Entries Tagged 'Computers' ↓

Here is my personal statement for you to look/ jeer at:

There’s a fine line between game freak and computer geek, and I think I may be standing on it. I first discovered Visual Basic on a web forum based around an online game called Neopets, and taught myself using online tutorials. I made programs which utilised the winsock control to make playing the game much easier, but it quickly led to a race to be the best, as it was very competitive amongst the programmers to have the most efficient programs. I then started programming for myself and for friends (and even once for a teacher) for other uses, ranging from seeing if a website is available (e.g. to get tickets to a Led Zeppelin concert) to calculating the lowest common multiple of two numbers (thank you, Euclid!). More recently, I started looking at PHP and CSS in addition to HTML to increase my knowledge of web design, and I started a website to test out my coding, and a blog on events in my life.

In the future, I hope to be a creative software engineer, but even if I don’t, the ability to program efficiently will be extremely useful, as almost all fields of work can benefit from some form of programming. This is a fact that was proven to me during my various work experiences over the past few summers: at Royal Bank of Canada, I saw they wrote specific programs when they needed them for tasks like searching their enormous database of clients and complex products; at Citibank, I saw how they could have used a programmer on their team in order to make the complex data and product structures in spreadsheets much faster to access and manipulate. This past summer in India, I visited my uncle’s car parts factory, which I discovered still uses Visual Basic for all of their systems. However, they had a programmer on site to convert it to the new .NET framework. I spent time with him, and I was impressed with the complexity of the VB programming in use. I also volunteered at a rural development NGO called Chirag, where I lived with villagers, helped in the local primary school and planted grass as fodder for the livestock. In order to improve my programming knowledge, during the long journeys to and within India I read some of Donald Knuth’s famous ‘The Art of Computer Programming’ which I found both extremely interesting and at times confusing. It did however reinforce my thirst to learn more. I am doing computing as an A level to help me understand better how to apply the subject to real-life situations (e.g. I programmed a simulation of a petrol pump system for my AS coursework and am writing a program to gather and search Tweets from the social networking website Twitter).

I am president of the school computer, magic and bridge societies, and captain of the bridge team. In the computer society, we discuss technological advancements and test out various projects on the computers we assembled specifically for that purpose. Some of us entered a competition to make a 2 minute video about computer science and won a trip to the Google headquarters in London. In the magic Society, we learn tricks and organise shows at local primary schools. In bridge club we strive to improve our bridge skills and occasionally play against nearby schools. I sing in the Concert Choir and am also on the Charities Committee. My main sporting interests are fencing, cricket and aikido, and I am currently in the middle of completing the Duke of Edinburgh gold award. In order to get a taste of university Computer Science, I attended Computer Science taster courses at Imperial College and Royal Holloway, where I benefited from very interesting lectures on topics such as artificial intelligence, game theory and the travelling salesman problem. I also had the privilege of visiting Princeton University where I met Brian Kernighan, famous co-author of ‘The C Programming Language’. These lectures and meeting this great professor further strengthened my conviction that without a doubt Computer Science is what I want to study.

I got an ABB offer from Edinburgh today which was quite pleasing after having lost terribly to SPGS at bridge. The course is a 4 year BEng in Computer Science, which makes it my last resort (all of my other choices have MEng 4 year courses).  I’ve been working on coding my homepage, and with some help from Alex, I’ve managed to get it to work as I like. Currently it doesn’t work properly in IE, but I hate IE and I probably wouldn’t tell anyone who uses it my website anyway.

I have my Imperial interview on Wednesday. I think I’ll take some of Douglas Adam’s very good advice. DON’T PANIC.

If you have the time, could you please answer this quick (or not?) survey that I need filled out by Twitter users for my computing project. Just respond in the comments. Thanks.

1. Would it be useful to be able to search all of the Tweets that anyone has ever made (including private feeds of people you are following)?

2. Would it be useful to be able to search Tweets by date posted?

3. Would it be useful to be able to download all Tweets of anyone who you can view the feed of?

4. Assuming the answer to 3. is a yes, would you prefer the downloaded file to be one that is easily understandable in a spreadsheet software package, or that can be read by the program that is being made and searched from within that?

5. Would you expect a program such as this to run quickly or would you allow for it to be quite slow (given that the current programs which do similar things can take more than 10 minutes to run)?

6. Would a Twitter login that is integrated into the program be better than a browser window opening within the program (which would show the user that the information is (more likely to be) secure?

7. Any suggestions?

I’ve decided to start blogging updates on my computing A2 project. Currently I’m in the planning stage, though I’ll probably document my progress through the whole project. I should have my analysis done by half term (17/10/08). Need to come up with some project ideas by tomorrow for RAB, so any comments are very welcome. Here are the ideas I have so far:

Twitter Archiver

A program which downloads tweets from an inputted Twitter user. It gets all Tweets ever made by the person and saves it to a file which can be viewed and modified in any spreadsheet software, which would eliminate the old problem of Tweets not being searchable, and would let you do graphs to show the history of various people. It would be able to collect tweets from all people you are following and collate them all in a single file. This would get around the problem that is normally faced which is that you can only look at the last 40 pages of tweets. It would not use the Twitter API so that it is not restricted by the API limits (70 queries per hour or something similar), although this would make it harder to code and slightly slower, the benefits outweigh the small loss in speed. I would probably use Winsock or INET to get the information. If a user’s updates are protected then it will ask for you to log in to Twitter, and if then you aren’t following them, then it would come up with an error saying so. It may also be able to archive all direct messages (though this function is fairly useless). Will be able to save login info (locally, of course ;)) so that you don’t have to type it in every time you use the program. Potential users are pretty much any Twitter users and I could probably interview @farhan, @dolphonia or if needs be @preoccupations if he isn’t too busy, and I could do a survey over Twitter. Hurrah for social networking! This is actually something which was requested before at least once, and made by the Twitter team but now no longer exists (sadly). Another example of a similar program is this Wordpress plugin which does almost the same thing but saves the data to a database instead of a manipulable (is that a word?) file, and is only usable as a Wordpress plugin and not a standalone program. Another example is this, but it only takes 250 tweets (silly API, why do people even bother?) and only downloads your tweets, and doesn’t let you download those of anyone else. 

