Course... approaching... end! So much still to do :/

So - the last handin is due tomorrow, then its FREEDOM! - at least until the exam diet starts in May. So much to do in that time!

The latter half of this semester has been so dominated by assignments I have not attended many lectures at all, and have a LOT of studying to do before the exams. In addition to this, after last Friday's Hack day, and chattering with Christian Heilmann ( @codepo8 on Twitter) and Rowan Murray from Yahoo uk - I have been in the process of trying to arrange flights to the Bucharest open hack - which should NOT be so complicated...

My choices are British Airways - which involves getting to London somehow then paying over £400 round trip to Bucharest and back to London, then get back home to Dundee again. The alternative is fly from Edinburgh airport with KLM for about £300 - but have a stopoff in Paris on the way there, and Amsterdam on the way back - and the whole trip totals in excess of 26 hours when its 3 hours either way... thats 20 hours sat in airports for a weekend away... MADNESS!

I am also in the process of trying to set myself up as a business for contracting and web-design purposes. This is quite a lot of work and is pretty time consuming. Liability is the scariest part of it all. I feel competent, but will someone that is paying for services that run into an issue going to be accepting or monsters? Oh well! As an aside to the business - I have been tinkering around with Google Ad-sense as I would aim to have one or two placed on the websites I design - but as far as I have seen - its relatively pointless as they are rarely ever clicked on. I do notice I have got a habit of reading them on other peoples websites and viewing anything that  interests me!

Oh, I am also twiddling my thumbs waiting for news of an Internship I had an interview for yesterday. Hopefully I am taken on as it is a pretty sweet deal, with the added bonus that because of my computing background, the degree I will be qualified for when I start as well as my electronics degree, and 9 years employed as Electronics Engineer and RMSS engineer they are looking to extend (hopefully to the full 12 weeks so I qualify to have the summer placement be graded) the placement and have me do various other items of work for them.

Hmm... much to do, back to this report I go!

-V

Hackday project: Threadbot

So our Yahoo Hack Day project finished quite well. We didn't win any of the prizes on the go - but we did get an evening of heavy drinking covered by the lads that came on over :) the "hack" is now hosted - so to access it, go >Here<.

Our hack is basically an amalgamated forum search engine. 5 programming forums are currently coded in with their Xpath queries etc in place - so when you perform a search - it searches all of these forums and tries to extract the most relevant results. It works pretty well and I see it as something I will definitely use when I wish to browse for technical or programming requests on these forums.

-V

Yahoo! Hack day

Run into some problems last week with our hack-day project that mean that it we decided to postpone completion of it until AFTER the hack day - and work on another idea, which, as it turns out - is waay easier, and also a much better project in the end we think!

New blog for it: www.yahoohack2.blogspot.com

Dundee & Yahoo! Hack Day

So today me and my groupmate from Uni created the blog for our Yahoo Hack Day project... Dont know how much info will be put into it as we go, but it may be interesting to some.

The Hack Day is an event that Yahoo travel the world doing - and at the end of this month they are coming to our University. The theme of these days is for groups to put together a "hack" - a solution to a real-world problem, or functionality that they would like to see in action.

We are given a couple of weeks to come up with an idea, develop that idea and produce a prototype for demonstrating on the day. We think we have quite a good idea, but the work involved in it may be quite extensive!

If interested, the blog can be found at: http://gojammit.blogspot.com/

Have fun!
-V