Zapper’s Brain Dump

This was a wee talk i did on thursday for those who missed it

mashed presentation

Added this as a comment on this beeb website article

For those who think dyslexic people are lazy, I have a few stories of my own experiences to help change their mind.

The stories vary from the harmless examples such as the time I got 99% for my computing standard grade, the one mark deduced being for spelling my name wrong.

To worse examples, such as how fared badly on my 3rd year genetic algorithms exam. Having read a question, it seemed hard, build a full genetic algorithm from scratch, I endeavoured to build a fully working genetic algorithm spanning two additional pages in java complete with advanced features such as hierarchical weighing.

Unfortunately I got zero marks as the question only asked me to describe not build a genetic algorithm, with a red comment in the margin adding that next time I should read the questions more thoroughly.

I can reassure readers that building a actual genetic algorithm is far harder than just describing vaguely how one works, this story was repeated through my university time and any time I have a job interview with a written exam.

Apart from exams I often ended up doing the practicals twice, once for myself and once for someone else, with them transcribing my spoken version of the practical write up into something which would receive marks, in real life we are judged on our results not our write up of our results, this makes this a moot point.

I had additional problems with my poor memory also related to dyslexic, I ended up cheating by bringing in a calculator with formulas on it, it was because I objected to having helped many in my class study and through their practicals only to fail the final exams myself, in real life we have these great things called books full of formulas which tend to help us dyslexics make this issue a moot point.

Of the 6 dyslexic people I knew who went to university in my year, I was the only to finish not being good at my course, but by passing my practical coursework by such large margins that they would mask my poor exam results,

Dyslexic people suffer badly at university, as the only survivor of my friend’s group my advice to other dyslexics is not to bother, learn a trade or work your way up an organisation. You will shine anywhere were you talent can show, I can tell you university is not currently one of those places

The Zap

In short, being dyslexic is hard, harder than most people think, especially at the start when you haven’t proved you can do anything, and the only way to prove your ability is through doing something your inherently bad at, for those that manage to pass this stage it can leave a slightly bitter taste in one’s mouth/and a chip on the shoulder so big, it takes years of work to get rid of.

Though I stand by my comment at the end, should of been a plumber

Ant

Hurray ! channel t is away… for 5 of the hardest weeks of my life I think it’s a good result, shame my wee ai bots didn’t quite make the 3d environment but the site had to be launched

http://www.bbc.co.uk/tinthepark/2008/channelt/#/channelt/

Thanks to swfAddress, akamai, away3d, bits of sandy, and alot of as3

http://www.flickr.com/photos/27869619@N02/2602347960/

Just back from bbc mash 2008, wow what a 24 hours, it was a seriously geeky event, truely
more geeky than anything i’ve done in the 4 years at the beeb,

I spent the weekend at a boot camp for 700 geeks ran by the bbc backstage guys called Mash2008,
all the geeks had 24 hr’s to write something fun, there was some amazing stuff on show,

typical example one guy wrote a automated language dubbing service for any video stream,
tested on eastenders, dubbing it into german for much geeky fun,

fantastic experience,being the only Scottish beeb representative I tried to put in a good show, i think i held my own
against the other geeks in the competition, for my bbc super search project, I made a web scraper which successfully
crawled and extracted the metadata on all the 4000 or so root folders and index.shtmls on the bbc web site, created a
real-time client side search app for them and the iplayer metadata, made a tag cloud version, then put the tag cloud
into 3d, then made a end screen in 3d

Unfortunately during the actual presentation i only got onto the tag cloud when i ran out of time and Sylvester McCoy
(yes the ex-doctor who) dragged me off the podium with his umbrella handle…
Still great laugh good fun,

Alas here’s links and source of what was achieved, I didn’t even get a chance to thank Cris who parsed and did the proportional weighing of the tag cloud for me…

