A proper job!

I've been working at Sharp for three weeks now, and all I can say is, "Wow!"

It's a pretty amazing place: I park my bicycle next to two giant tanks of liquid nitrogen, there are sets of breathing apparatus on the walls, the place has a high-level cleanroom, and there are laser warning strobes above half of the doors. I keep on being reminded of when I used to play Half-Life a lot...

I turned up on the first day, expecting loads of administrative stuff and not even to have a desk until the afternoon. To my suprise, the first thing I had to do was to unpack my brand new workstation with a 19-inch flat panel monitor onto a huge desk in my development team's offices. My personal space at work is nearly as big as our sitting room at home! I've now succeeded in getting a good set of GNU tools installed on my computer, thanks to Cygwin.

I've done two mini-projects so far: one involved making some printed circuit boards (PCBs) and the other was an investigation into Dickson charge pumps, a type of (very inefficient, we found) DC to DC convertor.

I started my big project on Thursday, so in the next few months I've got the joys of learning VHDL, playing with FPGAs, designing some very complicated circuit boards, and then hoping it all works...

Update time

So, having sorely neglected this journal for far too long (not for the first time, I might add) I thought it might be a good plan to write an update for a change.

Although it didn't feel like my A-level papers went as well as I wanted them too, I didn't do too badly. In fact I did very well - I got A-grades in all the modules I took in the summer session, and thus A-grades in all of my A-levels! That means I'm going to Cambridge!

In July I went on a OCYO tour to Germany - my first tour as principal horn. Regrettably, it didn't go too well - I messed up at least once in each concert. The major contributor to that was the fact that I managed to break my horn - somehow, I succeeded bending the leadpipe in by about 20°, resulting in a huge kink in the leadpipe and a bigger dent in the bell flair. It's going to cost too much to repair, and the worst thing is that I'm going to have to play my brother Alex's horn in the really important OCYO concert in two weeks' time because mine won't be fixed until the end of September, which isn't going to improve the quality of my playing.

Since getting back from tour, I've been working at Keble College as a student helper during the conference season, and playing Achaea a lot.

Although I did my best to get the MBDA Engineering Scholarship, I didn't, unfortunately. However, that means I'll be spending my gap year working for Sharp, starting soon. Bizarrely, one of students I'm currently working with at Keble is sharing a house with an Engineering student who's working on the same team I'm going to be working on.

Anyway, that's all for now. I'll write again soon, no doubt.

I'm currently in the happy position of having just completely messed up two A-Level Chemistry papers. Fortunately, Chemistry isn't particularly critical for me, so I can afford to get a B, but it would be nice not to. On the other hand, my Maths papers have been going well so far. The beginning of next week is going to be traumatic though: Physics synoptic paper on Monday afternoon, Chemistry synoptic on Tuesday morning and Pure Maths 4 and 5 on Tuesday afternoon. I'm not looking forward to that little lot at all.

Learning Lisp

I've been learning Lisp - after all, it's not as if I have anything else to do. It's very different to any other programming language I've learnt, and in a way it's very cool. I especially like the feature that the language itself can be used to modify the language, but I haven't really got to the stage where I can make use of that yet. Today I wrote a program:

(defun countdown (&rest args)
  (let ((target (apply #'encode-universal-time args))
        (left))
    (do ((finished nil)) (finished)
        (sleep 1)
        (setf left (- target (get-universal-time)))
        (if (< left 0)
            (setf finished t)
          (format t "~a:~a:~a~%"
                  (floor (/ left 3600))
                  (floor (/ (mod left 3600) 60))
                  (mod left 60))))))

I've been finding ANSI Common Lisp by Paul Graham very handy (once Amazon finally decided to deliver it), and I've been using SBCL as my compiler.

Update: The history of Lisp, for anyone who's interested.

Success!

The first flight[msn.com] of Scaled Composites' SpaceShipOne to 100km[slashdot.org] was successful[space.com]!

Yay! My money's definitely on them to win the X-Prize.

Update: More info here[spaceflightnow.com], here[bbc.co.uk], and here[newscientist.com].

More about Magnum

I mentioned a month or so ago that I'd been told that NASA was developing a new launcher called Magnum, and that I was going to investigate. Here's where I've got to.

Firstly, searching for the keyword "Magnum" in a space-related context brings up a lot of results referring to NASA launching a series of ELINT satellites in the late 1980s, which isn't very helpful. It's also hard to filter out references to the Colt Magnum series of pistols.

A document from 1998 provides some interesting information:

• Design is derived from that of the space-shuttle (this could be a replacement for the Shuttle-Z programme)
• Performance is 80 tonnes to ~400 km altitude LEO at 28.5° inclination
• Core is 8.4 m diameter to allow Magnum to launch from existing shuttle facilities (cost-cutting measure, I guess)
• Target cost is $1000 per kg (and if you believe that you'll believe anything)

The document also mentions something that I hadn't picked up before, that NASA are planning to replace the current solid-fuel shuttle boosters with liquid-fueled boosters capable of autonomous fly-back and landing. I'll believe it when I see it.

