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I'm a current student at the University of Queensland studying Engineering with a major in software. This degree is 4 years in duration.

UQ also offers an Information Technology degree which is 3 years in duration.

Whats the major difference? Engineering students have to do math, engineering principles and diverse team project subjects.

Engineering students must complete 2 team project subjects (aptly named Team Project 1 and Team Project 2) which each last a semester as well as a Thesis which lasts 2 semesters. The first team project I did was to construct a PC based oscilloscope (hardware in a wood book with a coax input for voltage and an rs-232 connection to a PC) and the second was an reminder keyring (programmable using flashes of light on a PC screen. Also needed to provide the software to set alarms at certain times). Both projects were completed between 4 students comprising of 2 software engineers, an electrical engineer and a computer systems engineer.

I have chosen to and am currently completing my thesis through the CEED project. CEED list projects on behalf of companies to be completed by students. Once a project is completed and documented appropriately the student can then submit the work as their thesis project. The company pays CEED for this service and retains all IP rights to the work. CEED then passes on a % of this money to student for their work.

This model seems to work well enough. My only criticism is the allocation of students to groups in team project. It isn't a rare occurrence that you get teamed with other students that either struggle to talk English or don't have a solid understanding of their discipline, thus making the completion of the projects rather difficult. But, only 50% of the subjects marks are on the final product while the other 50% is on documentation and planning (see the related link). I think this is a good enough compensation for group selection.

Coincidently, students of both IT and Software Engineering are required to complete 3 subjects related to the design and development strategies of software. See the course guided here (PDF).

What a bunch of political bullshit. For fuck sake people, it's a Linux distribution, not the United Nations. During the many years I spent at the University of Queensland I ran into Anthony Towns a bunch of times. Back then he was a fun loving geek, and I doubt much has changed. We both attended HUMBUG semi-regularly, and had a few laughs. The politics at HUMBUG were annoying too. For a bunch of geeks sitting in a lecture theatre playing around with Linux and ignoring whoever was giving a "presentation" that month, there was a heck of a lot bureaucracy, what with voting held annually for president, vice-president, treasurer, secretary and librarian. There's such a thing as too much organisation. Especially when people lose sight of the big picture and get bogged down in administrivity.

oh look... paint drying...

You look like an ideal candidate.
We are looking for a person to oversee the Pitch Drop experiment.

You may also be interested in this - I made a slight error in my first posting. We *can* currently implement quantum algorithms, through simulators such as this one for Matlab: http://www.physics.uq.edu.au/people/rohde/blog/?pa ge_id=20

However, a famous physicist/mathematician (whose name escapes me right now) proved that to emulate a quantum computer on a digital one will always require exponential complexity. So the benefit of speed is lost, but for the sake of curiosity and development, implementations of quantum algorithms can, at present, be tested. What we need now is the hardware. 8)

Well, there is the MicroBlaze/uCLinux project, which runs Linux on a MicroBlaze CPU in FPGA. There's discussion in their group of running signal processing apps, then moving the SW to DSPs on pins, and revising the SW to merely signal the pins. I'm watching them for development of a generic codec facility configurable to specific codecs on demand.

First application for Mach 7+ won't be passenger travel, but military (if not already used) where it will not only be fast, but louder than heck - after all Jet Noise is the Sound of Freedom! ;-)

First application for Mach 7+ won't be passenger travel, but military (if not already used) where it will not only be fast, but louder than heck - after all Jet Noise is the Sound of Freedom! ;-)

A colleague of mine is the project manager for the HyShot trial. It is being conducted at the Australian Defence Force's Woomera test and evaluation range and shooting north-west across the Australian desert.

Woomera and nearby areas has a long history of trials; several British designed rockets were trialled there, and several satellites were launched to earth orbit. Maralinga was one Australian site of British atom bomb tests in the late '40s and '50s.

HyShot is intended to be recovered, but it is a large area in which it might land. Watch this space!

To quote from a SpaceDaily article at the time of the last test:

The Hyshot Consortium partners include Astrotech Space Operations, DTI and GASL, QinetiQ, NASA Langley Research Center, Seoul National University, the DLR (German Aerospace Center), NAL (National Aerospace lab. Japan), AFRL (Air Force Research Laboratory, USA), Australian Space Research Institute (ASRI), Institute of Engineers Australia (IEAust), UniQuest and the Australian Department of Defence. Australian firms, Alesi Technologies, NQEA, AECA, Luxfer Australia and Jet Air Cargo, and BAE Systems Australia are also involved.

