No longer an academic

Hum! I'm no longer an academic as of friday. Suppose I'm going to have to rework all my website blurb as well as my CV. Oh well, these things are sent to try us.

Well I have been to Durham...

Today didn't go exactly according to plan.

Tuesday's drive up to Durham was fairly uneventful and more or less spot on three and a half hours which is what it should be (Slightly surprising since the rest of the country seems to be completely gridlocked through snow, including the north east if you believe the news).

Today was a bit of a nightmare on the other hand. Started off being confronted with this:



Very pretty but makes it a bit hard to get to work but ho hum!



So off I go and an hour latter I'm at work basically packing up my desk because virtually nobody else made it in (and it needed doing at some point).

The plan was to be in Durham until Friday but fate had other plans. Got a phone call at about 3.30, Caitlin had broken her wrist at school.

So, in the car I've jumped, travelled through crazy weather (and lories) and I'm back home again.

Didn't even get my goodbye drink down the pub!

- Posted from my phone (please excuse grammar and spelling. Well more than usual anyway)

Still 250 miles from Durham

Well my original misgivings about driving to Durham today were well founded. I've had three e-mails from the powers that be basically saying if you live outside Durham give up and work from home. You can't get much more outside Durham than Cambridge I guess.

I wouldn't have had much to do today even if I had managed to drive up. Turns out that most of the rest of my group are stranded on La Palma due to bad weather shutting down the airport there.

We shall have to see what tomorrow brings.

- Posted from my phone (please excuse grammar and spelling. Well more than usual anyway)

Last week as an academic

Well my last week as an academic isn't off to a promising start. I'm down here in Cambridge, job is up there in Durham and it's started snowing.




This is probably going to make getting to work fun today :-(

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

A Few Telescopes

After Nearly a Decade in the University Sector...

We'll after nearly a decade working in the University Sector I'm about to call it a day. I'm just basically fed up of the way things are done and also getting 'possibly you're going to be made redundant' letters from HR in my pigeon hole (I get one about every three months because funding is that tight).

So, I'm going back to Cambridge to work in the high-tech sector. I reckon if Cambridge goes pear-shaped, economically speaking, there'll be nowhere left in the country to run to and we'll all be in trouble.

I could rant on about lack of investment in education, collation government policy for universities (terrible at best and I think you can trace the problem back to the last time the Tories messed with the University/Polytechnic System but that would be ranting) but I'd sound like a broken record.

Suffice to say that all those years ago when I came back to University I had a couple of aims:

1) To get a PhD because it would be fun (yes, I am that perverse).
2) Use the PhD to get a teaching job lecturing in Software Engineering.

Well, aim one achieved and after a fashion it was fun (I highly recommend it if you have the time and money).

As for aim two, well you find things out along the way when it comes to University.

My rose tinted (undergraduate shaped) notion of lecturing was that you are actually there to teach. Not quite so, at least not these days. True, as a lecturer you do have to teach undergraduate courses but in most universities that's not the main reason you're there. You're there to obtain research funding and manage research (you don't even get to do the actual research yourself!), so in effect you're middle management. That's quite apart from the terrible rates of pay you're expected to start on.

OK, I though, I'll try being a Teaching Fellow. Basically just there to teach which is what I wanted to do. Great, except that even if you can get a job doing it you're seen as a second class citizen by most departments and you're paid accordingly.

After that it was a slippery slope really. Try and bit of research for few years, get to the point where a lectureship is a really possibility and then you're back to problem number one.

So, go for a purely engineering based role in a university (great fun) but eventually self defeating because you end up doing the exact same work as in industry, for half the money with, less resources and less organisation.

Hum! On the whole, since I value my sanity and I have a wife and two children to support I think I'll go back to industry if it's all the same to you.

Well done government spending/education policy (no government in particular, just government in general)

A Long Overdue Update

At long last I'm finally getting round to posting some of the results of my trip to La Palma and the WHT (which was about two months ago now).

This is me (probably) breaking health and safety regulations and a risk assessment by not wearing an long sleeved shirt or a hat out in the sun, not to mention standing on the top of a rather unstable sandy cliff top with a 20ft drop to get this picture. Oh well.

