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Random observations

2003-12-16 12:59:16

Hmm. I’m getting a bit lazy with the blog entries lately. It’ll probably stay that way for some time though. The blog has served it’s role as a place to dump my Ph.D ideas over the past year or so. Well, I’m past the stage of needing to generate new ideas. It’s down to the writing and prototyping. Needless to say, that stuff would make boring reading here, though if I have anything exciting to report with regards to the prototype, I’ll make sure it gets a mention.

The Indians took a 1-0 lead in the cricket test series. It was an awesome and well deserved victory to them. Two games to go.

A few other things happened today, but I won’t bore everyone with the details. Another reminder not to expect updates to this blog with the same frequency as the past.

Categories
Random observations

2003-12-03 10:53:55

Today I attended the New Ways of Working Together DSTC retreat at Indooroopilly. After the first couple of hours I thought it was going to be a totally boring day, but it got much better. I think the group came up with some very interesting ideas. Even the first couple of hours, though they might have been a little on the dreary side, highlighted exactly how much I didn’t know about the projects going on at DSTC. A good day all in all!

Categories
Random observations

2003-12-01 01:05:00

We’ve finished marking the COMS3200 exams. Results were lower than we expected. I suspect some students didn’t bother to study because it was an open book exam. But I think the extra hours I put in at Ipswich paid off. An Ipswich student (as opposed to a St Lucia student) received the highest mark on the exam, which is great! They even gave me a Thank You card this year! Some of them worked really hard, so I hope at least a few of them get very good grades. They certainly deserve it.

I finally made it to a Brisbane Strikers match on Saturday. The Strikers are doing fairly well so far this season. They beat the Melbourne Knights 1-0. That puts them in 4th place.

We now have a digital set-top box. We got the low-end TEAC model, but it suffices. So now we can watch most stuff in crystal clear wide-screen. The best part is that all the trouble we were having with reception is gone completely. The way digital television works means that even though the signal is bouncing around all over the place and being dampened by the big fig trees in front of our house, the picture we get on our TV is perfect. With the analogue signal, we would get ghosting caused by the signal bouncing off the next door neighbour’s roof, the fig trees would distort the signal, especially when it was raining. With the digital signal, the hardware just filters out any duplicate signals. It’s great! The cricket looks really good in wide-screen. :)

By the end of this week I hope to have the ant-based service discovery protocol working completely. I’ll be annoyed if I haven’t got it working soon. I haven’t progressed nearly as far as I had hoped to by this time. By now I thought I’d be collecting stats from the local-area and wide-area protocols. I haven’t even finished coding them yet! Must work faster!!!