alex.mullr.net/blog

I was talking to Michael yesterday, and we decided (I think I got this right) that university was really pretty cool because at times we actually get a say in the way things work. Today, that was verified as I got this reply back from the college administrator:

I was all ready to write this post dripping with praise for the college, and the university and whatever, except I just got another reply explaining that we don’t have Wi-Fi because of the prohibitive cost. Really, "prohibitive cost"?

The pink is where there’s currently Wi-Fi available on campus. The blue is where I asked for it. How is that more expensive to the point where it’s not possible?

Part of me is tempted to try and do something with this (meetings, petitions, voting?) but another part of me thinks it isn’t important enough to waste time on.

I quite like random little anecdotes/stories/tales, so thought I’d share:

There’s an office here that the porters look after the keys for. If you want to get in the office when there’s nobody else around, you have to ask them for a key; they check your university card against a list of people who are authorised to borrow keys.

So here’s the kicker: anyone can give in a new key list, even if you’re not on the old one. They don’t check, they don’t care. If this was a program, it would be the most horribly flawed code.

Shell scripting is really pretty good fun. I’m nowhere near claiming to be an expert (hell, I’ve been doing it for about three weeks now), but I kind of feel like I’m getting somewhere. Here’s some stuff I’ve been messing around with, hopefully accompanied by some clear explanations that, if nothing else, will help me get my head around it a little better. I’m playing with my chat logs because I’m obsessed with stats (hopefully you’ve figured that out by now).

Redirecting output

One of the most simple things, but it bears noting down. You can redirect the output of the bash shell by using the greater than symbol (>). Let’s build it up:

Will list all the files and folders in directory.

Applies the recursive -R switch, which will list all the files and folders, as well as any files inside any folders.

Now we get on to the redirecting output bit: the > part followed by a filename will take the output and put it in the file you named. Here’s the output – not that you care, or anything…

Grep

Grep is something different: a command for searching, basically. I’m going to use it with the file that was created above in order to make it more readable.

Will search for (and print) the lines containing “hello” in the file text file “example”. Clearly this is a pretty basic use of the tool, but it works. To get a bit more complicated:

Will print all the lines in the output_list file that contain the phrase “.chatlog”, and save them to the filtered_list file.

What’s changed? The egrep just tells grep to apply the -e flag, which will make it use regular expressions for searching. I haven’t bothered trying to understand these. For me, it’s only to add the $ sign to the end of the string to indicate it should only search for that at the end of a line. Here’s the output from the second part. Much easier to read, much easier to do stats on/with…

There you go

Hopefully that helps someone understand something a little better. If I’ve got something wrong, let me know please. I might report back if I can find it in me to manipulate the text file a little bit.

Quirky lecturer thing: Maths person who pauses, says the word “right?” fairly distinctively and then continues. Lectures take five times longer because of this (technically, we get five times less stuff done because of this). I got so frustrated with it last week that I decided to put an asterisk in the margin of my notes every time he did his thing…

Conclusion: 47 times. 47 times he did this. I wanted to cry a little.

Well… I made it to the University of York, and survived Freshers’ Week; making my way through two fire alarms, a few dozen pints of Guinness and more free Dominos pizza than I care to remember.

The newsy-thing that came up today is the flyer that’s displayed to the right – UoY’s Computing Services are asking for people’s opinions on migrating the University email and calendar setup to Google Apps for Education or Microsoft’s Live@Edu. This is huge for me. Not only is it a fairly large (thousands of students) organisation considering migrating to the cloud within the next couple of years, they’re actively soliciting opinions from students. I’m so pleased to see things heading in this direction.

The URL on the flyer requires a University of York login.

Also: Oh God, I hope I don’t piss people off by posting this… ;]

Email is really important to me, especially at the moment – I’m going to be moving a fair bit over the next few months, but my email can stay in one place (the cloud, if you don’t cringe every time you hear that). Like just about every geek, I’m in love with what Google have achieved with Gmail. The simplicity, while at the same time managing to offer every feature I could need along with bucket loads of storage (all for free) is amazing.

This one is a screenshot of the webmail system implemented at York University at the moment:

Wow. While I’m sure there were reasons for using this software, I’d be curious to know what advantages it offers over MS Exchange Server or Google Apps. Let’s be honest, it’s not as pretty as either of them.

• What happens when I click on the sender? Does it start a new email addressed to them, or open the one in the inbox?
• Why does the subject truncate, leaving a whole load of blue space?
• Why isn’t the time received displayed?
• Where’s the calendaring functionality offered by both Google and Microsoft?
• Why do I only get 30MB of storage compared to Gmail’s 7 gigabytes?

One thing that really concerns me is whether I’ll be able to hang onto my email for years to come. I’m a complete hoarder, so I have this irrational urge to want to keep every message received… which is why Gmail appeals so much.

For the last four years, I’ve had all my email from my school redirected to my ‘personal’ Gmail account. Having left school, I’m over the moon that I still have 524 emails about crap like my A Level choices. You won’t understand this unless you’re stupidly crazy-obsessive like me, but just to have the ability to be able to read any of that is great. I haven’t even started at York yet and I’ve already set up redirection using their online IT account system; I don’t want to leave the university and lose four years worth of correspondence with professors and friends.

What’s the absolute worst case scenario right now? That Google goes bump, or decides it can’t be arsed to keep Gmail ticking along anymore, but something tells me that won’t happen just yet. This is an issue that’s going to become even more important than it is right now: the ability for users to extract their data from a service and move somewhere else. Someone clever already took the idea and gave it a name.

I spent a week at the University of York on a Headstart course – it was in the Computer Science department, so it was a week beginning to learn Prolog and use Alice software. The only downside i could notice was that the university seemed to see it as a week to advertise themselves to me, and i really hate advertising.

Nevertheless, it was so incredibly worth it: the student helpers (Louis, Matt, Rana) were great fun and something i’ve started to notice is that at every university i’ve been to so far, all the undergraduates are all enthusiastic about their course. They even went and set up a Facebook group to post photos and keep in touch after the week.

On Tuesday the 3rd we had a good speech from Helen Bowyer, who works in the emerging technology department at IBM – she spoke on getting information to and from mobile devices via bluetooth, as well as accessibility and technology for disabled people. The connection here is that she is was a recent graduate from York University.

The next day we had a fantastic lecture from Professor John Clarke (ex-government advisor) on security. Some memorable quotes:

• “There is no such thing as privacy anymore” – very topical given the current attitudes towards social networking websites
• “People are not your best asset, they are your worst nightmare” – the example he gave was holding open locked doors for the person behind you. This is very appropriate as it has happened at school a few times now, resulting in the theft of phones/laptops.

I just plain loved it.

I spent today at the University of Bristol – in my opinion the atmosphere was really nice, but i’m starting to get the feeling that once you’ve seen one university, they’re not radically different from that first impression. A few friends of mine that i met on campus were a little less kind about it – and even i’d say the 224 mile, 3 hour round trip probably didn’t justify the 4 hour stay.

While there, i saw this on a road sign – and of course taking pictures now is just far too easy, so i just had to:

The URL makes no sense to me at all – i mean it’s obviously something to do with an election, but that’s as far as i get.