Category: Random observations

I decided to relieve a spell of thesis writing boredom today by doing a bit of web surfing. I found a few interesting sites. I liked this site. You can watch a whole bunch of anti-Bush television commercials. I also came across Outfoxed, the web site promoting a documentary that examines Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News Channel. Check ’em out.

Don’t you just love election time? We’re offering a tea set, says one lot. We’ll see their tea set and raise them a set of steak knives, says the other lot. Will the Medicare issue ever die? I’m sure the government very recently made changes to Medicare (the so called safety net), so why weren’t these changes made back then?

For me, this upcoming election won’t be about voting somebody particular in, it will be all about voting John Howard and the Liberals out. I’ve voted Liberal in a Federal election before, but I cannot, with a clear conscience, vote for somebody who has systematically lied to the nation, committed us to an illegal war and abused the trust that we put in him and his party. This election is about something much deeper than interest rates, economics and Medicare. This election is about what is fundamentally right and wrong. I would like to believe that my fellow Australians will put those issues above economics and all the rest of it.

Our family was considering signing up for Foxtel because they have exclusive rights to the English Premier League, and will also have exclusive rights to the new Australian soccer league when it starts up in 2005. But we all decided it was far too expensive. We couldn’t justify the cost. At almost $50 a month just for the basic package, and up to $229 to get connected, it isn’t worth it. Furthermore, the "special offer" from Telstra which gives you 50 free local calls a month if your phone service is with Telstra and if you get Foxtel through them is anything but special. If you also have Bigpond Internet then you get 125 free local calls. Who the heck makes 125 local calls a month? The offer is insulting. A real offer would give you a discount on your phone bill every month, regardless of how many calls you make. Maybe free line rental or something. Whatever. As it stands, it’s a disgusting joke. Cost aside, by far the majority of reviews I’ve read about Foxtel Digital are negative. Existing Foxtel customers especially (the ones who upgraded from analogue to digital) seem to be aggrieved and complain about the customer service. Google it for yourself.

In order to improve the performance of the blog, I’ve moved Tomcat over onto a faster machine. Apache is still running on an old box, though. I’m currently trying to get a newer version of Apache talking to Tomcat. When that happens, I’ll move Apache over to the faster machine as well. As it stands there is a huge performance improvement. I hope this improvement is noticeable for users on the other side of my cable modem!

We had a leisurely Sunday. It started out by giving Dad a few goodies for Father’s Day. Nigel then took Dad to see The Corporation at the Schonell Theatre. Dad thought it was great. Then we went to Fasta Pasta at Stones Corner. Pretty good. I’ll go there again sometime.

I heard from K last night. She’s enjoying herself in London. She’s seen Buckingham Palace, Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament among other things. She’s off to Nottingham with Jaga today.

Tomorrow (er, today, even) is a stay at home and write thesis day. Hopefully the day after will be much the same, except that I have prac supervision first thing on Tuesday morning.

The Corporation – now there’s a good documentary. I saw this at the Schonell Theatre this evening. What a pity it’s showing at only a handful of cinemas around the country. Everyone concerned about their future should go and see this film (yes, the whole 2 hours and 20 minutes of it). This film examines the inner workings of the entity that has come to be known as the corporation. Startlingly, corporations in the US have been granted many of the same rights as human beings. Strangely, corporations assert these rights under the 14th amendment – an amendment to the US constitution intended to bestow rights upon the slaves freed by the Civil Rights Act of 1866. Over time, for whatever reason, corporations came to be viewed as persons, and were thus accorded the same rights as persons. Yet, corporations do not have a sense of ethics, they have no moral conscience. In fact, and as the documentary so skillfully demonstrates, corporations have the mindset of a psychopath. They have no regard for anything, except their duty to their shareholders and to the bottom line. One thing I found immensely pleasing about this documentary is that the makers were so sure of their convictions and so confident about the message they were seeking to put across that they were not afraid to interview proponents on both sides of the fence. Nobody could accuse this film of being biased. For me, this is one of the things that makes it a much better documentary than Michael Moore’s recent films (Michael Moore is interviewed in The Corporation, however, and it could be said that his comments in this film are rather more poignant than most of his commentary in his own films). In short, I cannot emphasize the importance of this film enough. Just do yourself a favour and see this film.

