RickyRobinson.id.au

Category: Random observations

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

  • Inside NICTA

    I’ve instituted a new post category on The Thin Line called “Inside NICTA”. NICTA is, of course, where I currently work. In this category I’ll be writing about things going on inside Australia’s information and communications technology Centre of Excellence, singing its praises and challenging it to be even better than it currently is, all the while being careful not to overstep any boundaries (and getting fired for troubles). RickyRobinson.id.au will be reserved for updates about the particular research I’m working on and the odd NICTA event announcement (again, there are intellectual property considerations that need to be kept in mind), while this weblog will continue to play host to a wide range of topics.

    This weblog has been conspicuously quiet on the topic of NICTA, given that I spend most of my waking hours there. I intend for that to change. I want to do my bit to give NICTA the exposure it deserves and needs. I want to promote NICTA as being a great place for people to work, and in so doing, hopefully attract smart and creative people to work at NICTA, thereby making it an even better place to work. However, I also want to push NICTA to be all that it can be (not that I believe this weblog could have a major influence!), and so I will, from time to time, post constructive criticisms of NICTA. In the absence of a NICTA-specific blogging policy, I will abide by Sun Microsystem’s well known blogging policy. I am doing this in the tradition of many bloggers before me, from the Scoble‘s to the Zawodny‘s of the blogosphere. A final hope is that this new post category, in conjunction with the new look RickyRobinson.id.au, will attract potential research collaborators. So if you’re interested in any of the research I do (which you can read about over at RickyRobinson.id.au), just drop me a line: ricky at rickyrobinson.id.au.

    I hope you enjoy reading the new Inside NICTA section of this weblog. As always, feel free to leave comments and pingbacks: my intention is to engage the readers of The Thin Line with this new category.

  • RickyRobinson.id.au gets a facelift

    RickyRobinson.id.au has served as my personal website for many years now, although I think that it has been rather usurped by The Thin Line in recent times. To address this concern, RickyRobinson.id.au will now serve as my professional website, documenting my research and listing my publications. The Thin Line weblog will now be the place to find anything to do with my personal life, although I’m still wondering whether to host photos on this weblog or to upload them to Flickr. RickyRobinson.id.au has been given a facelift to coincide with this separation of professional and personal content. I hope you like its new look.

  • Evolution 2 versus Thunderbird versus The Rest

    I would like to know which e-mail/calendar application you are using, or which one you would prefer to use if you weren’t constrained by platform, and why. Your responses may include applications that run under Windows, Linux or Mac.

  • Hello 2007

    It’s a new day. It’s a new year. And a great year it will be.

    Happy New Year to one and all!

  • More books

    Karen and I went to Sunnybank to watch Charlotte’s Web today. I was glad to find we weren’t the only adults in the cinema. Not a bad movie at all. Hearing Steve Buscemi do the voice of Templeton the rat was worth it alone. After the movie we had lunch at the impressive Landmark Chinese restuarant which is just outside the shopping complex. It does yum cha every day. It has a very nice interior, and it seems extremely popular, particularly with the local Chinese community.

    While we were at Sunnybank, I used the voucher my brother gave me for Christmas to buy Animal Farm and a book called How to Get Things Done, by David Allen. The second book was recommended by my friend Rhys, whom I saw at our annual UQIT2K Christmas gathering (UQIT2K being the name of the mailing list we set up after we graduated from ITEE at UQ in 2000). I figure I need to get a bit more organised. After taking an official Myers-Briggs test at the NICTA retreat, I found out that I’m an ENTP. I’m only marginally ‘E’. I used to be an ‘I’, and my personality is only E-like at work. I’m definitely ‘N’, ‘T’ and ‘P’. The ‘P’ means I’m laissez faire, disorganised and a bit chaotic. While the laid back thing is good, I’d like to organise some aspects of my life a bit better, which will hopefully give me more time to do more stuff, such as reading all those books I still have to read!

  • Saddam hanged

    Saddam Hussein was an incredibly evil man; however, he should not have been hanged. The death penalty is a relic of times past and it is wrong in every instance. Might it have been better for Iraq’s future to show Saddam the mercy that he never showed anyone?

