a 弁当 (bentō) at the Okra House Café. She drops me off at home, etc., etc.. Paul Johnston had very kindly mailed the list saying he'd take people down from Leeds. So I met him and a couple other people at Leeds station and we spent several hours driving down. It was great fun chatting to some fellow Python enthusiasts. We finally got there at about 9 something, checked in, and in going to the pub I left my keycard in my room. Went to the pub, met some people, came back, got another card. It was a little hard getting to sleep. There wasn't really anybody being noisy or anything, perhaps it was a combination of just having had a long walk, and being excited about the conference. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, November 8th, 2005
12:17 pm	Why is it that I can't just create an account for comments rather than getting a journal too? It seems like a waste. Tom Adams' blog. Current Music: None, it broke! (Comment on this)