So, next time the BBC reports on something that's happening outside America, I hope somebody will do some research before they base the headline on the leading paragraphs.

Note: I'm a UQ past student (had Allan Paull as a first year subject coordinator) and employee, so I'm not short on local perspective/bias here.

Related to this (but still in the early research phase) is the idea of reconfigurable computing.
[...]
still in the research phase, but interesting to think about.

It's interesting for more than just thought -- it's interesting to play with right now. Unfortunately, most of the tools for FPGA development are oriented primarily toward use by engineers far more than programmers. The hardware could use a bit of extra help too, at least IMO -- one thing I've suggested to Xilinx is some sort of thermal monitoring capability built into the chip. This probably doesn't make a lot of sense on the small, low-end FPGAs (E.g. Spartans) or CPLDs, but it'd add only a trivial percentage to the cost of a high-end Virtex part.

As I noted above, however, the tools are the big problem. Reconfigurable Computing nearly requires dynamic partial reconfiguration of the device (i.e. reprogramming some parts of the circuitry while leaving other parts intact). Xilinx is about the only vendor that even claims to support that, but while the hardware to do it is there, the software support in their toolkit is _quite_ lacking (in fact, there's thread on comp.arch.fpga that's been talking about this (warning -- it gets just a bit heated at times...). Right now, they're adding support via their PlanAhead tool, which is a rather expensive add-on to ISE (their usual toolkit). Worse, it's something you can't plan on distributing for use by even a fairly technically adept end-user.

It's fun to play with, but not really ready for prime time yet -- and neither Altera nor Xilinx (who make the vast majority of FPGAs sold) _seems_ to be particularly interested in supporting either. It'll be interesting to see what happens -- but I'm not going to hold my breath for much to happen either. Reconfigurable computing has been a "next big thing" for 10 years or so now, and I'm not entirely sure how soon that's going to change.

If you want to do some experimenting with it, one interesting possibility is the RaggedStone 1 board from Enterpoint Ltd. -- a 400,000 gate FPGA with a PCI connector. You have to add a PCI core to make it talk to your computer, but opencores.org has a free one that works with it. And to answer the inevitable next question, yes, it does run (under) Linux. If you wanted to get crazy about it, you could even run a copy of ucLinux on the board as well (though this would be a bit pointless -- the main point of reconfigurable computing is to use reconfigurable hardware to implement things that are hard to do well in software).

Oh hell yes it can, it can be entirely re-compiled into C, but it may not look exactly as it did before it met the compiler.

The compiler simply is a translator that turns a human-parsable programming language into a machine parsable instruction code. That being said, a translation in the other direction is just as easy.

However, compilers these days are more advanced than the golden old days of computing, and will do crazy things to optimize code (unrolling loops, replacing ineffecient operations with more effecient ones [i = i + 1; -> i++;]). Some of these operatons can't be reliably undone (especially the case with inline functions and macros, because often the code compiler will apply the inline, and then realize there's a way to make it more effecient, thus making the code slightly different than the inline function and causing it to not be reversable), at least without a little human interaction.

And there are open source code decompilers available for a number of languages (for C, as an example, there's DCC. Just don't go decompiling Windows and copying and pasting the code back into ReactOS ;)

There's also the chance to write apps to a Linux API on an FPGA. I'd love to see one of those MicroBlaze/uCLinux chips interfaced directly with one of these TI DSP/MVLinux chips, running multiprocessors. You can even put multiple MB/uCL instances on a single FPGA, with gates to spare. Which are gates that can be used to solve multiproc problems in ways unavailable to fixed-config chips like x86, PPC, or even the TI DSP. How about a Beowulf cluster in gates of these...

Assuming this is you I think it might be a physical impossibility to knock-you-up in the classic sense of the phrase - unless of course you are the yellow one in the picture.

Since alcohol has a lower viscosity than water I wonder how fast a human swimmer could swim in vat of alcohol. Any takers? Now that I got thinking about this if you had an ideal fluid with no viscosity could you swim at all?

