Oh Damn !!, I can’t insure my robot !!

Link

나는 엉어 할 수 없다

(R: Nanun yongo hal us opta) (E: I can’t speak english)
Found an interesting , yet ranty article about why Korean students of english say “I can’t English”.

http://efl.htmlplanet.com/interlanguage.htm#cantenglish

I guess this is something I will be hearing a lot in 2008.

I think my son, like me, is Slytherin.

For those who are Harry Potter fans my friends have an on-going discussion about which wizard house we think people may be in. Personally I think I am probably a Slytherin.

If you haven’t read the books or seen the movies there are 4 houses at the Hogwarts school of magic. They are well described at this site http://www.injenn.net/~tania/slytherin.html

I have often wondered about my son and what personality traits he would have. Then yesterday it happened. This is how the conversation went when we were having a discussion about Christmas. Remember my son has just turned 3.

My Son: “Dad.. I hope all the other kids are naughty at Christmas”
Me: “Mmmm… Why?”
My Son: “because I will be a good boy and then I will get all of their presents”.

No doubt about it pure Slytherin.. and some ingenious thinking for a 3 year old (IMHO).

What house do you think you are in ??

Yourtimesheets.com goes live

I have been a little slack with the blogging lately because for the last couple of weeks I have been using my spare time to develop a new website. Today I released http://www.yourtimesheets.com/ into the wild. It is basically a user configurable single web page timesheet application. It supports “self replication” which basically means that the .html file has the capability of copying itself.

The websites’ configuration page is used to do the initial configuration and then the site generates a single htm file containing all of the code and the configuration data for download. The user then saves this generated file to their pc.

This file contains all of the javascript logic to run the timesheet and also the code to copy itself. This allows this single htm file to provide functions like “create next timesheet” which takes a copy of the existing timesheet and manipulates the data a little so the copy contains the next date in series.

Anyway check it out.

Mobiles and Pools don’t mix.

Today my pool was making weird noises so I went out to have a look. I had my mobile in my top pocket. As I leaned over to check out the filter box I heard a “plop”, and you guessed it my Motorola V3 went for a swim. As of this morning it is dead. I am hoping by some miracle that when I get home tonight it will have miracously fixed itself. But I am doubtful.

No 1. on the top thanks

Yesterday I got my first No 1 razor cut. I usually get a No 2. It is a scary preview of my life ahead as the slow approach of balding takes hold. I would love to post a picture of my sleek skull, but my phone ( with camera ) went for a swim.

Timesheet Single Page application

(For reference a “single page application” or SPA is a fully functioning web application contained in a single html file )

In a previous post I talked about creating a SPA timesheet(this is an based on one of the commercial timesheeting applications I have written). I have now completed a test version of this and it is available here. It will work in both firefox and Internet Explorer.

You need to right click on the link and select “save target as” , or “save as..” and then save the file to a local drive ( Make sure you don't use Save from the file menu as it will mangle the file). Once it is saved you can then open it with a browser window.

Basically this is a full functioning timesheet that can self-replicate and support some nice business logic. It also supports many preferences so it can be programmed for flexible business rules.

The next stage of this will be to create a site where users can login set their prefences and then download a customised version of this file with all there preferences set.



This preference data will then persist across all create timesheets and controls the logic of how the timesheet looks and performs for the user. These preferences are things like:

1 ) Name, employee number, text info about where they work etc
2 ) Whether they have Flexible/Bank hours, Toil and/or Overtime
3 ) There hours required for each day for a 4 week work cycle.
4 ) The date they want to start
5 ) The types of leave they are allowed to take.
6 ) The date format they want to use DDMMYYYY or MMDDYYYY.

With these preferences the web site will generate a html file that the user can download (just like the file above ). The user can then use this file to create new timesheets ( every week ) without the need to return to the website unless they need to change any of their preferences.

The great part about this system is that it is simple to deliver applications this way and you can write some pretty nice application where the users only require a browser and as all of the data and logic is self-contained you don’t even need to be on-line to use it. It also can be multi-OS if written correctly.

Extending these application to allow them to interact outside the container of the web page is possible by using AJAX.

Now I just need to think of another idea of how this can be used for another type of application.

And in more amusing search engine news..

I'm No. 4 at google.com if you type in "Korean Farting Stuffed doll". Now thats cool !! :-)

It's really quite interesting to see how people find you...

Korean Google

It would seem that for some reason suddenly google korea has recognised my site. I am now getting heaps of hits on my blog from korea. For instance I seem to be ranked 48th for a search on
무궁화꽃 (rose of sharon flower).

Not sure why it has taken until recently for this to happen.. I feel a bit sorry for the non-english speaking koreans who stumble across my site.

Once again the world is a small place

I think I know a total of 7 people who live in japan. One of them is my father, the other is my good friend Taxi. Well it turns out that my father now works in exactly the same building (view in googlemaps) that Taxi’s dad used to in Yokohama.