Meanwhile, my brother’s watching Mary Poppins. That’s a pretty long movie too. All the spoonfuls of sugar and chim chim cherees add up to three hours (including ads, too).

I wrote a little bit more of my thesis. I spent a lot of time trying to explain how I’d derived an equation which describes the way a resource description spreads through the network. I’m not sure that what I’ve written is very clear. The approach to take from now on, I think, is to just write everything down, and then come back and fix it later. Seeing the pages of writing pile up provides an incentive to keep writing, so I reckon I should just write while I’m in the mood for it, and worry about trying to improve the quality later. This policy would seem to concur with expert advice I’ve received from my thesis writing consultant. :)

I dropped K off at the airport this morning. Everything went smoothly. At this instant she should be at Changi Airport in Singapore awaiting her connecting flight to London.

After dropping K off at the airport I came home and read through the paper I’m writing with RGW. It needs a lot of work, and it’s due this Friday. It’s going to be close. I made lots of annotations and sent the annotated version of the manuscript to RGW.

I wrote a little program today that "implements" the mathematical model of my local-area protocol. It just gives me an idea of how the network becomes covered by a particular resource. So things are generally going well with my work at the moment. However, I’ll probably take to working from home again as I attempt to get my thesis completely written.

My friend, Ernie, sent me some really cool pictures from Europe via e-mail. Check them out!

K leaves for England tomorrow. I’m so envious!

The weekend was tiring but fulfilling. Muscles (what pass for muscles, at least) sore. K’s move is now complete. Had dinner at the Blue Fin club in Inala with K’s parents to celebrate the culmination of weeks of hard work.

The coming weeks and months ahead will be dedicated to thesis writing. But first I have to help RGW write (or modify) one last paper. I’ve also been roped into doing three hours of coms3200 pracs per week, but that’s nothing. Thesis progress is looking up, as I’ve recently made significant inroads into formulating a mathematical description of the ant-foraging part of my protocol. I had kind of left this bit for last because, well, it involves maths. But it’s looking good now. The mathematical model enables me to calculate expected results against which I can compare the results from my experiments. This worked beautifully for the wide-area part of protocol. The results agreed perfectly with the mathematical model. There would have been something very wrong with either the maths or the implementation if this wasn’t the case, since the wide-area protocol is deterministic, and should therefore be directly calculable. If nothing else, the comparison shows that the wide-area implementation has been implemented properly. The local-area ant-foraging protocol is a completely different kettle of fish. The way in which resource descriptions propagate through the network is non-linear and stochastic. The mathematical model, therefore, is probabilistic and far more complicated than the wide-area model. But I’m pretty sure I’ve reduced this to a mathematical expression that adequately describes the behaviour of the protocol. So, for the last week, I’ve been writing up the analysis chapter of my thesis. It’s going well, I think.

On Monday and Tuesday this week I attended the 2004 DSTC Symposium. In fact I gave a presentation entitled "Context-Sensitive Resource Discovery for Mobile Computing Environments". It outlined the work that I’ve been doing recently. I’ve also submitted a paper with a similar title to the Mobile Computing and Communications Review.

A couple of weekends ago, I went and saw Fahrenheit 9/11. I didn’t think that much of it, to be completely honest. I felt strangely dissatisfied when I walked out of the cinema. Over and above the general point that the film made (that George W is an idiot), I thought the documentary hung together very loosely. First it pointed out that Bush was never democratically elected. Fair enough. Then it highlights his links with the bin Laden family. Okay. Then it goes off on another tangent questioning the invasion of Iraq and the seemingly pointless loss of lives. Granted, these things are all related to President Bush, but they didn’t tie together in the film very well at all. I’m quite surprised that top film critics like Pomeranz, Stratton and Ebert found the documentary to be an impressive piece of film-making.

It seems I haven’t documented the Sydney trip yet. Here’s a short overview, we stayed at a cheap motel in Surry Hills. We visited the Maritime Museum with Nigel’s friend Max, and ate dinner at Max’s place too. I spent Saturday with MM. We saw The Chronicles of Riddick (quality entertainment, not) at Bondi Junction. After that we headed out to Bondi Beach. Stayed there for dinner. On the Sunday, Nigel and I spent the morning and part of the afternoon at Taronga Zoo. The baby chimps were cute. In the evening we took the train to Hurstville to visit our cousins, aunt and uncle. On Monday we went to the botanical gardens and the War Memorial. Then we flew back to Brisbane. I’ll have photos up soon. Anyway, it was a nice weekend.