Actually this research should team up with the Australian and see how fast a swimmer could swim in a tub of congealed black tar

And have done. I was involved with the people who managed to push through the 1999 Copyright Amendment (Computer Programs) Act which makes it legal to reverse engineer software for interoperability, security analysis, to correct errors or just to learn how it works. It took the support of a dedicated team of lawyers and academics but, frankly, the law got changed simply because the people who were voting on it didn't really understand what we were asking for and didn't see the harm in giving it to us. Which really boils down to the lobbyists of proprietary software (like the BSA) not being nearly as organised as the lobbyists of the music industry.

Check out http://www.physics.uq.edu.au/physics_museum/pitchd rop.shtml for a demo of a high viscosity liquid.

I tried the illusion they referenced at http://www.uq.edu.au/nuq/jack/bonneh.html and my "self reported" results were on par with the monks. If I blink, I lose the focus and see the other 2 dots, but I can stave off the other two as long as I can hold off blinking. Anyone else?

OK, so it's not on the Cell architecture, but rather an FPGA-based softCPU, but certainly the problem of integrating asymmetric coprocessing engines into the Linux architecture has been thought about before.

Cool stuff nonetheless.

Although using FPGAs for reconfigurable computing applications still has a number of drawbacks, utilizing FPGAs for embedded applications is some really cool stuff.

For example, an entire system can be dynamically built right into the FPGA -- including processor, OPB, memory buses, and any other devices such as interrupt controllers, timers, etc. Aside from RAM and Flash, you almost have an entire embedded system built right into a chip.

Earlier this spring I had the opportunity to work on a project that required this very embedded setup. Using the MicroBlaze soft-processor from Xilinx built into the Spartan3 FPGA and only 8MB of SDRAM, I got uCLinux running -- completely tailored to my hardware setup!

I can't tell you how much time and money would have been wasted trying to design and fabricate the same setup on a PCB.

this reason you dont see HDTV tutorials is because the setup is EXACTLY the same, however here is a HDTV card w/ linux drivers http://www.itee.uq.edu.au/~chrisp/Linux-DVB/DVICO/

but the HDTV tuner cards cost a lot more so "reviewer's" usually dont spring for them for the project of the month.

I am currently running in HDTV mode @ 720p. Cant seem to get 1080i currently (i think my 1080i mode line is wrong) however for 1080i you need a athlon 3000+ (or equiv) and a semi modern Nvidia card to have it played back full screen.

What you want is "Pipe Dream" http://innovexpo.itee.uq.edu.au/2003/exhibits/s358 144/, a final year engineering project.

:-)

Leaning towards this way too. I'm not an admin so I don't know for sure but the once vulnerable Moss & Lichen systems used for the SunRay labs have now been replaced by Argave which is also the students mail server (POP3/IMAP, not SMTP).

It's still Solaris 10 though, but in the meantime they've setup a Fedora Core 2 image as an installable & deployable option on the [typically Windows based] Dell machines. Dell machines now account for about 10 of the 12 or so computer labs at GP South

Interesting developments. :)

One possibility is to use melanin - the skin pigment that gives our skins colour. Being in Australia, of course, researching melanin is of significant interest to us! It's yet another example of biology helping to make really cool physics - more details are available on UQ's physics blog.

guess nobody bothered to g**gle it: New kernel for Darwin:

Apple's Darwin operating system is the open source base for Mac OS X. The underlying kernel is based on Mach. This project requires implementing a replacement for Mach based on the L4ka Pistachio kernel. Since ports of both exist on similar platforms (IA32 and PPC), most of this project will consist of building an emulation layer for Pistachio which can provide system call interfaces to match those provided by the existing kernel. In addition to implementation and testing, performance evaluation will be an important aspect of this project. Since part of the project is already done and the whole thing is quite large, an important aspect wiill be defining a doable subset, in conjuction with anyone doing part of it for BE. Starting early is advised on this project so no late applications will be considered.

http://www.uq.edu.au/ben/Cheapo_Fridge_Kiosk.jpg This cost $120 for the refridgerator and $80 for the PC h/ware. It is now the most used terminal in the house. * NOTE the cheap Russian sweets wrapper collection on the freezer panel adds flair and colour :)

If you really want to build your own, why not start from a team with open-source software or published robot designs?

