Category: Random observations

If it doesn’t fit elsewhere, it goes here.

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Random observations

CSIRO Job

Peter Corke at the CSIRO ICT centre in Pullenvale has asked me to spread the word about a position his group is looking to fill as soon as possible. In fact, he says ideally he’d like to start the successful candidate tomorrow if he could. Here are the details.

The job is within the sensor nets research program, and covers the following areas:

  • Sensor net applications
  • Routing in sensor nets
  • Data muling (i.e., collecting data from sensors and transporting that data via mobile nodes back to a base location)
  • Web backends
  • Data service integration

The position is a 12 month contract and attracts a mid-$60k salary. Please contact Peter directly if you’re interested. Otherwise, please tell your friends about this job.

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Random observations

Former Secretary of State in Gilmore Girls

The former US Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, will appear in an episode of Gilmore Girls. What I’d really like to know is, as one of the few shows that I used to watch on a regular basis, when is it coming back to Australian television? I know I’m not the only one who’d like an answer to that question. Please, Channel 9, bring it back.

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Random observations

Nobody entertains like The Beatles

News.com.au reports that The Beatles have been voted the most influential entertainers of the past one hundred years in a survey conducted by Variety. As if you’d need to conduct a survey to tell you that! ;-)

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Random observations

Jobs

There are a few jobs on offer that I know of, and I’ve been asked to spread the word about them. First of all, there’s a software engineering job or two at global-roam Pty Ltd, who are currently based in Toowong. global-roam develops applications that relate to the National Electricity Market (NEM). NEM-Watch is the flagship product, and it allows users to watch the NEM in real-time. Most, if not all, companies that have a direct or indirect interest in the NEM use NEM-Watch and/or one of global-roam’s other products. These include organisations like Origin Energy, Energex, departments within state and federal governments, as well as newspapers (like the Smage) and companies like Toshiba who provide generator components.

I’ll give a brief overview of the kind of candidate global-roam is looking for. The candidate global-roam seeks will be able to point to some previous applications they have developed, and have a basic understanding of the NEM (there’s plenty of information online about the operation of the NEM if you’d like to do some research). The candidate will be able to develop applications that handle large quantities of data that are sourced in real-time from various locations. Ideally, the candidate will be an ace at designing and implementing intuitive, good-looking graphical user interfaces, and have some experience with .NET and C# in particular. This job is advertised in various places other than the global-roam web site. Free trial versions of all global-roam products are available for download (after obtaining an ID).

When I was in Melbourne, I met Andrew Smith from the Key Centre for Human Factors based at UQ. He asked me if I knew anybody interested in working as a full-time programmer on the Leximancer Project. I couldn’t think of anybody off the top of my head, because most ex-DSTC software engineering person seem to have found employment already, and the Ph.D. students I know are not quite at a point where they can take up a full-time job. I believe the job consists of programming in Perl and Java, although prior experience with Perl is not a prerequisite since apparently the Perl component could be picked up by any competent programmer. The Leximancer Project builds conceptual maps from collections of documents by automagically extracting the important information from the documents. Please contact Andrew if you are interested in the position.

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Random observations

Kerry calls it quits

Today was the last day at the DSTC for one of its icons, Dr. Kerry Raymond (Distinguished Research Leader, Adjunct Prof., ITEE). All the best in the future Kerry!

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Random observations

Congrats Anna and Will!

Anna is getting married to Will! They’ve launched their own version of Wedlog to mark the occasion. Congratulations guys!

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Random observations

What a week!

Sometimes it seems as though months can go past without much happening, and then, all of a sudden, lots of things happen in the space of a few days. The past week has been jam packed with notable events.

It all began last Saturday, when Karen and I looked at nine houses in the Forest Lake area. The last house that we saw was the best of the lot. It was perfect for our needs, and we liked it very much. We visited another house on Sunday morning (which was not too bad, but a lot older and therefore in need of some patching up here and there) and then took our parents to see the one that we liked from the previous day. They liked it too. On Tuesday we made an offer and a price was agreed on Thursday. So, unless something disastrous happens in the next thirty days or so, Karen and I will be the proud owners of a three and a half years old house in Ellen Grove.

On Wednesday, I was offered a position as a research scientist at a new lab in the city. On Thursday I had a meeting with my current boss to inform him of the situation. I was due to travel to Newcastle, Rockhampton and Townsville in the space of three days next week to install our new product (deSide version 2) at various clients’ facilities, and then to Melbourne the following week to attend the Energy Users Association of Australia conference at the Grand Hyatt. Part of the reason for these travels was so I could meet our clients and vice-versa. Luckily there was enough time for Paul (my boss) to rethink who to send on these trips. The meeting I had with Paul was long, but he took the news as well as could be expected. I’ll be sorry to leave global-roam after such a short stay because I’ve thoroughly enjoyed my time there and learned a great deal about what it takes to develop software that people actually use on a daily basis, but happy to be stepping into a job that allows me to work on problems very similar to those I worked on during my Ph.D. candidature. I’m still to negotiate a finishing date with Paul, though I expect I’ll be staying on until sometime near the end of the year.

