Category: Random observations

Tax return deadline: October 31.

Another working week begins. No fire alarms today; nothing exciting at all, in fact. Did some more marking. Hopefully will finish that by tomorrow afternoon. I attended the complex systems lecture as usual. This one was on economics from a complex systems point of view. It seemed very high-level to me, but then my mind started wandering toward the end. And just now I got home from my spanish lesson, during which we were introduced to yet another tense. I have tenses coming out of my ears now!

Shortly, tomorrow or the day after, I should know whether I’m going to Berkeley, California for a conference. The notifications of acceptance should have been sent around on Friday, our time, but for some reason they’re running late. Fingers crossed, anyway.

We received some Liberal Party propaganda in the mail today. Apparently local elections are coming up. They’re promising to build five tunnels thereby creating three river crossings (not quite sure how that works) at critical locations to ease traffic congestion. I’ve promised myself not to take too much interest in political issues, world events and suchlike, for a while anyway. So perhaps I shouldn’t be reading Stupid White Men right now. Hmm.

I just remembered I still haven’t filled out my tax return! Better do that sooner rather than later. When’s the deadline, I wonder?

This evening I finished reading The Three Musketeers. I found it to be enthralling, inspiring, romantic and tragic all at once. The Disney movie is certainly very different to Dumas’ novel (although, I like the movie for what it is). The novel is a tale of intrigues and comradery, and shows how men in positions of power can use that power for their own ends. If anyone wants to read it, let me know because I own a copy of it.

Yesterday I bought a copy of The Count of Monte Cristo, another of Dumas’ novels. This was written at the same time as The Three Musketeers. This was my grandpa’s favourite book, so I’ve been meaning to read it for quite some time. I’m finally getting around to reading these classics, and I wish I’d started a long time ago. Tess was brilliant, The Musketeers I enjoyed thoroughly (but being a translation from the French, the quality of English writing can’t compare with that of Thomas Hardy’s; he was a master, as I’ve said before), and I’m sure I will be kept absorbed by Monte Cristo having seen the film and knowing that the book is always better than the film. I’m buying any classics that I wish to read, so slowly I’m building a Penguin Classics library.

I think in the last entry I wrote about my reading, I’d just finished Tess and was starting on Last Chance to See. The latter is an amusing look at some of the world’s endangered species, Douglas Adams style. If anything, that book caused me to reaffirm my status as a vegetarian! I must thank the great book lender in the sky for the loan of this book. Since finishing that, I’ve read The Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels. The Manifesto itself is only forty pages long (as published in the Penguin Classics format), but the 2002 Penguin Classics edition has 187 page introduction, most of which I found boring, and is published with seven different prefaces! To be honest, I’m not quite sure what to make of it all, and will reserve judgement until I’ve had a bit more time to digest it. I daresay I’ll be reading the forty pages again. On my first reading, it seemed like a call to the Proletariat to rise up against the Bourgeoisie, rather than being an all-encompassing ideology or economic paradigm. That brings us up to date with my reading (not that most of you care, I suspect :). I now start Stupid White Men by that most engagé of activists, Michael Moore. Courtesy of RW. (Thanks mate!)

Nigel and I went to see Pirates of the Caribbean yesterday (Saturday, though by the time I submit this, yesterday will be Sunday). Highly entertaining cinema, though by no means a great movie. Johnny Depp was very amusing as the perpetually inebriated Captain Jack Sparrow. See it if you want to laugh a bit or if you like lots of swashbuckling.

Wow! The fire alarm went off today, and for once there was a real, actual, flames and smoke FIRE! Admittedly the fire was in the garden outside GP South and not inside. It was contained with a garden hose or two and was put out before the fire engines arrived. Nevertheless, it managed to char quite a large section of the garden. About time there was some excitement in this place!

I’ve added a whole bunch of photos to my web site. They can be accessed here. They’ve been reduced to 640×480 resolution for faster downloading, but of course they don’t look quite as good as the originals. The gallery contains photos from Fairfield, Caloundra and Maleny among other places. Each photo also has a caption. Enjoy.

Boy am I tired tonight! I just returned from my Spanish lesson, where we learned yet another tense. I think we’ve learned four or five tenses and there’s still another nine or ten left!!! Earlier on in the day, I had a meeting with Jaga and RW about the paper we’re writing. It’s almost there, thank goodness. Now I really must get some sleep. Luckily there’s no football match that I’m obliged to get up and watch in the middle of the night!