Sorry Cris, anyway here’s our 24 hour project it’s it’s full glory

My Examples and Source

not a bad bunch if i don’t say so myself, considering we only had 24 hours

BBC Screen Scraper

http://extdev.bbc.co.uk/scotland/test/bbc_super_search/screen_scraper.html

BBC Super Search

http://extdev.bbc.co.uk/scotland/test/bbc_super_search/controller_bbc_co_uk_app.html    iPlayer Super Search

http://extdev.bbc.co.uk/scotland/test/bbc_super_search/controller_iplayer_bbc_co_uk_app.html
Non-3d Tag Cloud (Takes a while to load)

http://extdev.bbc.co.uk/scotland/test/bbc_super_search/controller_tag_clouds_app.html    3d Tag Cloud (Takes a while to load, try searching ‘teenager’!)

http://extdev.bbc.co.uk/scotland/test/bbc_super_search/controller_3dtag_clouds_app.html

End Screen
http://extdev.bbc.co.uk/scotland/test/bbc_super_search/end_3d_app.html

Source

http://zapper.hodgers.com/labs/?p=73
More Photos
http://www.flickr.com/search/?w=all&q=mashed08&m=text
http://www.flickr.com/search/?w=all&q=mashed2008&m=text

Zaps Year so far by pictures

Results form the glasgow 10K are in, zap did it in 56 minutes! thats a whole 4 minutes under my goal, and only 7 minutes slower than my arch rival mr crispin, whoope!

I did it without stopping and I even managed to do a wee sprint at the end, all this despite my raging hangover [  cheers vicky  :-)  ]

Name
McKALE, Anthony

Place
1935/2539 (alot of folks didn’t finish … honest)

Chip Time
0:56:22

As anyone at bbc’s big o2 night out in london would of realised, i spent most of the time reading, reading , and even at slightly inappropriate anti-social times, reading.

‘

This wasn’t because i’ve found some conjugatious disease and am currently researching for a cure, no it’s because of Peter F. Hamilton that genuis of science fiction i discovered about 2 months ago.

‘

I can’t recommended this author enough, his humanisticly life affirming, page turning, space opera Pandora’s Star is amazing it’s also more addictive than crack, at only £7 for hours of entertainment the book’s seriously good.

‘

The book sends you 300 years into the future where death is beaten, the stars are only a train away, and machines can think. Humanity hasn’t wiped it’s self out, it’s doing great, everyone’s doing great, every thing is so happy and good. yes, lawyers and politician still suck, as does being poor, or living in the sticks but all in all humanity aint done too bad for it’s self.

‘

However… those pesky terrorists are still out there ‘blowin shit up’ and some suspious stars are acting wierd what will happen next! buy the book it’s great, the best read i’ve had in years, DONT LOOK IT UP IN WIKIPEDIA it’s full of spoilers!

a

Don’t worry too much, adobe flash has loads of vulnerabilities,

http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=1189

If you’re worried about that one, there’s a suspected buffer overflow flv load code in the vm for as2 I haven’t told anyone about as well

Basically every time when your developing for the flash player, and it unexpectedly crashes there a good chance it’s a bug, and there a slightly slimmer chance it’s exploitable,

Moral of the story, flash block/no script + Firefox, and only allow flash to run on trusted websites,

For the customers they will require a big scare on a major website, some one to hack onto msn and insert a malicious flash object on the website

Or more easily done by opening a public wireless access point and simply modifying all html page traffic passing through to have your 1px by 1px little swf

People eventually will treat flash like exe’s from some website, you wouldn’t (or at least definitely shouldn’t) download and install “adobe_cs3_warezed.exe” from www.allmycracks.com

give it time, maybe a year or two, and several thousand hacked credit card accounts later

Ant

Yo man this is for you hommie

source here of course I pity the fool it could be of help to though

link

I ran a total of 7.4 km, and you know … I feel great,

really great…

I mean my limbs hurt, my ribs hurt and i’m sporting a rather unfashionible case of facial sun burn, but i feel great

Bring on the glasgow 10k…

Ant