In the matter of only 2 hours…

Posted on February 12, 2008 by Andy Callaghan.
Categories: Rant, Uni, Work.

I have been looking frantically for ‘internships’ for my next University year. I spend a year in the computing industry working for a real company on a real project, earning real money and hopefully setting me up for my career after I leave Uni.


I originally applied to (a very large non-Microsoft company) – as you do. Being my super-duper numero-uno choice for a placement, I applied for their Software Engineer intern in London on their first day that they started accepting applications – 1st November ‘07. Look at me trying to be organised! 

After a good month of no response from them, I was forced to begin looking elsewhere for placements.

I picked a local company to Reading that specialise in financial institution web design (banks basically) which I’d prefer not to name in case i get sued for libel or something. When they gave a set of guest lectures, they appeared to be a young but relatively experienced web company which was uber-local to the University – perfect!

After applying to their intern scheme, and a few emails between me and a big cog in the company, I’d secured an initial interview. After this first interview I believed I performed reasonably, and when they offered a second ‘more formal’ interview, I thought it could only mean good things.

The second interview then passed, and they told me that they would get back to me with a decision by the end of the month (January). 

29… 30… and the 31st of Jan passed and no response – I feared the worst. 

These fears were confirmed in the worst possible way by me discovering that one of my course
acquaintances showed me his acceptance email from them. Not the best way to find out you don’t have a job…

Shortly after I got feedback from the internship officer at Reading. She said that the company could not fault my interview, but only said I ‘had asked for too much money during the interview’. Bullplop! They asked me what the average internship wage was, in which I responded with £14k minimum (which is coincidentally what the Big M offer…), and the offer that came through as acceptance was for £13k. Rudeness!

Anyway, I digress… After this setback, I was forced yet again to rethink my options, and after a meeting with my internship officer, she secured me an interview with a large pharmaceutical company based in the States, but with offices near Reading.

After the painless interview, I believed that I had performed well (but I thought the same before). My placement officer told me that the decision would be relayed to me later in the evening of the interview (last Wed).

At 9pm I checked my inbox, and not only found a ‘Congrats’ email about the previous pharmaceutical company, but also a response from (a very large non-Microsoft company) !! WOOP WOOP! I saw it and literally leapt into the air in celebration.

The email explained that I wasn’t suitable for the Software Engineer internship, but the Associate Product Manager job was! This intense job allows an intern to direct the shape a handful of their products: released, unreleased, free, or multi-billion dollar a year – It’s all the same!
I am understandably ecstatic at the prospect of this, and I can’t wait until I have a chance to show off what I can achieve for the company.

Updates will follow, I guarantee.

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Microsoft and Yahoo? 2 + 2 ≠ 4!

Posted on February 2, 2008 by Andy Callaghan.
Categories: Microsoft, Rant.

All this Microsoft and Yahoo stuff has got me thinking — how desperate are the CEOs of Microsoft to narrow the gap between them and Google?


At the current time Google have a 55% market share, up 20% in 2 years. Pretty good growth for any business. Microsoft and Yahoo (including all their subsidiary companies) only make up 45% and their market share is slipping year on year because of Google. Microsoft and Yahoo are desperate for more share in the market, and I can’t blame them.

But hang on. Even if the $44.6 billion Microhoo! deal does happen, do they really expect their market share to improve, profits to increase and Google to die as quickly as it rose in the sidelines?

The most likely thing that will happen is that competition will increase against Google, which will all but fuel Google to further improve their already superior search. Come on! If you’re two biggest competitors have to merge just catch up with you, you have to be doing something right!

For me, and other internet developers, the merger would be good news however you look at it. Better tools and APIs from Google, a comparable alternative to Google and maybe a Yahoo page written in ASP! 

Steve Ballmer said:
“We have great respect for Yahoo!, and together we can offer an increasingly exciting set of solutions for consumers, publishers and advertisers while becoming better positioned to compete in the online services market,”

What he meant to say was:
“We are so desperate to kill Google that we’re willing to acquire Yahoo, once the only company to compete with us. To make sure they can’t say no we’re going to be throwing an inordinate amount of money at it, and hope that this whole Google business can just go away! *throws chair at reporter* ”

I believe that Microsoft were better than to think that “2 + 2 = 4″ on the web, and that just bolting different companies together will solve all their problems. It’s like shoving two cars together, and thinking it’ll go quicker, or putting two stupid people together and making a genius. It just doesn’t work!



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Andy Callaghan: Pythonian

Posted on December 8, 2007 by Andy Callaghan.
Categories: Rant, Uni, Work.

I have recently found myself deviating away from C and C++ towards a newer, cleaner, smarter and much less annoying programming language - Python.