Reminder to self: there’s a whole bunch of photos that I’ve taken that haven’t been published on my web site yet. Get your act together. What kind of dodgy, half-baked show are you running here? The people want to see photos. The people like photos. The more photos there are, the less chance there is of people seeing dodgy photos of me like the one here (Put the mouse cursor over the link with my name on it. That web page is slightly broken at the time of writing this entry, but I’m assured it will all be working again soon. Wait! That’s a bad thing for me!). That photo was taken when I most definitely was not riding around a Greek island on a moped without an appropriate licence. Never happened.

Nigel and I spent another weekend in the sunny climes of Caloundra. We took Dad to a jazz breakfast, which Mum organised, for Father’s Day. We gave Dad a bottle of red wine and a bottle of port. At the jazz breakfast we ended up winning another bottle of red wine in a raffle, so Dad should be very happy for the next month or two!

Nigel and I went to the beach and had a swim for the first time in ages. The water is still freezing. The swim was very invigorating.

Ph.D work is going v. well at the moment. I’ve written introductory sections for each of the chapters of my thesis (bar one or two). So I’m a couple of thousand words to the good already. Jaga’s also given me the go-ahead to start implementing my basic prototype. I feel like doing some coding because I’ve been writing papers for the last few months. Speaking of papers, the two that I’m working on at the moment are slowly taking shape. They’re both semi-complete. After those are done, there’s already another paper to write partly based on the work of an honours student to do with bridging service discovery protocols. So Jaga’s seems very pleased with my work at present, and that’s as much as I can hope for at this point. It’ll be fun to do some programming for once!

Jaga and I have also decided to implement my original ant-based algorithm as well as my deterministic algorithm. These will be implemented as two distinct routing layers underneath the service discovery layer. The ant-based algorithm does a better job than the deterministic algorithm in highly mobile, ad-hoc networks. In these environments, the deterministic (distributed hash table) based one pays too hefty a price for node failure, and for nodes joining and leaving the network. However, the hash table based algorithm does well where a large proportion of the query resolvers are static and permanent. This way, applications have the same interface to my service discovery protocol, and the appropriate routing layer can be selected depending on the type of underlying network.

Australia beat Jamaica 2-1 in Reading, England overnight. Australia completely dominated and should really have won by five or six goals. Those guys have got to start putting their chances away more often, because they had a lot of better than half-chances and didn’t capitalise on them. We might be able to get away with that against Jamaica, but against tougher opposition we’ll be made to pay for those misses. Apart from wasting a bundle of chances, Harry Kewell played awesomely, and Marco Bresciano had a great match.

I finally got around to seeing A Clockwork Orange last night. It was on the shelf in the video store for once! I don’t have time to say much about it; just recording the fact that I’ve seen it. A fantastic film.

RA cracks first. This entry is for him. :)

The month of August was eventful: saw tons of movies, went go-karting, went to the Ekka and progressed somewhat on my Ph.D.

Started writing my actual thesis, even though I’ve still got a lot of design work to complete. I’m determined not to leave all the writing for the last months of my Ph.D. Most of my work is done at home now. I only go in to uni for meetings, and this strategy is working a treat. I get more work done at home. Anyway, I’ve got a very unrealistic goal in mind for my thesis submission date, but I’m going for it anyway. I’m burying myself in my work, screw everything else. My Ph.D is enjoyable, but I need to finish fast so I can get the hell out of here and go, well, anywhere else really. I don’t care. Just need new surroundings, and the further away from here the better! My extended family in England were half expecting me to do my Ph.D over there, so perhaps I’ll try to set up shop in the UK for a few years or longer. Mum’s always wanted me to live in England so that she has an excuse to make the long trip from Australia. She loves the west country almost as much as I do, and she can urge Dad to come along too, who would happily tag along so long as it wasn’t winter! Dad’s stated reason for leaving England to come to Australia is that England is far too cold. If England doesn’t work out, then perhaps Spain. Perhaps somewhere else entirely.

I’ve also got plans for the period between thesis submission and acceptance (or Heaven forbid, rejection). That ought to be about a six month block, during which I want to go to South or Central America to do some aid work. If not there, then India. All this planning doesn’t seem like me at all, but times change, situations change, people change. I need some big goals to aim for in order to expedite my Ph.D completion. If the goals turn out to be too big, well, at least I’ll have finished sooner than I might otherwise have done.

Tutoring will take up a bit of time again, but most of the COMS3200 material is fused in my head from having tutored it for the past several years. So I find I don’t have to spend much time preparing. Assignment marking will consume most time as usual.

I’ve been spending an hour or so each morning in the garden. It helps clear my head, and the garden has fewer weeds than it did. :) It’s looking very nice at the moment, because all the flowers have started to bloom now that we’re coming into spring.

