Month: September 2003

Another working week begins. No fire alarms today; nothing exciting at all, in fact. Did some more marking. Hopefully will finish that by tomorrow afternoon. I attended the complex systems lecture as usual. This one was on economics from a complex systems point of view. It seemed very high-level to me, but then my mind started wandering toward the end. And just now I got home from my spanish lesson, during which we were introduced to yet another tense. I have tenses coming out of my ears now!

Shortly, tomorrow or the day after, I should know whether I’m going to Berkeley, California for a conference. The notifications of acceptance should have been sent around on Friday, our time, but for some reason they’re running late. Fingers crossed, anyway.

We received some Liberal Party propaganda in the mail today. Apparently local elections are coming up. They’re promising to build five tunnels thereby creating three river crossings (not quite sure how that works) at critical locations to ease traffic congestion. I’ve promised myself not to take too much interest in political issues, world events and suchlike, for a while anyway. So perhaps I shouldn’t be reading Stupid White Men right now. Hmm.

I just remembered I still haven’t filled out my tax return! Better do that sooner rather than later. When’s the deadline, I wonder?

This evening I finished reading The Three Musketeers. I found it to be enthralling, inspiring, romantic and tragic all at once. The Disney movie is certainly very different to Dumas’ novel (although, I like the movie for what it is). The novel is a tale of intrigues and comradery, and shows how men in positions of power can use that power for their own ends. If anyone wants to read it, let me know because I own a copy of it.

Yesterday I bought a copy of The Count of Monte Cristo, another of Dumas’ novels. This was written at the same time as The Three Musketeers. This was my grandpa’s favourite book, so I’ve been meaning to read it for quite some time. I’m finally getting around to reading these classics, and I wish I’d started a long time ago. Tess was brilliant, The Musketeers I enjoyed thoroughly (but being a translation from the French, the quality of English writing can’t compare with that of Thomas Hardy’s; he was a master, as I’ve said before), and I’m sure I will be kept absorbed by Monte Cristo having seen the film and knowing that the book is always better than the film. I’m buying any classics that I wish to read, so slowly I’m building a Penguin Classics library.

I think in the last entry I wrote about my reading, I’d just finished Tess and was starting on Last Chance to See. The latter is an amusing look at some of the world’s endangered species, Douglas Adams style. If anything, that book caused me to reaffirm my status as a vegetarian! I must thank the great book lender in the sky for the loan of this book. Since finishing that, I’ve read The Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels. The Manifesto itself is only forty pages long (as published in the Penguin Classics format), but the 2002 Penguin Classics edition has 187 page introduction, most of which I found boring, and is published with seven different prefaces! To be honest, I’m not quite sure what to make of it all, and will reserve judgement until I’ve had a bit more time to digest it. I daresay I’ll be reading the forty pages again. On my first reading, it seemed like a call to the Proletariat to rise up against the Bourgeoisie, rather than being an all-encompassing ideology or economic paradigm. That brings us up to date with my reading (not that most of you care, I suspect :). I now start Stupid White Men by that most engagé of activists, Michael Moore. Courtesy of RW. (Thanks mate!)

Nigel and I went to see Pirates of the Caribbean yesterday (Saturday, though by the time I submit this, yesterday will be Sunday). Highly entertaining cinema, though by no means a great movie. Johnny Depp was very amusing as the perpetually inebriated Captain Jack Sparrow. See it if you want to laugh a bit or if you like lots of swashbuckling.

Wow! The fire alarm went off today, and for once there was a real, actual, flames and smoke FIRE! Admittedly the fire was in the garden outside GP South and not inside. It was contained with a garden hose or two and was put out before the fire engines arrived. Nevertheless, it managed to char quite a large section of the garden. About time there was some excitement in this place!

I’ve added a whole bunch of photos to my web site. They can be accessed here. They’ve been reduced to 640×480 resolution for faster downloading, but of course they don’t look quite as good as the originals. The gallery contains photos from Fairfield, Caloundra and Maleny among other places. Each photo also has a caption. Enjoy.

Boy am I tired tonight! I just returned from my Spanish lesson, where we learned yet another tense. I think we’ve learned four or five tenses and there’s still another nine or ten left!!! Earlier on in the day, I had a meeting with Jaga and RW about the paper we’re writing. It’s almost there, thank goodness. Now I really must get some sleep. Luckily there’s no football match that I’m obliged to get up and watch in the middle of the night!

Reminder to self: there’s a whole bunch of photos that I’ve taken that haven’t been published on my web site yet. Get your act together. What kind of dodgy, half-baked show are you running here? The people want to see photos. The people like photos. The more photos there are, the less chance there is of people seeing dodgy photos of me like the one here (Put the mouse cursor over the link with my name on it. That web page is slightly broken at the time of writing this entry, but I’m assured it will all be working again soon. Wait! That’s a bad thing for me!). That photo was taken when I most definitely was not riding around a Greek island on a moped without an appropriate licence. Never happened.

Nigel and I spent another weekend in the sunny climes of Caloundra. We took Dad to a jazz breakfast, which Mum organised, for Father’s Day. We gave Dad a bottle of red wine and a bottle of port. At the jazz breakfast we ended up winning another bottle of red wine in a raffle, so Dad should be very happy for the next month or two!

Nigel and I went to the beach and had a swim for the first time in ages. The water is still freezing. The swim was very invigorating.

Ph.D work is going v. well at the moment. I’ve written introductory sections for each of the chapters of my thesis (bar one or two). So I’m a couple of thousand words to the good already. Jaga’s also given me the go-ahead to start implementing my basic prototype. I feel like doing some coding because I’ve been writing papers for the last few months. Speaking of papers, the two that I’m working on at the moment are slowly taking shape. They’re both semi-complete. After those are done, there’s already another paper to write partly based on the work of an honours student to do with bridging service discovery protocols. So Jaga’s seems very pleased with my work at present, and that’s as much as I can hope for at this point. It’ll be fun to do some programming for once!

Jaga and I have also decided to implement my original ant-based algorithm as well as my deterministic algorithm. These will be implemented as two distinct routing layers underneath the service discovery layer. The ant-based algorithm does a better job than the deterministic algorithm in highly mobile, ad-hoc networks. In these environments, the deterministic (distributed hash table) based one pays too hefty a price for node failure, and for nodes joining and leaving the network. However, the hash table based algorithm does well where a large proportion of the query resolvers are static and permanent. This way, applications have the same interface to my service discovery protocol, and the appropriate routing layer can be selected depending on the type of underlying network.

Australia beat Jamaica 2-1 in Reading, England overnight. Australia completely dominated and should really have won by five or six goals. Those guys have got to start putting their chances away more often, because they had a lot of better than half-chances and didn’t capitalise on them. We might be able to get away with that against Jamaica, but against tougher opposition we’ll be made to pay for those misses. Apart from wasting a bundle of chances, Harry Kewell played awesomely, and Marco Bresciano had a great match.

I finally got around to seeing A Clockwork Orange last night. It was on the shelf in the video store for once! I don’t have time to say much about it; just recording the fact that I’ve seen it. A fantastic film.