Well it is update time and the past week or so has been busy but not all around great. Not terrible just few things going wrong most of which have been remedied.  Also A few little rants a bout things mostly job applications and the passing of an acting legend Sir Christopher Lee.


So job applications, it is that time of year when graduates who do not have a job spam out applications left right and center in hopes to get a job. I am no exception, however, some of the jobs that I have applied for have been asking for a minimum of 260, 280, 300 ucas points.

Now this would be fine if my ucas points were that high but due to a not so good sixth form I went to university as a mature student. Here I have more than proven my determination at working and that I can get good grades, likely to get a high 2:1 and that I can combine that with an active social life. While at university I have undertaken archery, fencing, football, dancing( both latin and ballroom) and competed in them.

So because of this I just wish jobs would judge you on you latest qualification and achievements, because after all that is who I am/have been for the past 4+ years.


It has not all been applying for jobs I have also been trying to get Ad Sense working on my blog and having issues with ads being shown but not displayed in the layout manager. Turns out if you have an add blocker it hides the ads even in the layout manager, so after disabling it I could then remove most of the ads that were spamming my blog page.


I have been trying to seek out work in other areas such as free lancing on sites such as Elance. This site seems pretty good so far giving you choice of pay limitations and what work you take on. However I came across an issue when trying to add my address, no matter what address I entered I always got the error;

'Please enter a valid location.'

This was slightly irritating so I tweeted Elance and they responded quickly asking for user name and screen shot of the issue. I am still waiting to hear from them about a fix but until then I can work without an address.


Now to the sad news, I woke up today to hear the passing of Sir Christopher Lee at the age of 93.He was well known for his iconic acting roles as Dracula, Saruman, count Dooku the list goes on. He was in the Wicker Man, the man with the golden gun and countless other, he has had an amazing acting career. I have not seen everything he has been in and I doubt many people reading this will have too or just not realised it. I think that I am going to have to have a Christopher Lee marathon of films at some point soon.


He passed away at 8:30am on Sunday 7th June 2015 due to heart and respiratory problems. He is now out there with some of the great actors and my sympathy goes out to his family and friends.

Modded Minecraft: Ep4 Manyullyn Shuriken, Place of interest and almost d...

I finally get round to making manyullyn shurikens and exploring the place of interest for some loot. This is the first of 5 where I start to make work on creating a digital miner

Modded Minecraft: Ep3 Nether, Enchants and Machines

Check out my modded minecraft series. I go to the nether and find some cool new materials, enchant some stuff and get round to starting work on making machines

Android fun

So the past couple of weeks I have been trying to keep busy with job applications and my own projects. I have started work on creating an android game so stay tuned to see how that progress. As well as this I am also working on improving my C code and learning C#. I have had a job interview yesterday that I feel went well and got a few other people I am waiting to hear from. If any one is looking for a developer or support technician then I am the computer scientist for you :P

With the android development I had a bit of trouble getting my Z1 compact registering on my computer using android studio. This was so I could develop and run the application on my phone. This was fixed by clicking tools menu, android and enable ADB integration. At the moment just going through an on line tutorial. The tutorial I am using is this.

I have also started live streaming on twitch mostly Minecraft and Team Fortress 2, check my twitter here for when I will be live streaming. Also check out when a new video goes up on YouTube.

As well I have finally wired up my 4x4x4 LED cube to a breadboard and a ATMega328p. Which although the wiring is not fantastic it is working :).

Graduation is soon so I am going to have to make sure I am ready for that.

Done Done

Well 4 years later and I am finally finsihed with university. I have had a wonderful time at Aberystwtyth and I hope to not be away from it for too long. I am still waiting on results but hopefully I will get at least a 2:1(a 1st if I am lucky).

So what am I up to now, well, first priority is to get a job. I have spoken to a few people and got a few interviews lined up, so we shall see how they go. To try and keep on top of things I am working on a few projects, both hardware and software. As well as that I have a charity raft race this coming Sunday at Glengower in Aberystwyth so that should be good. Got a few friends coming up to take part as well.

Other things that are going on is my YouTube channel is back to being updated and you can have a look at what I have going on here feel free to like my videos or if you feel up to it even subscribe.

I should hopefully get back to updating my blog a bit more as well and might even start doing some Vlogs on YouTube so look out for them.

Memes!

The interwebs define them as;

1. An element of a culture or behavior that may be passed from one individual to another by non genetic means, esp. imitation.
2. An image, video, etc. that is passed electronically from one Internet user to another.

Whether its Nyan cat, Rick Rolling or even adding "all of the " to *insert item/topic* memes are a popular and very handy thing to know how to use. They can make you and others get a good chuckle out of them if used properly.

Idea - First you need an idea whether it be from a obscure game or film or even one you created you need to have something that's catchy, annoying and sure to be used a hell of a lot. Even bad stuff can become memes (see Rebecca Black, Friday). 

Catchy - It has to be something simple that everyone can say/do or join in on. It doesn't even need to make much sense. Repetitive things seem to work well or simple tunes. Combine the two for epic memes.

Adaptability - The meme has to be able to be used in a wide range of scenarios. It's all good having a catchy tune but if you can bring it up often it will soon die out. The "All your base are belong to us" meme from bad Zero Wing translation has been used in a lot of things. "all your chips are belong to use" etc. Another notable one is over 9000! (Google these if you have never heard them before).

Audience - What ever meme you make intentionally or not they need to be able to be viewed and enjoyed by people of all ages and categories. This will insure maximum exposure and make them travel fast. If enough people are not sharing this and showing it to their friends chances are it won't survive as a meme.

Finally Life Span - A good meme will last a while or even return after some down time. If you can create a meme that is original, interesting, catchy and can adapt to many scenarios and have the talent to manipulate that you can be very rich. A good example of this is the Numa Numa guy, Gary Brolsma, who although making himself look a bit silly is now quite well off.

 Apologies for the weird background on the text slight issue with blogger :/

People are objects

Well I am back and I have been working hard on my dissertation. I have gotten the people detected to be stored as objects after a bit of an issue. Never having done much Python before this dissertation and no object orientated Python at that, I can up on a few issues. My first was treating it like Java and putting global variables at the top of the class file. This I later found out that these were shared by all the objects, so when modifying one object global variable I modified them all. This was resolved by initializing them in the __init__ which is the first method that is run when the object is created. This involved me putting self.var_name = value. The self lets it know that that variable belongs to only that instance of the object. This link really helped me, especially 9.3.5.

The second issue was checking all the objects to see if they were a new person or the same person object and just needed location updating. This was partially resolved by checking the location of the new detections and comparing them to the location of the people objects. This will later incorporate the Kalman filter, and will target in a set direction making it a more accurate verifier.

As can be seen here the Kalman filter is not starting at the centre of the people which needs to be worked on. This will make initial tracking more accurate rather than having to wait for it to align.

The blue Xs are the start location of the Kalman filter

My next lot of tasks to do is to add in the mean shift and cam shift to improve the tracking. This will help determine if there is still a person at a location as well as helping determine if new detections are accurate. As well as this I need to track the location of people exiting the scene. If they are disappearing along the edge of the scene then it can be assumed that they wandered off screen. If they disappear on screen or are not detected then you can increase the likely hood of something such as a door existing at that location. The same can be assumed if reappearing at the same location.

Another possibility that could be happening is that there is an obstacle obscuring the view of the person for an extended period of time.