That's GranTeCan in the background which (at the moment) is the world's largest telescope. I got to go inside last year and it is huge!

I'm rather proud of this one even if I did just take it on my iPhone and then stick the individual pictures together. On the left you can see the WHT (the larger dome) then moving right you see the Isaac Newton Telescope and finally the Jacobus Kapteyn Telescope.

The conditions were abysmal for astronomy while I was on the island. There was dust in the upper atmosphere which was being blown across from large sandstorms in Africa and there was quite a lot of high cloud (which doesn't happen that often at La Palma). Saying that, it did make for some impressive pictures when the dust cleared a bit.

This was about the third day I was on La Palma and the dust had cleared just enough so you can see across to Tenerife. This was taken on a little walk I had around part of the caldera rim near the Isaac Newton Telescope.

I also rather like this one. It's got a bit of telephoto on it to try and catch some of the detail but I don't often see cloud spilling over ridges. The last time I saw something even vaguely like this was in Oxford on Port Meadow down by the river. I'd gotten up early to walk the dogs for some reason and it was fairly cold. Mist was boiling up off the river, rising up in the air and then falling back about 20 ft from the river bank so it was forming a tunnel by the river. It didn't last for long and I wish I'd had a camera with me.

Finally the trip to the WHT

Well the time has finally come. The family summer holiday is over, the caravan is safely back in storage, and I'm now rocketing along the TF-1 towards the north airport on tenerreefe in preparation for a short inter-island hopper flight to La Palm tomorrow morning and hence up to the WHT.

What had been going on since I last blogged about this goes roughly as follows: our French counterparts from Meudon spent most of July in Durham testing the optics; there was a mad scrabble to get the software stable (which I have to say I'm not happy with my software but it's usually the way of these things); the whole lot has been packed up into 9 big boxes and shipped to La Palma.

And now the fun begins.

What you can see with a compact camera

When I first tried taking some night pictures last year with my A920 I was surprised that they worked at all to be honest. When I enhanced the pictures I noticed some bright pixels which I thought were noise to start with and it took me a few minutes of comparing pictures to work out that they were in fact stars.

Now that's about as far as I got and I haven't thought to much about it until last night. Now when I was taking my test pictures last night the clouds cleared and I could see Ursa Major poking out from behind my house so I thought I'd use that as part of the test. It came out quite clearly and looking at it on this scale you can see the main stars and that's about it.



Today I've been playing around altering exposure, contrast and levels to see what I could see and try to get rid of some of the noise. I then zoomed in to try and see how much of the noise I had gotten rid of. I happened to zoom in on the star Mizar which happens to be a naked eye optical binary and was quite surprised that it seemed to have been captured. I then messed about with the levels a bit more and found that the stars were actually in the right positions and further that I could see objects that I hadn't noticed with the naked eye.

My first attempt got this:



Which is pretty noisy but you can make stuff out on it. I then brought the contrast up quite a bit to take out most of the bright sources:



Which is probably a bit to harsh and got rid of some stuff that was actually there but did at-least get rid of the noise.

Finally I brought the contrast up again and got back some of the noise but probably some objects that are there as well, it's hard to tell.



I'm just really impressed that such a budget camera can capture stuff like this even if it isn't prefect.

Night Photography - What you can do with a digital compact camera

One of the things I'm really keen on doing while I'm out on La Palma is getting some really good night pictures of the dome and surrounding scenery at night. I went out to the WHT last year and spent a night up there and got a few reasonable snaps but I wasn't very well prepared and I wasn't entirely happy with any of them, so this time I'm doing a bit of experimenting first. My plan is to take one of my digital compact cameras and a 35mm SLR. Ideally I'd like to buy a nice new digital SLR but money won't stretch to that at the moment (although I have spent the day drooling over a Fuji S1600 super-zoom which was very reasonably priced and has up to an 8 second exposure but it's still to much!). So I'm stuck with the equipment I've already got.

Now I have a cheep and cheerful Fujifilm FinePix A920 which is fine for snaps (although the JPG compression can be a little bit harsh on very fine detail) and as luck would have it has a shutter speed with goes up to 4 seconds and which behaves very reasonably in dark conditions. This is what I had with me the last time I went out. I also have an old Nixon CoolPix 3200 which I brought back in 2004. Now at the time it was (and still is) a very capable camera and takes nice pictures. Its only drawback these days is it's pixel count but I thought I'd give it a go and compare the difference. Again it has a shutter speed which goes up to 4 seconds.