RoboRoos - Currently the software release seems to be down, but a friendly email to them would probably fix it.
CMDragons - My team (whee shameless plug). Our complete 2002 software is available (runs on Debian). RedZone robotics is currently selling a robot based on our design.
RoboRoos - These guys have done very well the last couple of years, and have a fair amount of information online as well.

In Australia, colleges are closer to halls of residence - they don't offer any courses of study at all. They do offer tutorials and other assistance for courses offered at university, however.

The college that you linked to is located within the University of Sydney, and I'd be somewhat surprised if they didn't offer a range of engineering degrees, although the other big university in Sydney, UNSW used to be USyd's engineering faculty.

In any case, the University of Queensland (where I go - I used to live in Emmanuel College here) has a Womens College too - it may be a sister college, I don't know.

(Good luck with the college links, I think that the server room is currently running off a generator.)

In any case, within Australia, the public vs private university question is kind of moot, since all of our big universities are public, and our one big private university (Bond) doesn't offer most degrees - such as science or engineering.

In Australia, colleges are closer to halls of residence - they don't offer any courses of study at all. They do offer tutorials and other assistance for courses offered at university, however.

The college that you linked to is located within the University of Sydney, and I'd be somewhat surprised if they didn't offer a range of engineering degrees, although the other big university in Sydney, UNSW used to be USyd's engineering faculty.

In any case, the University of Queensland (where I go - I used to live in Emmanuel College here) has a Womens College too - it may be a sister college, I don't know.

(Good luck with the college links, I think that the server room is currently running off a generator.)

In any case, within Australia, the public vs private university question is kind of moot, since all of our big universities are public, and our one big private university (Bond) doesn't offer most degrees - such as science or engineering.

..Christina Cifuentes (and her thesis) is who you want to talk to.

..Christina Cifuentes (and her thesis) is who you want to talk to.

See http://www.mech.uq.edu.au/hyper/hyshot/

The australian experiment is quite different (and simpler).

Notably, they do not have their scramjet configured to generate thrust (because the experiment measuring other things). The scramjet speed was actually attained from a rocket, followed by gravity as the payload return to earth (simplified explanation.)

The X-43, OTOH, is actually flying under it's own power, at least, after being boosted to a speed fast enough to ingite the engine.

I wonder why return == submit instead of preview. grr.

I was recently reading
the spotlight blurb.

My little virtual filesystem with EA + inference interface
has been moving along for a few years and contains much of
the same stuff as spotlight. Also it will obviously support
reiser4 soon.

Maybe! Linux runs on the MicroBlaze softCPU on Xilinx FPGAs, as a derivitave of uCLinux. Care to port it to this new hot hardware?

The infrastructure you need included:
- IP assignment policy across the continent
- a node database that has a Geographical Information System to tell you where to point your antenna to find neighbouring nodes
- local interest groups that help businesses & individuals go wireless & advocate at the local level

What major advantages does this have over the 18-month-old Panasonic W2 other than a slightly better video card and smaller footprint? The W2 weighs 2.8 pounds, has a DVD-RW, 12.1" screen, big keyboard, 1.1 GHz CPU, and its battery lasts over 7 hours.

In the USA, we get the older version of the W2, but it's still some-tasty.

On a side note, some tips for running Linux on the W2:
- Red Hat
- Debian
- leog forum

How is NX different from the Low Bandwidth X (LBX) extension for the X windowing system that usually underlies KDE and Gnome?

It is the physorg website that is /.ed not the University of Queensland.

Here is the article at the university, which is still up. (for the moment) :o

Not very much extra information though.

"...companies losing valuable employee time to deleting spam..."

Maybe they should be working on a Slashdot-Firewall. Damn, I really should get back to work.

Oh, and since the linked article got /.ed, here:
http://www.uq.edu.au/news/index.phtml?article=5833

YES!!! There is a Linux driver for this card!

Chris Pascoe has written a Linux driver for the Austrailian version of the card. See: http://www.itee.uq.edu.au/~chrisp/DVICO-Linux/. AFAIK, the only difference between the Austrailian and American versions is the tuner. If we can find the codes (perhaps by sniffing them w/ a homebrew I2C sniffer), we should be able to have a fully-functioning driver for the US card.

Bonus: the card is half-height, and comes with a low-profile PCI backplate, which would make it fit nicely into a small MythTV-powered PVR.

YES!!! There is a Linux driver for this card!