I was knocked back from it’s sheer simplicity in code and the vast selection of built-in libraries for easy programming. For example this one line of python code broadcasts a web-server on port 8000:
python -c “import SimpleHTTPServer;SimpleHTTPServer.test()”
From Gary Robinson’s Rants

Ridiculous! And how about this… completely tokenise a string, one line:
“Hello my name is Andy”.split(’ ‘)
This one may not seem too amazing; php has the explode() function which basically does the same, but this very piece of code took me well over 50 lines of C code to do exactly the same thing. 

Also Python natively supports Regular Expressions, whereas it would have to be a dodgy undocumented class add-on for C++.

This is exactly why I have chosen to do my next piece of Compilers coursework in Python. We are to construct a compiler that has an input of a self-defined language, use Lex (or equivalent) to produce perform lexicographical analysis and tokenization, Yacc (or equivalent) to produce the parser for the language, and my brain (or equivalent, i.e. Google, Wikipedia et al.) to produce efficient assembly language for the input source.

Just starting this coursework in C++, would involve extensive research to discover how one would accomplish the first two stages, let alone the last – and evidently most important one.

However in Python, I have imported the built-in Lex and Yacc tools, written 62 lines of code and the code already tokenizes and parses my custom language. All that’s left is the funny error messages (see below) and assembly code production.

Funny compiler error messages in Python
I’m never turning back. 

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There go my printer credits…

Posted on December 2, 2007 by Andy Callaghan.
Categories: Rant, Uni.

My XML coursework is finally done. As I couldn’t get any work done at home, I went into Uni from 5 on Saturday…

… at 2am, I finally left with the coursework done. I walked back home feeling zombified with companion from exceedingly drunk Union-ites. This is a screeny of my report properties:

Document properties of XML report

Yes… that’s 6 hours 2 minutes and 58 seconds of editing! Ouch.

During printing the 23 full colour pages of the report, my printer credits plummeted…

The fall of computer credits...

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Coursework Hell, Convex Hull.

Posted on November 23, 2007 by Andy Callaghan.
Categories: Rant, Uni, Work.

I feel overwhelmed that my Convex Hull algorithm coursework is complete.

We got just over 4 weeks to complete this work, but along with another 4 pieces of coursework that were due in before this one — most people didn’t start until the last week, and are therefore unable to get anything complete in time. Luckily, I started this work a week before we were to hand it in, and handing it in 5 days late… oops.
Due to no one handing the work in on time, a lot of jiggery pokery has been happening behind the scenes to make sure that we don’t get marked down for the late hand-in.
I implemented the entire program in C++ using classes, but not to the best effect I could have done. I also had to use Divide and Conquer methods to optimise the algorithm execution and show of that I can code it…
It was also the first project that I’ve ever implemented in Xcode – Mac OS X’s development program. I was quit surprised at the relatively shallow learning curve of using the IDE, but the compiler errors from gcc which I’ve used before in KDevelop, were not as useful as they could have been. It didn’t help that I upgraded to Leopard half way through development — I got a lot of linking errors when I did…
Well, if you’re just reading this to get the code, here it is:
Report:
Divide and Conquer Report – 9 pages – 107.6 kB
Code:
Complete Xcode Project – 522.3 kB
Convex Hull – Class Implementation – 18.4kB
Convex Hull – Main function – 1.61kB

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Back to the Stoneage

Posted on October 5, 2007 by Andy Callaghan.
Categories: News, Rant.

As I have moved back to Reading University for my second year, I have moved into a house nearby the Uni with three of my friends. The house is quite old, dusty and grotty but apart from that it’s really nice being in a place of your own, rather than in halls. Plus more sleep, as there are less drunk and rowdy students about at 3am!

One considerable downside is that the network situation has not been fully completed yet. We have an extremely makeshift network consisting of very temperamental Virgin “2″ Mb broadband ( see picture below), a firmware hacked cable modem (for QoS), a weak wireless point and a Ethernet cable running upstairs going to another router, connecting two other computers.

To add insult to injury, we found after a good hour with Linux console and ndiswrapper that my newly bought off-the-shelf Wifi dongle, doesn’t easily work in Linux. Grrr! Windows, for now, it is!

As you could imagine, all of the above do not lead to a reliable internet connection as the following picture demonstrates:
Virgin broadband being very very slow
I’ll hopefully soon get this sorted!

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Grind my gears: Automatic article generators

Posted on May 26, 2007 by Andy Callaghan.
Categories: Rant.