So first the CoolPix. Now the trouble with most digital compact cameras when you're trying to do this sort of thing is that you just get a bunch of programs and no manual control of anything useful like aptitude and shutter speed control. Basically you have to pick the right program mode and hope it will do what you want. So I tried it out in landscape/night mode and adjusted the resulting jpg in iPhoto. After a bit of fiddling I got this.

Now this is by no means terrible all things being considered but it doesn't seem as good as the pictures I got from the A920 last time I tried this. You can make out stars in this but when I looked at the exposure speed encoded into the JPG it came out as 1/4s which is far to fast for this. I may have another go tomorrow night.

So now onto the A920. I tried this in Night mode and Firework mode and Night mode was by far the best. It gave a 3 to 4 second exposure and with a little adjustment I managed to get quite a nice image. If you compare the two you can see that the A920 photo has far less noise and the definition on buildings is much better (and a big plus the stars are much clearer).

I took this second picture of a tree with stars and again its came out quite well. There's a little bit of noise but the CoolPix failed completely to capture any of the detail from the tree and I only got one of the bright stars visible (again this many have been down to the fast shutter speed and the modes I tried).

I thought I'd try a more conventional shot for a bit of fun (excuse the mess in my garden) and again it's come out quite nicely.

In all three cases with the A920 to manipulate the images in iPhoto 8.1.2 I've only really adjusted the 'Shadows' and 'De-Noise' settings and left it at that.

Now the drawback (apart from noise, etc). Since these images needed post processing you don't get a lot of feedback on the camera display's when you're taking the pictures. Now for me this won't be much of a problem since I'll be able to take a batch of photos then nip back into the observatory and process them and then nip back out and try again which isn't a great problem and at least I get reasonably quick feedback.

So next on the list is testing my 35mm SLR. I suspect this will be far more time consuming because I'll have to have film developed but it should be fun at least. My big dilemma now is do I go for slide file and scan slides or do I go for normal print film and hope the lab process the prints correctly.

Into the last two weeks

So perhaps I'd better explain what goes on and what this experiment is in very general terms (and in layman's terms because I'm a Software Engineer not an astronomer). This project is an experiment to test a new adaptive optics system. Now adaptive optics are a way of compensating for distortions in the earth's atmosphere so you can get clearer images from ground based telescopes. It basically works by observing a light source in the part of the sky where you want to observe your target object and by watching how that distorts you can work out how the atmosphere is changing. Once you know this you can use a deformable mirror, basically a mirror that changes shape, to compensate for these distortions and you get a clearer image. Obviously you have to make these measurements may times a second to make this work and at regular intervals, otherwise it doesn't work. Also the time taken to capture your image, calculate the shape of the mirror and the time for the mirror to change must be very short otherwise the atmosphere will have changed to something else and you have to start again. The first experiments in this used stars as the light source to work out how to change the mirror but these days we use lasers and make our own light sources by reflecting laser light off of layers of dust, etc in the atmosphere.

OK, so that's the science bit. In terms of Software Engineering what we have here is a hard real-time system. The data has to flow through the system and meet stringent timing criteria to work. The numbers we're talking about are four cameras, each taking an exposure once every 4ms (250 times a second) which then need to be measured and a shape for the mirror worked out and sent through before the next image has been taken. To do this there are a number of computers, each linked by a fibre-optic bus which allows the data to flow from one computer to another with little delay.

Now the part I'm responsible for (apart from fixing anything that seems to go wrong if nobody else is about) is telemetry. At various points in the system I take the data and then send it via a normal ethernet network to a number of sub-systems which can then use the data to make secondary calculations with slightly less stringent timing constraints. So to recap, I have the job of taking the data flowing though this high capacity fibre-optic network and transferring it to a normal style network (like the kind you'd have around your house say). This is the equivalent of sending a suitcase on a high speed train and at the same time sending an identical suitcase via horse and cart to the same destination and expecting them to arrive at the same time. Some days I have no idea how but I manage to make it work!

