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Random observations

2004-03-29 10:54:49

Southampton are back in the top half of the English Premier League table. I hope they stay there! There was yet another cracker of a match between Arsenal and Manchester United. It ended in a draw, but was full of controversy as usual. It looks like Arsenal will run away with the league this year. They would have to have the mother of all collapses if they somehow manage not to finish on top.

By the looks of my last entry, I can’t spell "epitome". I really should get in the habit of checking my entries over before posting them. Nah.

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Random observations

2004-03-29 08:28:10

I had a very nice weekend. RA came around on Sunday and we had lunch and dinner at the Three Monkeys, my favourite little cafe. We talked for ages and I’m sure the cafe staff were wondering if we’d ever leave. Anyway, a nice little catch-up.

Today was rather slow. It’s very hard cutting a paper down to size. In this instance I have to cut it down from ten pages to five pages. Some passages were easy to cut out because they were the epitomy of vacuousness. I have a feeling I’m going to have to cut the paper down to about three pages and rewrite the remaining two, otherwise the paper will end up being complete and utter garbage. It will still probably end up complete and utter garbage. Oh well, we’ll just have to wait and see.

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Random observations

2004-03-26 06:56:21

RGW was confirmed as a Ph.D candidate today. His confirmation seminar was very interesting. His topic is to do with trust, security and privacy in ubiquitous computing environments.

Some guy was using his mobile phone in a bathroom stall today. At least I hope that’s what he was doing. It was kind of weird walking into the bathroom and hearing a person talking (in Chinese) behind a toilet door. Kind of disconcerting when you’re trying to use the bathroom yourself!

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Random observations

2004-03-25 07:59:35

Had a productive day yesterday. Among other things I wrote an XDR class for marshalling and unmarshalling data directly to a stream. It makes sending and receiving Superstring queries and responses much easier. I had another XDR class but it was really only useful for datagram communication. Today was far less productive. I had students to deal with and a two hour prac to supervise. For some reason I was also pretty tired.

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Random observations

2004-03-23 11:13:45

‘Twas a slow day today. I just read over a couple of papers I’ve been involved with in preparation for a meeting with Jaga tomorrow, then went to my prac session. There are an extraordinary number of students this year who haven’t programmed in Java before. The ones that haven’t programmed in Java are all Masters students. I’m doing my level best to get them up to speed, but I think some of them are going to struggle.

I had lunch with SB today, during which we saw a very big and bold bearded dragon jump up on some guy’s legs in order to steal his lunch! It failed in its attempt as the guy’s friend shooed it away with a book or something. The scary looking monster had been eyeing our lunch for quite some time before turning on the other guy. There are heaps of these dragons around the lake area, but none quite so bold as this particular specimen. SB will soon submit his Ph.D thesis. His topic is to do with vertical handover.

I didn’t mention that last week I wrote a Java version of the Chord protocol. I started on Monday, had it basically finished by Tuesday and was debugging it for the rest of the week. I got it completely working on Friday, and it turned out that the two bugs that had me befuddled were due to omissions in the pseudo code from which I implemented the algorithm, and not to my programming skills. This pseudo code appears in the Chord paper itself, and the omissions were, I thought, quite critical. Those MIT people don’t know what they’re doing. ;) Now I just have to put my service discovery protocol on top. After that, there are a couple of other programming tasks to do, but then I can concentrate on getting some numbers or building usage scenarios (I know I should have finalised by now how I’m going to test this thing, but I’m still mulling over the alternatives) and then writing my thesis. So the finish line is definitely within sight. (Please don’t let it be a mirage!)

It’s only ten past nine, but I am dead tired. Going to sleep now.

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Random observations

2004-03-20 08:19:55

I’ve captioned all my photos from New Zealand. There are a few that will have to be re-captioned because I’m not entirely sure of place names and so forth. I can glean the place names from the footage that my brother took with his new video camera.

I went to see Once Upon a Time in Mexico today. Very violent, and to be honest I was largely unimpressed. Johnny Depp was pretty good though. Last weekend I saw The Last Samurai which was a much better film. In fact I liked this film a lot better than any of the Lord of the Rings films. It’s an epic, and it worked. Even Tom Cruise was good! There was violence, but it was violence of the kind that depicted an aspect of Japanese history and culture. Just after seeing this film, I watched a documentary on SBS about the samurai. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the movie had depicted the samurai culture very accurately indeed. This movie is well worth seeing.

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Random observations

2004-03-17 12:51:26

I’ve published a small selection of the photos that I shot in New Zealand at this web page. Unfortunately I haven’t had the time to caption the pictures, but this will be done in due course. I say it’s a small selection even though there are 135 pictures because I took over 650 pictures altogether!

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Random observations

2004-03-16 13:28:07

Okay, so it’s been ages since I wrote an entry in this diary. The end of January seems to be the last time I was bothered to write anything, and a lot has happened since then. I’ve had another birthday, which was celebrated very nicely indeed, and I’ve been to New Zealand for two and half weeks with my family. I’ve also had the opportunity to do quite a bit of reading.

New Zealand was awesome, especially the south island. The scenary was spectacular. Milford Sound was particularly breathtaking. There were waterfalls springing out of every mountain side. I hope I don’t have to wait long before going back again! Before long I shall publish, on this web site, a selection of photos that were taken in New Zealand.

I finally completed The Count of Monte Cristo. It was very interesting, though rather drawn out in places. Indeed it’s a very long book. I enjoyed the ending, mainly because it contained a most pertinent piece of advice: Wait and hope. As simple as these two words are, they are held by me to be of the utmost importance. They bear resemblance to my e-mail signature also: Foi est tout (Faith is everything). This is the Robinson family motto, and I don’t know why it should be expressed in French. Monte Cristo was my grandfather’s favourite novel. Although I enjoyed it a great deal, I cannot go so far as to say it is my favourite book. Since finishing Monte Cristo I’ve also read Pride and Prejudice, which, to my surprise, I took great pleasure in reading. The characters were so very well described that I couldn’t help but form an opinion, either favourable or unfavourable, of each and every one of them. Tonight I just finished watching the BBC series of the same title, and enjoyed that too! It’s my task, and great delight, to read through my now substantial collection of Thomas Hardy novels. Presently I’m reading Jude the Obscure, for which Hardy was roundly criticized for writing, and this criticism put Hardy off writing novels altogether. What would Hardy’s critics think of today’s novels and films, where sexually explicit material is so prevalent and the institution of marriage no longer treated as sacred?

I’ve had a very productive couple of days at university. I’ve managed to just about write a complete implementation of Chord (distributed hashtable protocol) in these two days. There is an existing implementation of Chord, but it’s written in C, and I understand that it is excessively complicated to get it working. If I continue to work at my present rate, it will be one of my most productive weeks ever.

In the end, and with some persuasion from Jaga, I’ve decided to tutor Distributed Computing again. This will definitely be my last semester as a tutor!