B+ Trees - A Whole New World of Pain

One of the practical exercises that has been set for my course is to implement a B+ tree in Java. Sounds fairly easy right? Just implement a tree and make a few changes for search and insert/delete.

Not quite, I'm currently on my 3rd attempt to get a working tree. This time I'm successful (though delete is still to be implemented). The difference - I've moved away from recursive techniques for insertion to making use of a stack I can access programatically. This means as the child nodes are split, I can update up the tree making further splits as required. Once the stack is empty and if a split is still required, I can then simply create a new root.

Yay! Now to get on with the rest of it.

Interviews and Playout Systems

Yesterday saw me taking a 700 mile round trip for a job interview, all in one day. To say I was a little tired by the end of it is a bit of an understatement but it was far better than my previous trip, overnight, by train (you can imagine the pain, now multiply it a few times).

On the good news front, STAR's new playout system now has a music library. This means the music team can be trained for the system to go fully live and take over the current one.

It'll be a bit of a see how it goes on this one. We've now tried a few Linux based playout systems and if this is hopeless, we'll be paying out for a Windows licence and a mainstream playout system.

Talking of Windows based systems. Work on AllDay DJ 3 is well under way. I've started afresh, using NHibernate for the database stuff (it'll now work on a number of DBMS without screwing about AND I don't need to write all the boilerplate SQL) but still the same old for the audio library.

Progress wise, I've got the database part working, a track importer operational and the main player core operational, though without overlap / VT or soundcard playthrough support (think IRN if you're not seeing a reason to support this). The plan for supporting these is to edit the player object to take different special file names (e.g. "#PLAYTHROUGH 30" to indicate 30 seconds of playing through a soundcard input).

Change Of Job

That's it, I'm now mainly self employed. I am to start working as a freelance radio presenter [available for work in Fife and surrounding area :)] with a gig presenting Saturday Breakfast on Perth FM (in Perth).

Should be fun and certainly an interesting change from retail.

First Show on Commercial Radio

Well, I suppose I'd better tell you how it went. Not too badly by the sounds of it. I will tell you it's a rather strange experience getting up at 5am and enjoying it. :)

I even had my father taking a listen (the last time he did that, I'd just started on hospital radio). He was rather blown away by the whole thing.

However, it will remain to be seen if I get the position perminantly. If I do, I've got a cracking embarassing story to share with you then.

First Steps

Yesterday, I got a call rather out of the blue from Perth FM. The reason for the call: asking if I would do an on-air trial on Saturday morning.

My answer, of course was yes. So this Saturday (tomorrow) I'll be presenting Breakfast between 7am and 11am. I can only hope it all goes smoothly tomorrow.

Though, I was at the studio this afternoon. Mainly to get keys and obtain training on the equipment. It was also a great guide to how difficult it is to find the studio. Ah well, I know where it is now.

Anyhow, if you want to listen, it's 106.6FM in Perth or online at http://www.perthfm.co.uk/

ResNet, FATMAN and JA.NET - A Romantic Tale

Trust me to get the title of Ian's talk wrong, eh. Well that's the correct title. And as promised I am linking to the video.

To see the embeded video, click on the read more link.