Category: Random observations

Damn! I should have gotten this phone instead of my M55. I bet it doesn’t do GPRS and run Java though. :)

I had a long and tiring day today. In the study session at Ipswich today we went through last year’s exam. I stood in front of the whiteboard for four hours straight. My head hurts.

Makybe Diva gets up to win the Melbourne Cup. Zagalia finished fifth after leading into the straight. Not a bad effort from barrier 24!

Note to self: a client or service node in hybrid Superstring need not know whether it is connecting to a dynamic environment or a stable one, and hence doesn’t need to choose which routing layer to use. In the wide-area protocol client and service nodes connect to a DHT resolver by the same means as all nodes in the ant-based protocol connect to each other. Therefore, the only requirement is that if a node is to be a resolver in the wide-area protocol, it must realise it needs to use the wide-area DHT based protocol. Some administrative intervention may be allowable since resolver nodes are long lived and will be under the control of a systems administrator. All other nodes simply communicate with the ad-hoc protocol.

So it’s Melbourne Cup day yet again. I’m not at all a fan of horse racing. I just don’t understand the idea of some little guy racing around a track on top of a horse. Yet, I always end up watching the damn race. Aussie tradition wins through, I guess. Apparently a horse named Frightening is the favourite after Mummify was scratched. I’m backing Zagalia, but for no particular reason.

Bigpond’s email problems appear to be over for the moment. However, I still needed to call up Bigpond Technical Support to get them to remove a garbled e-mail message from my mail queue. There was like half an e-mail or something in my mail queue which didn’t want to be downloaded and was causing I/O errors for both my POP client and Telstra’s webmail interface. It prevented me from downloading any messages via POP. It was obviously a problem caused by all the work they’ve had to do because of the huge increase in mail volume going through their servers. Anyway it’s all fixed now, and I can finally access my Bigpond mail. It’s the first time since October 18!

I changed my mind about Vodafone ‘no plans’. I’ve gone with Virgin Mobile instead. It means you have to pre-pay, but the rates are great and you get ages to use up all your credits. Depending upon the value of the recharge you get either 180 or 365 days to use your credits. On Vodafone’s ‘red SIM’ you only get 30 days to use your credits unless you choose the ‘365 option’ which gives you a year. However, if you choose that option then you can say goodbye to all the cheaper rates. So I’ve finally had a good play around with my new phone (most of the functions aren’t available until you stick a SIM card in). I love it! It has a voice dialling option that allows you to assign a ‘voice print’ to an address book entry. Then when you want to call that number you just repeat the ‘voice print’. So I can say something like Mum and Dad and it will dial Mum and Dad’s number. Pretty cool, huh? So, as you can imagine, I haven’t got too much work done today. :-/ The novelty of my new toy will wear off soon, I’m sure.

Speaking of work, I need to rewrite bits of the paper that was rejected from MDM. That’s the coolest paper I’ve written, so trust it to be the one that got rejected! Now that I’ve progressed a little further in my work since writing that paper, there’s lots of ways I can make it less philosophical and a bit more design oriented. Since I don’t have any Spanish lesson tonight, I can be working on my paper instead. Maybe. :-P

I’ve just arrived back from a weekend at Caloundra. It’s Mum’s birthday tomorrow, so we celebrated it today instead. Yesterday we took her to a movie of her choice – Japanese Story – and shouted her lunch. We also got her a bottle of Red Door perfume. Then today Dad shouted us all to a Jazz breakfast. A fantastic weekend! I also ended up buying a Siemens M55. I got it from Allphones at Maroochydore for $389. Vodafone turned out to be the most expensive of the lot, asking over $500 for the M55! Now I just need to go to Indooroopilly or the city tomorrow and get connected.

Friday was the Innovation Expo where honours and Ph.D students from IT and Engineering got to show off their projects to industry representatives, lecturers, school children and general passersby. I had a poster on show. It was actually a lot of fun explaining what my project is all about to other people, many of whom may have no idea what service discovery is all about. Unfortunately, there didn’t seem to be a large delegation of visitors from industry. But I had to leave at 5pm. Perhaps all the industry people came along after they finished up at work. One person from industry was really interested in my work, but having thought more deeply about the intended application that he described, I’m not sure service discovery is the best solution. Nevertheless, I have to e-mail with the details of my work. There were quite a few interesting projects around the expo to look at, and it was great to learn about what other people around the school are doing.

The Information Environments program at Ipswich campus had their expo day last Tuesday. I would have really liked to go, but two days a week at Ipswich is already quite a bit, and I needed to get a move along with my own work. Some of the projects at Ipswich are really, really cool. Many of the projects had something to do with physical/virtual hybrid environments. For example, one project implemented an air hockey game where one player plays with a real mallet, and the other player uses a virtual mallet on screen. Another was a race between a team in the physical world and a team in the virtual world to defuse bombs. So there were some really great demonstrations, and the lecturers from St Lucia who attended were really impressed.

I’m really glad that a lot of my Ipswich students appear to be putting in a lot of hard work for COMS3200. When I can see the students are really trying, it makes it so much easier for me to put in extra effort to help them along. I really hope they do well this year, and I have confidence that some of them will.

The fan that sits on top of my VIA KT266A Chipset (whatever that is) in my computer is driving me nuts. It’s either just vibrating or the motor that drives the fan is flagging. I can’t find a small enough Phillips head screwdriver to undo the screws holding the fan on, so for now I’ve taken to sticking my finger or something else into the fan, which stops it vibrating for a few hours, or even all day/night if I’m lucky. You won’t find that technique in the PC repair manual!

Twice now Vodafone sales reps have failed to get back to me with a price on the Siemens M55. Last Saturday when I was in their store, one of the staff said he thought Vodafone was offering the M55 for $350, which is the best price I’ve found for it so far. To be honest, I’d be very surprised if they were selling it for that price. I think the sales rep might have gotten his wires crossed. Initially he tried to tell me it was $180 or something, then realised that was the A55, not the M55!

Man, I am seriously going to jam a wrench in that fan in a minute!

To keep my readership happy, I will be offering an RSS feed of this blog very shortly. Since I’m going to be playing around with my blogging app, I’ll add a few other features that are missing from the current version. For example, there are no permalinks for each entry, which means that in order to read anything, you have to visit a page with a whole month’s worth of entries on it. I’ll let you know when the RSSified version of my blog is live.

It’s my last Spanish lesson for the year tonight. We have an exam in two weeks. Thankfully the exam sounds a lot easier than what we’ve been doing in class lately!

Check out the Siemens M55 here. If anyone can think of a similar phone that costs less than $AU400, please let me know by the end of the week.