If anyone can think of any other useful functions, please Twitter them to me (@vpjayant). 

Bridge Bidding Assistant

This one was more complicated, but would be really useful if I managed to succeed. There are several possibilities for a program; a program in which you input a hand and it suggests what to big, a program which tests your bidding skills by showing you hands and asking you what you would bid. It would be limited by the fact that there are thousands of different conventions to choose from, and so would either have a huge database of them (difficult to implement) or it would be limited to only a common few. It would be based on the ACOL bidding system, and for users I could look to members of Bridge Club and some of the bridge playing teachers in the school such as @RAB. It would use a simple input method of either a drop-down list of card magnitude and then another for suit, or a code based one (E.g. 2C for the 2 of clubs, KH for the king of hearts). For the first idea, you would input your hand using that method, it would count your points, check whether it is balanced or not and then suggest an opening bid. However, the rebid will be considerable more complicated (see above) and so I don’t know how in depth the rebids will be able to get until I begin the design (if I choose to do this project). For the second idea, it would simply be a matter of having it generate a hand and ask you questions about it (”how many points does this hand have?”, “If your partner bid XX, what would you respond?”, “What would you open with with this hand?”). If you get the answer right, it will take you to the next question, but if you get it wrong, it will explain why you got it wrong. 

Having complained for the past year about learning Visual Basic at school, an ancient language, I was rather surprised when I went to my uncle’s factory today and found that every system was programmed in Visual Basic. The checks, datalogging, even the servers were all done in Visual Basic.

It was really interesting, I saw some of the production lines for the EGRs, and some of the electrical stuff including a clock and an engine controller. They used a CAD program called Pro/ENGINEER, which was very similar to Pro/DESKTOP, which we are used to at school, (not surprising since they are made by the same people) but significantly more powerful.

The monsoon is crazy; it’s permanently wet outside, and getting around places is very messy. It’s causing traffic to get really bad, and so my trip up to Sitla is unfortunately delayed until Thursday.

Oh. I forgot to mention, I’m going to be working with an NGO called CHIRAG in the north of India for a few weeks. It should be a very interesting experience.

This post has a lot of links in it. Here’s the last one: photos of the factory.

After my previous mishap, I managed to get Ubuntu installed. The customizability (is that a word?) of it is amazing, I love it. The only thing I miss is iTunes, and I’m just in the middle of installing SongBird right now which should fill that need. All in all, epic.

Monsoon is crazy. Was out in the rain for 10 seconds and got drenched.

Finished with SongBird. Frankly, it looks terrible. Need to get some music before I can justify my opinion, but things aren’t looking good.

How sad. While attempting to install Ubuntu, I managed to completely wipe (or possible destroy) my hard drive. It now believes that it is 5.8GB in size, and has no OS. I really wish I had backed up watbot (the most complicated program I have written to date). I’m currently downloading Ubuntu again on Nayantara’s computer, hoping the disk drive works so that I can bring my laptop back to life.

Goodbye, watbot.

Farhan told me to write a 4chan bot. I think he may have been joking, but I took his advice and started on it. Sadly the only language that I am good at is Visual Basic, so I’m writing it in that. Still reading The Art of Computer Programming, which is awesome.

Currently the program does the following:

• Loads page 1 of /b/ and then gets the number of every thread.
• Gets the first post of every thread and lets you view them by clicking one of the thread numbers in a listbox (there’s probably a better way to do this but I haven’t found it/ am too lazy to do it).
• Lets you search all of the loaded posts.
• Option to download all images in the first post of each thread.
• Refreshes its post database every 60 seconds.
• Displays number of replies to thread.
• Lets you post in whichever thread you choose.
• Has a button which enables the “bot” which basicaly just searches the first posts of the threads for any of a set of copypastas which I have saved within the program. It then responds to these threads with “wat”.

I know searching for something and then posting “wat” isn’t exactly a bot, but this is the basics. I’m going to try to make it as intelligent as I can in Visual Basic. Hopefully when I go to university I’ll learn how to do proper things, and then just write the ultimate fail program

This is fairly belated but nothing of particular interest has happened over the past few days so I haven’t had anything to write about. Enough small, insignificant things have happened that I can collate them all into one post. So here it is:

Arrived in India on Sunday (6th), spent some time with Nani and Nana then went to sleep for a while. Viveka called and so I went over to Masi’s. Met her friends. The IB results came out that evening, everyone was sorely disappointed; nobody managed to get their predicted grades. Something must have gone wrong somewhere. Viveka is now going to Smith, which, frankly, is much better fr her than Cambridge or LSE. We were planning to go to Agra the next day, but it never happened because Wimbledon was on, so everyone slept late/ was ill.

Yesterday we picked up Ushashi from the airport. Viveka was very impatient. Viveka had to stay here to get her visa instead of going to Sitla, so Ushashi and I stayed here, so we’re going on Saturday. I hope we have internet there.

Downloaded Ubuntu last night; but no way to install it (yet), installed a photo gallery because I hate Facebook and Fickr. Unfortunately it has a 2MB limit on images, so I’ll have to upload them via ftp.

Viveka isn’t talking to me. Oh well.