As if buying a house and having to tell my boss that I was leaving was not stressful enough, today was also the deadline for deSide development and testing. It’s all finished bar maybe ten percent of the installation file, which I’ll have to do tomorrow morning. Also, this week I’ve been setting up a Linux box to act as a gateway between global-roam’s LAN, Roam Consulting’s LAN (Roam Consulting is a sister company of global-roam whom we share office space with), a Cisco 877 ADSL router/modem, a Netgear ADSL router/modem and one other ADSL router/modem. I wrote a failover script so that the Linux box will switch between our primary Internet link (the Cisco modem) and our secondary link (the Netgear modem). For Roam Consulting, it’s the exact opposite. The script also had to take into account the fact that our SMTP server has to change depending upon which link is in use (we don’t have our own internal mail server). I set up a couple of dummy DNS zones and the failover script adjusts the zone files accordingly (i.e. changes the IP address associated with the hostname ‘smtp’ and increments the serial number for the zone). We’re putting each company (global-roam and Roam Consulting) onto its own subnet, separated by the Linux gateway. This means that we have also had to set up a Windows domain controller for our subnet.

So, that was my week. The weekend will be spent finishing the deSide setup file and then hunting for a reputable building and pest inspector. There are a couple I like the look of, and Karen also has some ideas of who to use, so it shouldn’t be too hard to arrange, assuming they’re not all booked out for the next few weeks. Tomorrow evening Karen’s parents are taking us out to dinner for a belated engagement celebration, which I’m really looking forward to. Also, I hope I find the thirty minutes I’ll need to touch up my responses to my thesis examiners’ reports. (Hmm, I suppose I could have been doing that now instead of writing this long blog entry). Finally, I’m looking forward to sleeping a bit. :-)

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Random observations

Melbourne

I’ve just returned from Melbourne where I presented a paper at The 9th International Conference on Knowledge-Based Intelligent Information & Engineering Systems (KES 2005) and visited some relatives. The trip served to reinforce how much I like Melbourne. The conference venue was quite spiffy (Hilton on the Park), though there was lots of audio interference between some of the rooms. Conference attendees who registered as students (like me) didn’t get a copy of the proceedings in hard or soft copy (although I’m glad I didn’t get the hard copy, which came in four LNCS volumes), nor did their fee provide entrance to the cocktail party of conference dinner. This turned out okay because I found the really nice little restaurant that Karen and I went to last time (corner of Little Collins St and Block Place). There was an awesome mariachi band playing. Those guys totally rocked. The food was great too.

I saw the part of the National Gallery of Victoria that Karen and I didn’t get to see last time. There was a temporary exhibition of about 100 pieces from the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, but I’d already seen them all with Karen when we visited Holland earlier in the year. There was also an exhibition of some of Albrecht Dürer’s sketches. I was impressed by some of the pieces the gallery has managed to procure for its permanent collection. There were several paintings by Rubens (though Rubens was so prolific that his pieces seem to be everywhere) and Rembrandt as well as a Monet.

All in all a good trip. I didn’t get to meet Rhys because he’s galavanting around South East Asia on business again.

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Random observations

The Ashes: England on the verge

England have very nearly reclaimed the Ashes after a brilliant innings from Kevin Pietersen. It’s a mere formality now, so I’m heading to bed.

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Random observations

Staying with cable for now

Mum and Dad have returned from Fiji after being over there for four months. As a birthday/Fathers’ Day/anniversary/welcome home present for Dad, Nigel and I decided to buy a wireless ADSL modem/router. Essentially we wanted to allow Dad to use his laptop from anywhere in the house and possibly across the road in the park, and later to connect to the Internet via ADSL when Nigel and I finally fly the nest. We settled on the ZyXEL P-661HW. Right now we’re still on Bigpond cable paying $69.95. I’m happy to pay that since there are three of us making good use of the Internet connection. But Dad will want a cheaper alternative when he’s the only one using the net and when he has to pay for it. :-) I looked at a couple of ADSL 2 and ADSL 2+ plans today, and it’s possible to save a fair bit if you don’t mind being capped after downloading 500MB or so in a month. I also checked to see what speeds we were currently getting on our cable modem. We seem to get 9.5Mbps from bmods.briscomp.org.au. Bigpond’s website says that you can experience download speeds of up to 5Mb per second, but we’re obviously getting more than this. I remember when we first had the cable installed the technician said that it’s possible we could get 10Mbps uncapped. Of course, this varies at any given moment depending upon how many other people in our area are using cable. Although ADSL 2 can theoretically reach speeds of 12Mbps and ADSL 2+ can reach twice that, you need to be living really close to the exchange to see speeds anything like that. So until I move out, we’re staying on cable. There’ve been hardly any problems with it so far.