  • My Christmas haul

    I already mentioned that I was given the book Nineteen Eighty-Four for Christmas (by my parents-in-law). I’m enjoying it much more this time around than when I read it for the first time sometime during my teens. Karen bought me the new U2 CD, U218 Singles. It’s a compilation of U2’s greatest hits, plus two new singles. She also got me a nice pair of Jensen headphones to replace the dodgy ones I have at work. Mum got me some clothes (I was hanging out for a new pair of shorts – I’m utterly hopeless at buying new clothes when I need to, though my Mum and Karen are trying to correct that flaw), Dad got me a 2007-2008 calendar of Italy, which I’ll hang in my office space at work, and Nigel got me some chocolates and an Angus and Robertson book voucher. I’ll probably spend the book voucher on The Road to Serfdom, Capitalism and Freedom or Animal Farm. Karen and I also bought ourselves some goodies, such as the Canon MVX430 video camera.

  • What’s Ricky reading?

    I’ve spent the last year or so working my way through Don Quixote, and I’m still nowhere near completing it. It’s not that it’s a bad book, it’s more that I’ve been reading multiple other things at the same time. At the moment I’m reading Nineteen Eighty-Four, which I was given for Christmas, and a micro-economics text book (I don’t know why). I’ve also just started reading Einstein’s Relativity – The Special and the General Theory which I found on Karen’s bookshelf. I’ve also become and avid reader of the The Economist, which NICTA QRL has a subscription of. That newspaper (yes, I know it looks like a magazine, but it’s a newspaper, okay) invariably makes for interesting reading. It has become my primary source for keeping abreast of what’s happening in the world. The writing is excellent, and whenever an argument is made in favour or against a policy etc., it is always well reasoned. It also has good coverage of the most important or interesting scientific news of the week, and each quarter it has a special section on technology, which is often very cool.

    So much to read, so little time…

  • Canon MVX430

    Yesterday, in the post-Christmas sales, Karen and I bought a Canon MVX430 video camera. We’d been saying for a while that we should invest in a video camera to take on holidays etc. After reading all the reviews, deciding we didn’t need an absolute top-of-the-line camera and agreeing that we didn’t want to spend more than $1000, we came to the conclusion that the Canon Elura 100 would be perfect for us. The respected camcorder.info website rated the Elura 100 the best video camera in any class for 2006. But it turns out that the Elura is not sold in Australia, at least not under that name. After doing some specification comparisons, I realised that the MVX430 and the Elura 100 were the same, except that the Elura 100 has 20x optical zoom as compared to 18x for the MVX430. The digital zoom also differs between the two. And of course, the MVX430 is PAL-based whereas the Elura 100 is NTSC-based. My suspicions were confirmed by a discussion on the camcorder.info bulletin board. There is a camera being sold in the UK called the MVX460 which is more-or-less an exact match of the Elura. For some reason it isn’t being sold in Australia. Anyway, we ended up getting the MVX430 for $679 from JB-HiFi, who were good enough to match Myer’s sale price. That’s more than $100 less than the RRP. I’ll be getting a further $75 back from Canon when I claim the Christmas cashback offer.

    My poor computer has begun its decline towards the scrapheap (or recycling heap, that is). One of the fans has gone, and it isn’t a part that can be replaced any more, such is the pace of change these days. Furthermore, neither Karen’s nor my own computer supports firewire (or USB 2.0 for that matter) meaning we can’t transfer any video footage from our new camera to the computer. My ancient computer monitor, which predates my current computer, died a couple of months ago. That has since been replaced with a sexy Dell 20-inch widescreen LCD monitor. No sooner had I replaced my monitor than the trouble with the fan began. Anyway, it looks like you can put together a very decent box for little cost these days. Another alternative might be to buy a PCI firewire card for my current computer, but that depends on how long my PC is likely to last without the deceased fan (which I believe is for the onboard video). We’ll see.

  • Middleware 2006

    The week before last, Karen and I attended Middleware 2006 along with Jaga and a couple of our students. I attended the Middleware for Sensor Networks conference (MidSens 2006) to present a paper that Karen and wrote, and Karen was running the Middleware Doctoral Symposium (MDS 2006). MidSens and MDS were on the same day, which is why we both got to go to Melbourne to attend the conference. We spent the first day at the Advanced Data Processing in Ubiquitous Computing (ADPUC 2006) workshop.

    From all accounts, MDS was a real success, and I’m a little disappointed that I couldn’t attend. Karen was able to get some pretty well-known people, including Maarten van Steen and Michi Henning, to play the role of mentors/panelists for the day. I think MidSens was also successful. It had a kind of buzz around it. ADPUC could have done with a few controversial papers to get some discussions going. The Middleware conference itself, which ran for the last three days of the week, was a mixed bag. The papers, in general, were of high quality (apparently many high quality papers were rejected), but as would be expected of a conference with such a broad theme, not all the papers appealed to my interests. One thing I did learn is that the Middleware conference might not be a bad place to try to submit my own papers, since there were a couple of papers in the area of pervasive computing.