Kier's Blog

I’ve been meaning to update this for a fair while now as an uncharacteristically large amount of stuff has happened. Since exams finished I’ve managed to get a job at ECS working for two of my lecturers on two separate projects, which is pretty good because it means my work is varied. Both are IC design projects though, so there is a similar vein running through them.

One of my minor duties on this dual-job is to assemble slides from about twelve people into a large presentation, with cover slides for each speaker, every Friday for a progress meeting we all have. Naturally the first Friday I just did it by hand by importing each one in turn into PowerPoint. However it is a fairly tedious job, and to paraphrase a certain member of staff: why do something by hand when I have a powerful computer under the desk?

So I began to investigate automating the process.

Turns out that Python has an IMAP module in its standard library, which isn’t too surprising I suppose as the Python standard library is enormous. After some playing I managed to write a program that logged into my university email account and downloaded the appropriate PowerPoint attachments.

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Wow, I’ve really been neglecting my website for a while. I had an amazing 1902 bullshit comments from spam bots or wankers or something. Luckily Wordpress identified all but a hundred or so as completely lacking of any worth and flagged them for manual verification. Fuck that. All 1902 pointless comments deleted by a single click of a button; thank you SQL.

An unfortunate side effect of this atrocity is that you must now register to post comments. Every cloud has a silver lining however: now you shameless, friendless people with an increased sense of self-worth can’t post plugs to your boring blog that would bring a sloth to tears.

End rant, moving on…

Finally, D4 (our big project of the year) is done and dusted! It was a pretty interesting couple of weeks, despite being filled with stress, aggrovation and late nights. We had to design a fire detection system that could accurately measure temperature, detect smoke and the presence of people from up to four sensors and display that information on a web interface. (continue reading…)