Here is an 'article' generated from the keyword 'internet': 

The Internet is good, but not because it cannot be regulated. The Internet is a global network connecting millions of computers. That is, traffic on the Internet is much more like a series of small telegrams passing back and forth. The Internet is one of the youngest and fastest growing media in today's world. The internet is the next OS, and Google is becoming a primary force behind it. Google Says The Internet Is Haunted. The internet is not evil. The Internet is in its 11th year of annual doubling since 1988. Because of Firefox and its accessibility features, the time that I spend surfing the Internet is more fun and productive again.

After all these years, Internet is indeed becoming the best service platform ever.

Apologies to any website which I have pulled content off of here, but I'm using their content for a good cause.

The software that produced this piece of text is called Instant Article Wizard, and is devaluing the efforts of good writings on the internet. COpyright is easily being breached, and is extremely easy to find out if your website has been reproduced elsewhere.

www.CopyScape.com

Enter your URL in, and it'll quickly give you a report of similar wordings on other websites on the web.

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Rape: 8yrs; Murder: 15yrs; Copyright Infringement: Life?

Posted on May 24, 2007 by Andy Callaghan.
Categories: Rant.

The RIAA and the US attorney general are at it again in the USA.

They have submitting a bill to congress with a proposal to increase the sentence for Copyright Infringement to life imprisonment in a lovely US jail. 

Their excuse? Terrorism of course!

      "     life imprisonment for copyright offences which endanger life and Homeland Security reporting to the RIAA when someone tries to sneak a pirated CD across the border     "   

This is not all! In the new bill the following measures are being proposed:-

  • 'Attempted' Copyright Infringement – 10 years
    Simply trying to download a chart-topping hit from Britney Spears counts for 10-years in a pound-me-in-the-ass prison.
  • Using Pirated Software – Life
    They're so desperate to stop people from 'stealing' non-tangibe material that they're willing to put you in the slammer for longer that a consecutive rape, kidnap and murder charge.
  • Allow of wiretaps to suspected copyright infringers
  • “Require Homeland Security to alert the Recording Industry Ass. of America. That would happen when CDs with "unauthorized fixations of the sounds, or sounds and images, of a live musical performance" are attempted to be imported.” (CNet News)

The US Government and the RIAA knows no bounds. They cannot distinguish between a 12-year old kid giving a DVD to his mate, and a mass-producing factory pumping out 10,000 DVDs a day. There's a stark difference in the amount of 'theft' that's occurring, but not in their money greedy eyes there isn't.

In fact, with this new law you would do less time robbing a bank (7 years) and then going to the shops and buying the CDs and DVDs! Madness!

Get some perspective!

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Lock Paris Hilton away and throw away the key

Posted on May 9, 2007 by Andy Callaghan.
Categories: News, Rant.

Finally! We all have a chance to chuck that witch Paris Hilton in jail, and either:

  1. 'Lose' the key
  2. Throw key in big river
  3. Force Paris to 'ingest' key
  4. Make her go into a X-men/Magneto style prison – no chance of escape.

Any of the above is acceptable.

Sign the petetion to keep her in jail:

JAIL PARIS HILTON!
(currently 20,802 signatures)

DONT PARIS HILTON!
(currently 14,096 signatures) 

All values correct at 18.08 BST, 9 May 2007 

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Pandora is closed off – USA is destroying music, freedom and the internet.

Posted on May 6, 2007 by Andy Callaghan.
Categories: News, Rant.

For those of you that don’t know, Pandora is a free, legal service that allows you to stream full length music tracks over the internet. You then input your favourite bands, groups or singers into Pandora. A complex algorithm will then return to you a list of bands that you might never have heard of, because they’re too obscure or that you’ve never heard of them.

Patriotic American

It has allowed me to double my legal music catalogue, buying albums from artists that I would never have even considered.

So it greatly annoys me when Pandora announced this week that they are stopping they’re service of streaming music to users outside of the USA. They said in a statement,

    “Delivery of Pandora is based on proper licensing from the content rights holders – we have always believed strongly in honoring the guidelines as determined by the artists, labels and publishers. In the U.S. there is a federal statute called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) that provides this license for all the music you hear on Pandora. Unfortunately, there is no equivalent license outside the U.S.”

So from that statement we can clearly see that the only reason why Pandora can’t broadcast to outside of the USA is because of the DMCA. The DMCA is a US law signed by President Clinton in 2000, and it will be the cause of Digg probably being taken off-line soon. 

It is all supposed to protect the good of the country (the World according to the USA that is).

Restrictions to import and export of games, videos and digital content has long been controlled and has long been circumvented by techies. Region codes on DVDs and DRM infections in all downloadable media content simply have no place in the modern global economy.

America, it’s laws and it’s ’special interest committees’ such as the RIAA are beginning to police the World, and dictate what we in other countries are allowed to watch or listen to. 

How can we stop them?

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