So, this year I plan to focus on my robotics and try and get back into machine learning. With my usual way of working, I thought I would fire up the Blade Server (HP C7000) and start getting some environments going etc. Server says no! Well its admin console does anyway and this is how you control all the blades. So after a week of kicking it, I decided to get something more practical (and something I could actually lift). I got a HP DL580 Gen 7 + HP StorageWorks running 16TB of space! PERFECT

Round 2: More shitting of the bed!
So everything was going great except the StorageWorks Disk Array seemed a little slow, sometimes it would do 500mb a sec, then 700k??? Then it shut down a few times and now it doesn’t even switch on 🙁 Hopefully it will be replaced this week however I had just got used to HyperV and made a few Vm’s to replace my old servers.

I think once I have a server infrastructure that works even when it’s not a full moon, I am going to start rewriting the Burf.co search engine so that NLP (Natural Language Processing) is built in at the start. I am thinking of building a search engine just for science and technology articles.

On other news, I have been checking out YOLO (You only look once) for image recognition using Tensorflow. It is super cool and I hope to use it soon with real-time video for my robots.

So, happy New Years everyone, I hope you all had a great Christmas! With the start of a new year, begins new challenges!

Last Year
So last year was a good year, new job, completed a lifelong goal to do a bodybuilding show, got a diploma and started Vibe Innovation/Burf.co Search Engine and some other things.

I didn’t however, do any robotics projects, I didn’t really build anything crazy and I didn’t release Hack24 etc.

The plans for this year
So I started writing down the usual New Years resolution (Family, Grym Training, Money saving, 10 different projects, take over the world etc) and thought, hey maybe I should just try and do less but better as that worked very well for my bodybuilding show. I focused singlely on that and succeeded. So I started thinking about all the stuff I enjoy that does not make me feel like I am doing work etc. I have a great job, so I need to also have great hobbies that are enjoyable and don’t feel like work 🙂

So I am turning my spare time back to building robots and whacky stuff but to a whole new level. Finally, I am actually getting round to designing them (as opposed to building them out of LEGO etc). I have already started using design tools like Fusion 360, I have printed out one of my own designs on my 3D printer, and tonight I did my first CNC design and fired it up on my CNC machine. I have made more progress this week than I did last year!

From the software point of view, I have already (last week) written a little Android app that is like Alexa (hot-word controlled to then stream audio to a server, then process it). I also want to get back into ROS (Robotic Operating System) so that my robot runs the industry standard. I do want to find a use for Burf but it will probably be linked to the robot somehow as a knowledge base.

I think the mindset change is that instead of thinking, will this project/thing improve me, it’s now, will this project/thing be fun.

So here is the current list of old and new projects (subject to change 🙂 )

Robots (FUN)
– Build my own custom robot (this is the big one)
– Fire up my old Lidar VEX one (for learning ROS, a small amount of work, helps above)
– Finish the VEX humanoid (I promised to do it and helps the other robotic projects)

Sites
– Burf.co : Development paused until I think of use (probably for robots) Likely to be re-written in .net core to learn for work
– Vibe Innovation: Needs a redesign and to really home in on what I want to offer (proof of concept work, AKA fun).
– Burf Development: This really should become Vibe I think, but for the moment, it’s not going anyway

Projects
– Echo : I resigned from this before Christmas because I felt it needed a whole team of devs!
– Hack24 : paused, likely dead… LibGDX just seems to cause me issues!
– Build either a Car or Traction Engine out of Meccano, why, because it would be fun!

It may still seem to some a lot (6 projects) but a few of them wouldn’t take very long to do (e.g website update, Meccano vehicle), and then clear the way for everything else which all kinda link with each other.

Let’s see if I actually stick to it 🙂

So 3 years ago, I joined O2’s innovation lab as their iOS developer. I didn’t actually do much hardcore iOS development per se, instead I researched new technology and rapidly created prototypes to demonstrate to the wider business. It was awesome fun and I learned so much on so many different fronts (how Corps works, AI/data science, VR/AR, the list goes on). As the lab developed, it’s future seemed to be focused on machine learning and big data, I decided to move in to Digital Products team to lead the Android development for O2Drive, O2’s telematics solution. Though I miss the crazy lab work, I missed doing mobile development more. My Android was a little out of date but I do enjoy a challenge and I learned a lot. I have to say that the O2Drive team was lovely and very welcoming! They really were driven to produce a great product!

So I start Reach on the 9th of April as their Application Development Lead which I am super excited about. I generally don’t change jobs very option (twice in 16 years) and don’t even have a cv! I believe they do a lot of Android and C# development but I am hoping to shake things up a bit with some Swift! It would be nice to do some iOS, Android and maybe try out cross platform solution like Xamarin or React. I believe they have used Xamarin in the past 🙂

So work has been progressing nicely on Burf.co and it’s up to 2mil + pages however, one of my aims was to only index English content. I thought by searching out for the HTML tag “lang”, it would be really easy to do! Even if there were a few different versions like en-gb or en-us, I thought it would still be an easy task. I also thought that all popular/mainstream/big sites would use this tag!

So 2 million English pages later and well…. I have over 300 different Lang=”*en*” variations! Plus major sites like Wikipedia don’t even use the tag!!

I guess it’s back to the drawing board!! I now need to use some sort of word matching algorithm to look at the page content and then work out if it’s English! A simplistic way of this could be to search for very common English words to see if they exists (the a at there etc) or not.

Update coming soon 🙂

So the good news is that Burf.co Search Engine is up and running in a rather alpha stage, the bad news it’s full of adult material so please be warned!!! There is no safe search filter on it yet!!!

My plan is to improve the search algorithm and then put a adult content blocker in place to protect people! This of course can be turned off but trust me, there is some nasty stuff out there that no one wants to see!

Technology wise, the index is just over a million pages and will heavily increase when the new blade server arrives tomorrow. It’s using MongoDB full text search for the initial results. MongoDB did seem to sh@t the bed when indexing all the words on a page, so I look at only parts of each page.

More to come soon 🙂