Glasgow Bus Finder

Although it's been around 3 months since we stopped work on Glasgow Bus Finder (my team project in third year), I've gotten the urge to do a bit more Android development. Aidan and myself always had greater ambitions than just a university project and I think it's time that I visit some of the features that we never had time to initially implement.

First and foremost was the ability to move the application to the SD card, as, admittedly, it has quite a high storage footprint. 3MB is not significant by any means, but I understand how limited memory can be in some devices.

Also, at the request of a friend who owns a Galaxy Tab, I should create larger graphics to ensure that the application scales up well on tablet computers.

I came across a cool game yesterday called Proun. It's a simple racing game involving brightly coloured shapes, and jazz music. That's about all a game needs, really! The cool thing? It has no fixed price; you pay what you think it deserves.

Kindles, strawberries and academia

My Kindle. And fish.

I finally got around to buying a Kindle! Already I love it; reading just seems so much easier when you don't have to hold open two pages. I've started reading David Copperfield by Charles Dickens, one of the free books in the Kindle store.

The highlight of Scottish summers, in my opinion, is our delicious strawberries. As I write this I'm tucking into a punnet. I remember picking strawberries with my grandparents when I was a boy. Naturally, the tastiest ones were the ones you cheekily ate while picking them! Alas, there are not many strawberry fields in my part of the country. It was always a nice way to spend an afternoon, picking strawberries and raspberries in the summer sunshine. Instead I'll have to settle for visiting the fruit-stall on Byres Road at lunchtime.

Work has been equally challenging and rewarding, although I have had a couple of not-so-great days. Some days I just feel unsatisfied with the amount of work I've gotten through, although maybe that's just me failing to meet my usual high standards. I think that my research skills are definitely improving. Even after 3 years of university, I don't think that I've learned much about independent research. By the end of this summer I reckon I'll have improved my research skills enough to put me into a good position for my 4th year project.

Last week I found out that I won two awards for my work in third year; the Level 3 Honours class prize, and a prize for my team project work. I'm honoured to have won both - it's a fantastic way to wrap up an otherwise stressful year. At least that hard work wasn't in vain.

Work and exam results

Looking across the River Clyde

I've been so busy with work lately that I've not had the chance to update this blog or take many photographs. The picture above is one I took around a year ago, not too far from my home. Despite the shortcomings of my town, I certainly can't complain about the view!

Last Monday I started work at university, where I'll be spending the next 11 weeks studying visual complexity. Rather than describe what that means (which, ultimately, is a goal of the research project), I'll leave it to your imagination: visual complexity concerns how "complex" an image is. Vague, I know, but what this project aims to achieve is to start trying to construct a model for assessing the visual complexity, or "expressiveness" of an image.

We'll be taking several approaches to this, trying to find a relationship between subjective ratings of complexity and some objective measurements which we hope to discover. A lot of previous work in similar areas of research has found that the filesize of a JPEG image typically indicates the complexity due to the nature of the compression algorithm. If there is more redundancy (i.e. the image maybe has a lower "expressivity"), the compressed filesize will be lower. While this seems to make sense in some regards, it'll be interesting to find out if other variables can be used to quantify visual complexity.

I find this exciting work because it's such an open area of research; I find myself reading papers from a wide variety of subjects and already I feel like I've learned a lot even after a week.

Almost all of our exam results have been published now and I'm quite pleased with my grades. My GPA is an A, which I'm pleased with; although in some subjects I feel I could've done better. In particular, I'm very proud of getting an A1 for our team project. As the highest grade possible, it feels like a fantastic reward after a tough year. Our application has had what we consider small-scale success in the Android Market, with over 1000 downloads and a 4.8/5 average user rating. All of that lost sleep and intense effort was worthwhile in the end.

Beinn Ghlas and Ben Lawers

Loch Tay

I'm absolutely exhausted after today's hike, a windy jaunt up Beinn Ghlas and Ben Lawers. At over 1200m tall, Ben Lawers is the 10th tallest mountain in Britain. Alas, there was no spectacular view from the top of either mountain. Both summits were shrouded in cloud, making it difficult to see much in either direction. It's a shame really because on a clear day, the Cairngorms can be seen in the distance. I had planned to also continue to An Stuc, but poor visibility and tiredness (mostly tiredness) made me decide to forget that idea. In retrospect, that was a great choice - I'm exhausted now after just two!

Summit of Ben Lawers

Looking up at Beinn Ghlas

Both mountains are on the north side of Loch Tay, an area I've already seen plenty of having climbed nearby Meall nan Tarmachan a year ago. I was looking forward to similar stunning views from the peaks of both mountains today, but low cloud and mist combined to limit views to just an occasional glimpse of Loch Tay below.

Despite the mistiness and a chilling, strong wind, my face and hands are both sunburned. I suffer from being Scottish; a skin condition that causes you to burn from so much as a rare flicker of sunlight. Although the weather wasn't particularly great, it was a thoroughly enjoyable walk. It was steep in places and I felt challenged at times, but that's to be expected from such tall hills. At 1103m and 1214m tall, both hills are the highest I've had the pleasure to hike.

I can't really think of a better way to spend 7 hours (although right now 7 hours of sleep is a fantastic idea), and hopefully I won't have to wait long before another adventure in the hills. Now to eat, wash and chill out with some movies and Minecraft.