My parents are down for the weekend. We went to Southbank for Riverfire on Saturday night. I think Riverfire was attended by more people than ever before. It was packed! We got there at 4.30pm and all the prime spots along the river bank were already taken. By 7.30pm, when the fireworks actually started, there was no room to move. Two F-111s did simultaneous dump-and-burns. It was spectacularrrr! The only stupid thing was the political propaganda played over the air by Triple M during the fireworks display. Could have done without that.

I now also own a Tai Chi sword by way of my parents. They got it for me a couple of weeks ago. There’s a dragon and a Chinese inscription on the blade which apparently says something like "The number one sword in the world!" It’s not quite the Green Destiny (from Crouching Tiger) but very beautiful nevertheless. Of course it’s purposely blunted. You could do much more damage with a cricket bat (trust me, I’ve been cracked in the head with a cricket bat before, and it doesn’t tickle!). I still have to finish learning the Short Yang form, and then perhaps I can learn the sword form.

Woops. I screwed up the NetLogo link in my previous post. Here is the post again, with the link fixed up. I wonder whether I should try editing a post, or whether I’ll just end up deleting my whole blog again…

I just downloaded NetLogo – a modelling and simulation environment. With it, I hope to create a very high level model of my original, ant-based service discovery protocol. NetLogo comes with a whole array of models which you can run, and the user community has created a bunch more. I want to create a high level model for the benefit of the complex systems researchers around the place, who may know little or nothing about pervasive computing and service discovery. It would be excellent if I could get those guys thinking about pervasive computing environments as an interesting domain that bears further study. This simulation won’t be for the benefit of computer networks and distributed computing people, who most likely aren’t too bothered with these high level models. I’m making sure I have one foot in complex systems territory, so that I can branch in that direction if I want to once my Ph.D is complete. For me, the lure of complex systems is its application to a wide array of fields, or rather, the fact that complex systems are everywhere: computer networks, sociology, economics, physics, biology – everywhere! Potentially, this means one should never be bored studying complex systems. But I fear this is a gross misaprehension, as those actually studying complex systems are all too willing to tell me.

But right now I need to focus on writing that paper with Ted, and thinking more about aggregating service discovery domains. Here’s a problem that might or might not have a simple solution. If distinct groups of p2p devices are connected hierarchically, perhaps based on physical location, how does a service at the bottom of this hierarchy know how widely its service description should be advertised? That is, a service at the bottom can know nothing about the overall topology of the network, so how does it specify how far up the hierarchy its service description should be advertised? As a contrived example, imagine that all the services on one floor of a building form a p2p group. The next level up is the building, then the campus, then the city and so on. A printer service wants to advertise itself to the entire building, but how does it do this, given that it can’t know, a priori, the way the p2p groups are split up. In its service advertisement message, it could say “advertise this to the building level domain but no higher”, but it would only be guessing that a there is such a thing as a building level domain. The topology could be organised using any other hierarchical property. I haven’t thought about this too deeply yet, but hopefully the solution is not difficult. Of course this assumes we even want to introduce hierarchies of p2p groups into the model. This may break the scalability of the protocol altogether.

For non-computer scientist readers of my diary, I apologise for waffling on about all this technical stuff. But there are a couple of computer scientist friends of mine who’ve indicated their interest in what I’m doing at uni and how my ideas are evolving. Besides, I’ve found it very helpful to dump my ideas in here. Looking back over my diary, there is a definite pattern emerging relating diary entries containing my random ideas and my level of productivity in the days and weeks following. On at least two occassions, random thoughts dumped in here have culminated in a manuscript, one of which has been accepted to a conference, and the other which is currently undergoing a review process. If I hadn’t stupidly deleted all my entries before March, I’m sure I would have observed a flurry of Core Dump activity in the lead up to my confirmation seminar too. So it seems that I can use this diary as a first step toward getting something accomplished, and I’m hoping this continues to be the case. So, unfortunately for some, the boring technical stuff will continue to appear in here. You can always skip reading it anyway.

Ultimately, this diary is forme to look back on, even if I do write a good portion of it for the small readership it has acquired. It should go without saying that my most personal thoughts and any incidents I wish to keep private don’t make it onto these pages. Apparently, that point was not entirely obvious. I can be candid, but not that candid! If you want more than I’m giving you, well you can always go and watch Big Brother (a show that I detest, by the way) or something like that. This is a Bowdlerised version of my life, because I don’t think everyone wants to know about every single one of my highs and lows, or what I think about these luxury Japanese toilets ;). More to the point, I don’t want everybody to know the ins and outs of my life! That was never the point of this diary. Those of you thinking you can read this blog to get an accurate indication of my state of mind on any particular day are sadly mistaken. You know who you are :). Just a friendly piece of advice. But do keep reading! :)