Robert Leverington

I’d like to talk a bit about one of my four major projects, Formatilicious. A friend of mine, Niall Coleman, came to me with his idea of a format converter. The inspiration came from the fact that Newgrounds - a site Niall is obsessed with - does not accept PNG image uploads (so I am told). Converting to JPG can often result in reduced quality due to the lossy compression technique used. Microsoft Paint, for example, does a very poor job of this, and loading up a photograph manipulation suite such as Adobe Photoshop, Paint.net, or the GIMP can consume a lot of time and resources; Formatilicious is simply a web page, and provides a decent compression level, reducing any resultant artifacts.

Currently Formatilicious is in its early stages, it’s a basic input\output interface and doesn’t do much else. In a month or two, once exams are over and the holidays are started, I plan on doing quite a bit of work on it (and a couple of my other projects too) - ideas include image cropping, resizing and supporting more formats. At some point I also hope to offer video conversion, but this is far deeper and would require a lot more work (but nothing’s impossible).

I’ve finally got my new computer up and running, it runs at a good pace, and is certainly a very capable piece of machinery. Unfortunately I am not completely satisfied, mainly due to my choice of operating system. Currently I’m running Windows XP Service Pack 2 (32-bit edition). As I have found out since purchasing my computer, 32-bit only supports a memory address space of 4,294,967,295 (four gigabytes). I purchased four gigabytes of RAM, but the address space also includes the graphics card memory (one gigabyte) - so only three gigabytes are available for general purpose use. At the moment this is not a major limitation, and three should be more than enough for everyday functionality (four would be quite nice though, especially when I settle into this new system and start running more memory intensive programs).

I plan on upgrading to Windows Vista Home Premium (64-bit edition) in the near future, once I have saved up sufficient money to buy it, this will allow me to use the memory to its full potential (one would hope). Running Windows XP on such a powerful machine seams wasteful, and I’d love to get a first-hand taste of the latest Microsoft operating system as well. I know a lot of people will say to use Linux - but I happen to like Windows, and a fair few pieces of software I use aren’t available on UNIX-like operating systems (yes, yes, there are probably equivalents - but certainly not for most games).

Sound is also an issue with my new rig, but hopefully playing about with drivers will solve this, the firmware that came with the motherboard for its on-board sound isn’t that great. Currently all I get from the speakers is sound played by the Realtek sound manager programs or beeps that the motherboard would normally make that get redirected to the speakers. This really is rather frustrating.

Last week I began my first round of GCSE examinations. This year my school trialed a triple science course (six modules in each flavour of science, rather than four), twenty-six of us opted to take it (there was an entry boundary though, you had to have scored at least a level seven on your SAT). Rather than having one exam covering the first module of all three sciences at Christmas and another, covering the second modules, in the summer, we had three exams in the summer (one for each of the sciences) - each covering the first three modules of its particular subject.

Today I had my chemistry exam. Last week I had a miserable time doing my biology one (which, in hindsight, I don’t think I spent sufficient time preparing for), but this was far easier. A lot of the answers were spoon-fed, this made the paper less challenging, although I’m still slightly concerned about how well I did.

Next week is the physics exam, hopefully I will perform better in this, at least doing so would alleviate some of my concern of failure. The topic has less material, although a lot more math; I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or not at this point.

For those of you who are interested in the gory details, my school does OCR Gateway Science and we will have three exams each summer of the two year course (three this year, three next year). My brother (who is the same age as me, but attends a different school) explained that his school did a science exam at the start of the year, but he also does triple science; I am unsure of what the difference is - perhaps an alternate exam board.

There are also several exams the school is running over the few weeks left before work experience, I was slightly annoyed since the maths exam (which we were informed may influence deciding who stays in the excel set next year) is right before our proper physics exam - although I’m told by the maths teacher that I shouldn’t worry about it, and problems will only really arise if one gets an abominable score. We do, of course, have two maths exam, so there is always a fallback. We also have a two hour RS exam, this is one of the subjects I detest, and haven’t a clue why it needs to be that long; it just seams ridiculous.