And in other news from japan my fathers next door neighbours daughter is this girl. this girl

Who seems to be a rising star in Japan. Although Taxi hadn’t heard of her but I assume that is because rocket scientest are not her target demographic :-)

Machine-gun wielding Korean Robot

The DMZ looks like it just got a little more crazy. It seems that Samsung is developing a human tracking killer robot to replace south korean troops on the DMZ

Someone needs to quickly translated Terminator into Korean, so the Samsung engineers can learn about Skynet. :-)

This page has a video of it in action.

맛동산 ??

Ok I need help from my Korean friends with this one. I got a packet of peanut flavoured korean chips yesterday and they are called 맛동산. There is also a korean restaurant in Brisbane called this. I believe it is a chain restaurant http://matdongsan.co.kr/

I have had a look in my dictionary and on the net and as far as I can tell it either means “Taste of the hill” 맛 – taste 동산- hill ( near a village ) or tasty personal items-동산. It may in fact be neither of these and mean something completely different.

도와주세요 !!

Looking at doing some extra studies.

I have been thinking about do my Masters in I.T. lately, one of my good friends is a lecturer at the local university and has informed me that there is a possiblity of doing a pure research Masters by grant, so no cost to me.

I now have to think about what I would like to dedicate a couple of years of my life to, this is quite a difficult decision as in some streams of IT something 2-3 years old is considered out of date, so a Masters you start today in a leading edge topic is old and boring by the time you complete it.

At the top of my list is probably something in the area of swarm-bots but with larger footprint robots. Something like the mini-sapien power by a pocket pc.


This is a very interesting area of research for me because it covers a wide number of topics that take my interest. These are:

• Synthesis of animal behaviours with machines.
• Mobile computing
• Robotics
• Machine learning
• Vision Systems
• Networking
• Distrubuted computing

Oh and it also means that I can get to play robot soccer.

Anyway, I need to do some more research and thinking about this before determining what exactly I want to do.

Reef Trip

Went out to John Brewer reef on the weekend with Sunsea Cruises it was brilliant. Did lots of snorkelling and saw some great fish. Lots of big parrot fish, Nemo , Dori and even saw a sea turtle.

We we told that it was the best day for visibility in about 3 months, and I can believe it , in some places (under the boat ) it was 20 metres deep and you could easily see the bottom. I have to say however that compared to how the reef used to be 15-20 years ago it is now a complete mess. Coral bleaching , sea temperature rises and the crown of thorns starfish have all taken their toll. The tour operators gave us a gloomy prediction that the reef would probably me gone in 10-20 years, so if you want to see what is left of it you had better get out there soon.

Lastest masterpiece.

My son turned 3 recently so he has moved on to a higher level of art .. He informs me that this one is titled “A Poo Poo with one leg and a belly button”.

Enhanced SMTPClient Class

I have been working on two areas of e-mail lately with .net. These are:

• Sending invitations from .net so that outlook with except them properly.
• Sending in-line MIME images

Both of these things require manipulation of the Content-Type headers which the standard system.net.mail.smtpclient does not support so I have written my own class to handle these two scenarios. The invitations are sent using a vcalendar class.

The class is CorpSMTPMailer (download here) and has two public methods of the class are

public void Sendicalinvite(string frommail, string[] tomail, DateTime EventStart, DateTime EventEnd, string Summary, string Location, string Organizer, string Description, string URL, bool Async)

public void SendMimeInLineMessage(string frommail, string[] tomail, string subject,string HTMLBody,string[] InLineAttachFiles,string[] InLineAttHTMLTokens,bool Async)

Both methods have an Async parameter, this determines where the functions are run in the current thread or a new thread is created to actually do the mail delivery. I haven’t included any feedback mechanism for error trapping as I don’t require it so if you need some them you will need to add it yourself.

The only thing to note is that the SendMimeInLineMessage function requires the HTMLBody to contain the tokens that are specified in the InLineAttTMLTokens Array so it knows where to place the content ids of the files specified in the InLineAttachFiles Array.

So for instance your code might look something like this. ( Please note I have changed the greater then and less than signs to [ ] in this code snippet as the blogger editor refused to render them properly )

List[string] MesgAttach = new List[string]();
List[string] tokens = new List[string]();

string body = "[div style=\"font-family:Arial\"]First picture attachment:[br /][br /][img src=\"@@IMAGE1@@\"][br /][br /]Second picture[br /][br /][img src=\"@@IMAGE2@@\"][br /][br /][/div]";

MesgAttach.Add(@"C:\pics\pic1.jpg");
MesgAttach.Add(@"C:\pics\pic2.jpg");
tokens.Add("@@IMAGE1@@");
tokens.Add("@@IMAGE2@@");

Seaworld

It has been a while since my last post. I was in Brisbane for work for a week, and then went to the Gold Coast for the weekend. Took the opportunity to visit Seaworld, it turns out they have a Korean guide book, so I took the opportunity to see how I would go if the theme park was Korean. Learned that the “polar bear” is the “north pole bear”. 복극곰 makes sense. My son loved the animals especially the dolphins and the polar bears.