Chris Pascoe has written a Linux driver for the Austrailian version of the card. See: http://www.itee.uq.edu.au/~chrisp/DVICO-Linux/. AFAIK, the only difference between the Austrailian and American versions is the tuner. If we can find the codes (perhaps by sniffing them w/ a homebrew I2C sniffer), we should be able to have a fully-functioning driver for the US card.

Bonus: the card is half-height, and comes with a low-profile PCI backplate, which would make it fit nicely into a small MythTV-powered PVR.

I'm sure it would be a great place to start getting information.

URL below for the Linux drivers of the australian Fusion 3 DVB-T card. There is is another guy working on Fusion 3 QAM drivers.
Australian Fusion 3 DVB-T http://www.itee.uq.edu.au/~chrisp/DVICO-Linux/
Fusion 3 QAM http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?s=4b 61d124b991cf13fdca49dfd8dac73b&threadid=421385

Readable Description of the ELF standard

Help from SCO on ELF compatability in SCO OpenServer

Summary of a.out, COFF and ELF from a FreeBSD pov

Nice descriptions of various BFFs (binary file format) including ELF

See this article on a joint experiment at Woomera, also aiming for Mach 10.

The smaller, more "agile" nanokernel could offer better interrupt handling and more granular CPU/memory accesses, therefore keeping more accurately on a realtime track. But for high-throughput realtime signal processing, another computing model is probably more appropriate: truly parallel logic arrays.

True parallelism means the that clock rates don't have to be jacked up to millions of times the rate of the events being processed (eg. 100s of GHz for 10s of KHz audio), just to ensure that thousands of thousands of instructions might be performed on hundreds of sequential tasks required to appear simultaneous. Routers already use FPGAs to handle these kinds of tasks, running at 100s of MHz on 10s of MHz of packets (eg. OC-192 routing). Once software development tools are high-level enough to allow many music-literate programmers write studio software, some winners will float to the top. The recent development of uCLinux for the MicroBlaze "soft processor" running on a Xilinx FPGA, with extra gates to spare, offers a really exciting platform for the transition. Why not get started porting your favoring Linux sound tools to uC/MB, and strike up the band?

Theoretically *AND* practically, you're wrong.

1. Theoretically, the JVM is equivalent to a finite turing machine and thus able to run C++ code.

2. There exists such a beast already (but is sadly not up to date and only a small prototype!).
See here:
Java backend for EGCS.

3. There is mips2java which converts GCC mips backend code to the java virtual machine. Google yourself. But this is a kludge, albeit a nice one.

Australia
Brismesh (state)
Local

A digital terrain model is used to see what nodes are within line of sight in the Node Database

We're experimenting with intercity connects as well, ofther with the helpl of RF/amaterur radio experts.

After a few years mapping what entrances were visible, we found a grate that had been left open, so those of us who dared went for a jaunt.

They must have had silent alarms aswell (I saw the sensors) so I knew we wouldn't have long. The group split in two and went opposite directions (the central tunnel is a large ring circumnavigating the great court). A couple of security guards came noisily blundering along the tunnel towards my girlfriend and I, but then they heard they other group and took off after them, not noticing us lurking in the shadows of an alcove.

The other group made it to a service entrance before the guards caught up, and we scurried back out the original grate. All in all a fun day at Uni.

Note for law enforcement: This is an ENTIRELY FICTIONAL account of something that NEVER ACTUALLY HAPPENED.

Q.

After a few years mapping what entrances were visible, we found a grate that had been left open, so those of us who dared went for a jaunt.

They must have had silent alarms aswell (I saw the sensors) so I knew we wouldn't have long. The group split in two and went opposite directions (the central tunnel is a large ring circumnavigating the great court). A couple of security guards came noisily blundering along the tunnel towards my girlfriend and I, but then they heard they other group and took off after them, not noticing us lurking in the shadows of an alcove.

The other group made it to a service entrance before the guards caught up, and we scurried back out the original grate. All in all a fun day at Uni.

Note for law enforcement: This is an ENTIRELY FICTIONAL account of something that NEVER ACTUALLY HAPPENED.

Q.

It was fun to spike my stats (scroll down to hourly stats) with a comment originated mini-slashdotting :)

It's interesting, the hit rate exhibits a lovely exponential decay...not like the crunching, grinding burning shriek that will come when I get front page coverage for my project - admins beware!! muhahahahahaha!!