Category: Random observations

‘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.

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.

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!

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!

So my hard disk died. Luckily, I now backup the important stuff, like this blog, for instance! :) So it was easy enough to restore. But I’m short a few MP3 files. We have most of those backed up on CD, though. Hard disk prices are amazing these days. I bought a 120GB disk for $158. That’s $1.30 or so per gigabyte! A few years ago that would have been unthinkable.

I was in thesis writing mode today, so I wrote another three or so pages. It’s the first time I’ve touched my thesis in quite some time. The bridge thing is coming on well also. I checked the high-level design with Jaga and she was pleased. It looks as though I’ll have an honours student to implement the bridge for me and to investigate various specification languages for translation tasks. Hopefully that works out well. Last year’s honours student was excellent. He ended up winning the DSTC prize for his honours thesis, which was to do with bridging INS/Twine and Jini. We should be able to get a paper out of that, especially seeing as though he will return as a Ph.D student this year.

Mum and Dad are moving back to Fairfield today. The Caloundra unit has been sold. No more free weekends at the beach. D’oh! Nigel and I have shifted some furniture into the garage to make way for the furniture from Caloundra, which is newer. I’ve rearranged my room a little bit to accomodate a sofa and another bookshelf. It looks a lot roomier now, even with a stack of boxes piled in the corner. It will still look roomier than it was when the furniture arrives. So I’m staying home today in order to direct the removalists where to put everything. They should be here shortly.

Another year is over, and a new one is beginning. Frankly I’m glad to see the back of 2003. Christmas was quiet, as Mum was in Fiji attending a funeral. That meant that I had to cook the Christmas dinner. Thankfully it was one of my better efforts! Santa brought me a cover for my mobile phone, a shirt and a copy of Pride and Prejudice. New Year’s Eve passed very quietly, too. Mum was back, but we all just played Quizzit until midnight.

Well, I’ve just about finished coding and debugging my Ants protocol. It’s working nicely now under the J2ME Wireless Toolkit simulation environment. It should also work OK on my Siemens M55. Now I’m wondering what to do next in terms of my Ph.D. I think I’ll design the protocol bridge/gateway thingy. Had enough programming for a couple of weeks at least. Oh, and I’m resigned to the fact that there’s no way I’m going to complete within three years. Three and a quarter to three and a half is looking more realistic, but I’m still going to aim for an August completion.

To tutor or not to tutor, that is the question. I have to figure out whether I’m going to tutor distributed computing again this semester. RW sounds keen on doing it, but Jaga asked me to do it. We’ll all have to sit down and work out what’s happening.

In addition to receiving a copy of Pride and Prejudice, I’ve also been lent Jude the Obscure and Two on a Tower. I’m still reading The Count of Monte Cristo, which is enormous. Then there’s also Don Quixote and Far From the Madding Crowd sitting on my bookshelf waiting to be read. Good lord!

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.

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!

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 4^th 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!!!