Quite a lot of these details are corroborated by this Space.com article, which also contains some snazzy publicity imagery - including Lockheed-Martin and Boeing concept renders of what the fly-back boosters might look like.

Earliest information I've found is a set of 1997 lecture slides which, although interesting, are probably hopelessly out-of-date by now.

I've also found some comments from various people, many of which run along the lines of, "Why are we spending all this money on massive launchers so we can send spacecraft straight to Mars Apollo-style, when we could use [insert name of current, low performance launcher here] and assemble at ISS?" The fact that the ISS is in a hopeless orbit for insertion into a Martian transfer orbit, and the fact that we don't have the know-how to be able to assemble large structures in microgravity, makes this viewpoint rather an odd one.

And that's pretty much it. I've been able to find very little or no useful information dating more recently that 2000. I'm going to try e-mail MSFC directly, and see what they can tell me. It's worth a try.

100 km

SpaceShipOne is an Ansari X-Prize project that I've been following with great interest over the last few months. On June 21st, Scaled are going to try their first flight to the X-Prize qualifying height of 100 km, from Mojave Civilian Flight Test Center. I will be watching with great interest. If only I could be there!

Although SpaceShipOne will be going up to 100 km, Scaled still won't win the X-Prize, because the X-Prize rules stipulate that the winning craft must carry 3 people (or just a pilot and ballast equivalent to the other two crew), and the same spacecraft must trip twice in the space of 2 weeks.

Time's running out for X-Prize competitors: the prize is only available until 1st January 2005.

On a personal note, I'm not a big fan of the X-Prize. Although it seems to have succeeded to a certain extent in stimulating the development of private spaceflight, even the winning spacecraft will not be capable even of getting to orbit. The next prize would be awarded to the first private enterprise to put a man in 500 km orbit and then recover him safely, if I had any say in it. Then you've automatically got a competitive launch vehicle.

Revision

For the first time in my life, I'm actually revising properly for an exam. I've got Pure Maths 5 on Monday (if I remember correctly), and I've realised that although I can actually do most of the questions, I can't do them fast enough. So I'm currently hacking through the practice papers I've been given as fast as I can in the hope that I can get a reasonable mark in the exam.

Inbetween writing my blog, reading Slashdot, eating, working out on the school ergos, shooting etc, of course.

Update: Opened the fifth of my pracice papers, looked at the first question, and didn't have a clue how to do it. So I looked at the answer, and couldn't make head nor tail of it. Am currently feeling tired and depressed.

Intelligence

I had a conversation with a friend of mine, where I made the point that I really don't like IQ tests because all they measure is how good you are at IQ tests. However, since I've never actually taken an IQ test in anger, I thought I'd take a few today to compare and contrast.

• http://www.iqtest2.com/ - 163
• Test Cafe Detailed IQ Test - 157
• queendom.com Classical Intelligence Test - 132
• IQ Test Labs Intelligence Test - 129

Quite a range - I rest my case. While randomly surfing, I also discovered that my personality type is Visionary (Extraverted Intuition with Introverted Thinking).

Balloonists

I went to the summer members' event at the Royal Institution last night. It was a balloon debate, with four eminent scientists each taking the role of a famous director of the RI. Represented were Count Rumford (founder of the RI), Michael Faraday, Lawrence Bragg (inventor of X-ray crystallography) and George Porter (discoverer of the ozone layer hole).

I left home late, and was thus late getting to the RI (the train from Oxford being half an hour late didn't help much), but fortunately I only missed the introductory comments. Lawrence Bragg's suggestion that he hadn't actually got anything left to contribute to the world of science resulted in him being thrown out first, and George Porter got thrown out second for being too smarmy, though I thought it would have been good to have a final between George Porter and Count Rumford. Count Rumford won; although some could claim the result was rigged because Count Rumford was being played by the current director, Baronness Susan Greenfield, she was to most confident and funniest of the group.

After the debate, there were Pimm's and strawberries in the library, which was nice.

Getting home was traumatic. First I decided to wait at Paddington for a fast train to Oxford, because I didn't feel like slumming it for hours on one of the inevitable dirty and smelly local stopping trains, and so, having left the RI at half-past nine I finally left London at quarter to eleven. Then there was a points failure at Reading, so I didn't get into Oxford until quarter past midnight, whereupon I had to wait for the last bus home.

Result being that although it took me two and a half hours to get to the RI from home, it took me nearly four to get home from the RI. Understandably, this morning I feel knackered.