Journal: October 2008

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Hello... terrain?
Sun 26/10/08 (Link to this entry)

I've got a lot of coding to do at the moment - I'm simultaneously working on prototypes for both my final year project's 3D renderer and the interface for the touch-sensitive table I'm helping to build. I'm making good progress on both but they're eating a lot of my time just now, and I haven't even started on my Sun work for this week yet (more coding, but hopefully not involving more trigonometry - yuck!). Below you can see my half-arsed attempts at rendering some basic terrain. It doesn't look like it, but there's actually quite a lot going on in this scene. The next challenge is going to be working out how to use real-world terrain data rather than some jaggy made-up islands...

It looks like I'll be staying busy for the forseeable future, especially given that I have to spend 48 hours next week on a trip to Surrey for a Sun training day on the 29th. I guess it's better to be too busy than not busy at all, but I sometimes wish I could strike a happy medium...

Phew
Fri 10/10/08 (Link to this entry)

The final-year project allocations at uni were published today and, much to my great relief, I've been allocated the one I really wanted. As I've mentioned previously, the idea is to create a kind of 'virtual window' that shows pilots in real time what the view out of their cockpit window should be, based on some preloaded terrain data and a live feed from a GPS. A basic coloured terrain model would probably be 'good enough', but I have visions of grandeur including adding some HUD elements or maybe some satellite imagery like in the picture below (shamelessly swiped from Google):

It's a great relief to me that I got the project I really wanted. I know at least one person who was allocated his sixth-preference choice, and while it wouldn't have been the end of the world if I'd been in the same boat, I'd have been a lot less happy about my final-year project right now. As it stands, I'm feeling quite eager to get started :-D

I feel the need... the need for speed
Tue 7/10/08 (Link to this entry)

My broadband connection switched over to O2 today. My line syncs at around 20Mbps and it seems like O2 aren't too worried about capping me to the agreed 16Mbps, from the looks of the below speedtest result (from SpeedTest.net):

This makes a pleasant change from the usual "it says up to 8 megs but you'll only get 4" guff - it's nice to get the line speed that was actually advertised. Even better, it's only a tenner a month and doesn't have any hard download limits, so I'm pretty chuffed with the new connection. Now I just need something big to download :-D

Choices
Sat 4/10/08 (Link to this entry)

I've just finished the first week of my final year. With lectures getting off to the usual slow start, the main thing that's been keeping me occupied is thinking about what I'm going to do for my final-year project. After an unsuccessful attempt at suggesting my own project (designing and implementing a new feature for the software tool I worked on while at Sun), I was left to follow the route of choosing from the plethora of staff-suggested projects for this year.

Unfortunately, this wasn't a particularly fun experience. After 21 months of working in industry, I find myself much preferring to do useful, practical work rather than airy-fairy academic stuff - but if you're going to do a project suggested by an academic, it's going to be an academic sort of project isn't it? To that end I found myself scouring the list looking for projects with a strong practical element and which had interesting subject matter; no easy task, considering the dryness of many of the options on the list.

I've managed to select the required six projects to submit on the selection form; they all at least sound reasonably interesting, although I have to admit there's only one that really makes me feel enthusiastic (creating a 'virtual viewport' for aircraft pilots based on terrain data and a live feed from a GPS device, so they can see what the view out their windscreen would look like if there weren't a big cloud in the way). Sadly, I'm only marginally more likely to be allocated my first-choice project than my least-preferred one; this is because the project allocation process is pretty complicated and personal preferences seem to be being treated mostly as an afterthought. This is worrying :-/

My final-year project isn't the only project I'm doing this year, though; there's a group project in the first semester for the eight fifth-year MEng students (including myself) to tackle together. It's supposed to be an exercise in project management, so we've been given a somewhat interesting project to manage between ourselves: building a multi-touch-sensitive table similar to Microsoft's Surface or the Reactable project, which can been seen in the video below.

Multi-touch user interfaces are a big thing in computing these days (see the popularity of the Jesus Phone, for instance), and the university is understandably keen to be doing some research on what can be done with this new kind of interface. From our point of view, it'll be an interesting exercise in project management as it's nothing like a normal uni project (we even have an equipment budget). That, and if we come up with something decent, it'll be really cool :-D

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