Mr-F.org

After a hellish couple of weeks in the office, battling the every increase number of projects arriving on my desk, I can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel.  However, these past couple of weeks have taught me that with the increasing number of experiments and software development projects, the time has come for me to seriously tweak how I’m working so that I can still keep on top of all the work.

For the past year I’ve been following several blogs that refer to this state as “getting things done” or commonly referred to as “GTD”.  With the wealth of knowledge that I’ve gained from reading these articles and my own personal experience with a number of the different techniques, I decided that today was going to be the first day where I achieve that mythical state of GTD!  Armed with my dairy of meetings and my “todo” list that stated which jobs where going to be completed, I attacked the workload.  Alas today was not going to be the first day that I achieved that state of GTD.  I fell short of this goal by not completing two of the tasks that I set myself.  Sure there are many reasons/excuses that I could used to explain them, but personally you either achieve it or you don’t, and today boys and girls I didn’t.  However, tomorrow is new day and I will achieve GTD!

I’ve finally managed to start the corrections! I‚Äôve found it so hard to actually get started on these and am not completely sure why. My only ideas for this inability to get on with what needs to be done are:

• May have something to do with the long wait I had from submission to viva, which got me out of the swing of things.
• Possibly because I know it‚Äôs the end of a special period in my life.

Of course this could just be me trying to avoid the fact that maybe I’m being lazy, however, I don’t think that is the case. Anyway, I guess there is nothing for it now but to simply get on with what needs to be done.

Whilst writing psychology experiments, one thing that I’ve come across time and time again is the ability to randomize data based on multiple constraints.  The first couple of times I came across this I simply hacked out a piece of Java using a brute force method that generated an order and then checked to make sure that all the constraints were valid.  This worked pretty well, but clearly wasn’t that scalable.  One other solution I could have used was to use a clever language like Prolog and do some constraint based programming.  That takes me back to the constraint based programming I did as an undergrad with Dr Andy King.  Anyway, after a couple of chats with different people I came across this rather neat tool called “Mix”.  It basically is a small program that allows you to specify exactly how you want your information randomized.  Furthermore the method in which you provide the specific is very short and to the point meaning that to make a specification that can generate 1000 sets takes a matter of seconds.  I’ve used this tool for a number of different experiments and it works well.  Although I’ve only just started to look into what else it can do.  So if you are in need of the ability to randomize information using multiple constraints, possibly fixed block position and anything else then you may want to give this tool a try.