So in less that two weeks time we're packing all our equipment up, putting it into a container truck and sending it off to La Palma in the Canary Islands. So this is the last of the time we have left to test anything before we arrive on the Island at the end of August. To say things are hectic is an understatement.

Astronomy

It must be said I've always been a bit of a geek when it comes to science. Way back when I was about 10 this was usually confined to watching Blake's Seven or Star Trek and spouting technobabble but since I was considered a bit thick at primary school and into secondary school due to being dyslexic (which I wasn't really aware of until my early 20s) that's about as far as science went for me.

Then when I was 12 (I think) second term of year 7 anyway and heading towards a life in, if not the remedial class then at least not making the top stream and doing O Levels, the science teacher annoyed me by implying I was less that stellar in the thinking department once two often and I should pay more attention. Now this wasn't completely his fault, poor guy, because by this point I was so bored with secondary school it was untrue so I did have a tendency to sit at the trouble making tables and create havoc. The point he missed, and it was fairly easy to miss, was that I was actually taking everything in that was taught but I just couldn't be bothered to show it (ah, the joys of being a teenager!). I'd also started to read a few popular science books on space and astronomy so I was slightly ahead of the curve he was teaching to.

Anyway the upshot of this was that a few weeks later I sat his end of term test and actually bothered to try and got 93%. This caused three things to happen: 1) the science teacher had to swallow his earlier words and write me a good report card (which I still have and I think its hilarious); 2) Since word was out that I might actually have a brain I stopped hiding my geeky side from everyone (this only lead to some slight playground bullying for a bit); and 3) (and probably most importantly) it got me into the upper stream at school doing O levels (and hence A Levels and hence degree and etc)

But at the time my main science interest was Astronomy. Once the geek was out that's what I wanted to be, or at least in my frighteningly realistic view for a 13 year old, that's what I'd want to be if I was any good at maths, had any chance of going to university and wasn't destined for a blue collar job. Yes, I use to have that little confidence in myself (and probably still do).

So I fell in with the computer geeks at school (by accident really) and that lead on, eventually, to where I am now. Of course the whole Astronomy thing fell by the wayside as an impossible dream and just became a hobby at best.

That is until about 2 years ago when a software job came up in Durham Physics Dept. So in just over a month's time I'm off to La Palma to the William Hershel Telescope to help run an actual experiment. So I guess I'll have something to blog about for a bit...

One of the best quotes ever

"coffee is a way of stealing time that by rights should belong to your future self" Terry Pratchett

Today I finally Wrote a Piece of Software I Am Happy With!

It’s a rare occurrence, writing a piece of code I actually feel is (well not perfect) but good enough.

It’s not that I’m particularly over critical of my own work or that I write bad code it’s just that slight tweaks to the basic design will creep in or minor bodges to accommodate other stuff will surface which just spoil the over all shape of the thing.

This time I’ve just taken the bull by the horns, locked everyone else out of my office (metaphorically speaking), ignored deadlines and other annoyances and got on a designed and written it.

I pronounce it good!

Of course it won’t last but today I’m happy with it.

The Road Not Traveled

Every once in a while (well not very often to be honest but just occasionally) I find myself wondering about the 'road not traveled', or rather the 'road traveled then abandoned because I didn't want to sell my soul to the man!'.

Now lets be honest here: I have the most amazing life. I have a lovely wife, two fabulous children and a dream job (OK, a nerdy dream job but that's fine with me). I've done things that most people only dream of (a small piece of my software is floating around the solar system in a space probe for heaven's sake and that was before I went back to academia!). I have a modicum of academic respect and people actually cite my work occasionally...

..but in the wee small hours I still sometimes end up playing the game of measuring success against job title and salary (Slippery slope and I'm not going there again!). The only cure I've found so far is skimming through the jobs section for embedded programming jobs and seeing what I could be earning without trying to hard (usually at least 20k more that my current salary) which strangely makes me feel better.

It's not the money you see (not that some more wouldn't be a help but c'est la vie). It's just a measure to compare me against other people who I think are doing better than me in industry. Once that's done I just remember what I'd have to do (and whatever morals I'd have to compromise) to get there and things sort themselves out in my head again.

Yes, I know this makes me shallow but at least I know what makes me happy and long may it continue.