Nigel has since commenced his employment with THQ. He’s really enjoying it. It makes a big difference to your state of mind when you’re doing exactly what you want to be doing.

K is going to England for a conference. Actually, she and JI are running a workshop at UbiComp. She leaves in just over a week, and stops off in Singapore for another conference on the way back. Fun. She also received notice today that the school has accepted her thesis and recommended she be awarded a Ph.D. Cool! Now she just has to get a few copies bound, but I suspect she might make some changes to her thesis first…

Bed time.

I submitted the MC2R paper today. I love writing papers on my own! I’ll be presenting the core ideas from that paper at the 2004 DSTC Symposium in mid-August. For some unknown reason, my presentation will be one of five given on the second day, which is the Participant Forum. The Participants are those companies and institutions who make up the board of the DSTC (or something like that). This includes companies like Telstra, Boeing, Sun Microsystems and the Queensland Government.

So we’re off to Sydney tomorrow morning. Our flight is at 8am. Flying Virgin Blue. Should be a good weekend, but apparently I’m not allowed to climb over the top of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Never allowed to ride my brother’s motorcycle either, for that matter.

I’m tired. Really tired. Six o’clock start in the morning. Hmm…

I’m writing a paper at the moment with the provisional title A Context-Sensitive Service Discovery Protocol for Mobile Computing Environments. It is to be submitted to the Mobile Computing and Communications Review (MC2R). In that paper I describe an approach for

1. enabling queries and advertisements to be context-sensitive, and
2. allowing applications to be context-aware by issuing context-sensitive queries.

These goals are achieved by enabling sub-queries to stand in for actual query components. These sub-queries differ from those of say, SQL, in that the author of the query needn’t be fully aware of the structure of that sub-query. Rather, the sub-query can be specified in very general, abstract terms, and the protocol does the rest. For instance, if a user needs to issue a query sensitive to the current location, except that she is not aware of her location, she creates a query for the type of service she’s looking for but leaves the location components for the service discovery infrastructure to fill in. The infrastructure can fill in the location information by any means available to it. A poor man’s solution is to fill in the missing components using approximate location information which can be provided by the resolver that receives the query (i.e. the resolver, because it’s fixed furniture, can be preconfigured with its own location and use this to augment any location-sensitive queries it receives). Alternatively, and increasingly likely because of the headway being made into location services research, a location manager can announce the user’s location as an advertisement every time the user’s location changes (i.e. if the user moves from one room to another). This advertisement can then be used to complete the context-sensitive query. Note that advertisements can also be context-sensitive. In addition, query results are ranked by a preference mechanism, and the query relaxation function (called scoping in Superstring) enable some neat things to be done. Furthermore queries can be made persistent, so that they become rather like subscriptions in a content-based messaging protocol such as Elvin. I’m not going to elaborate on this further because I’ve spent the best part of the last week writing about it. Some more later, perhaps.

I had a lovely weekend. Saturday consisted of cleaning, eating lunch at Sherwood Forest Park, shopping and watching Benny and Joon. Sunday was very easy going. So easy going that I don’t really remember what I did, except that it involved reading some papers and a couple of articles from New Scientist. Stephen Hawking has done a back flip with respect to his prior view that no information can escape from a black hole. Some guy in Taiwan has conducted a study that shows that people get less frustrated when computers apologise for being stupid (or at least when they don’t give terse feedback when something goes wrong). Another article says that it’s not necessarily a good thing to be intelligent. I’ve been trying to tell my intelligent friends that for years, so this is great news! ;). It seems likely that Poincaré’s conjecture (to do with topologies, and which I’m not even going to pretend to understand) has been solved by a Russian mathematician named Perelman. This isn’t exactly recent news, but it’s taking a long time for his work to be peer reviewed.

Nigel and I are going to Sydney this weekend for the hell of it. I hope to see my cousins and MM. Actually I’ll be seeing MM on Saturday, but haven’t yet organised to see the cousins. Better call them right now…