Category: Random observations

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

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Random observations

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…

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Random observations

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.

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Random observations

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.

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Random observations

UQ does not exist (acccording to Google)

I still find it unbelievable that The University of Queensland, one of Australia’s largest universities and a member of the Group of 8, does not appear on Google’s list of universities. Apparently, the way a university gets onto the list is for large numbers of its students and faculty to ask Google to add the university to the list using a web form. After completing the form, it asks you to tell other people from your university to complete the form. Does the absence of UQ from Google’s list reflect an underlying apathy of UQ students and staff towards their university? Surely not. I have blogged on this topic before, but nothing seems to have changed in the meantime. I am hereby starting the campaign to get UQ on Google’s list. UQ students, staff and alumni, do your bit!

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Random observations

Cairns

We had intended to go to Cairns sometime just before Christmas, but Karen had to present a paper in Cairns on Tuesday so we decided to take our leave a bit early. We headed up to Port Douglas last Friday night straight after work and stayed there for three nights before returning to Cairns for another two nights.

While we were at Port Douglas we took a boat ride out to Low Isles. Absolutely beautiful. Saw heaps of green turtles while we were there. The tour operators, Quicksilver, were first class, and genuinely friendly. They had to deal with a whole bunch of people throwing up on the way out and on the way back. The seas were very choppy and we were in a largish sailing boat. The crew suggested that anyone who tends to get sea sick should take some preventative tablets (which they made freely available). I guess it didn’t work for some people. I don’t imagine that sea-sickness turned many people off their lunch, which was included, because it was mouthwateringly brilliant: prawns, chicken and a variety of salads.

On Sunday we saw the Daintree, Daintree River and Cape Tribulation with Billy Tea Bush Safaris. Again, it was wonderful. We spent a good part of the day cruising around in a big Landcruiser with ten others plus the driver. We saw some smallish saltwater crocodiles on our Daintree River cruise. The smallest was about 20cm long! Our boat driver, Bill Smith, was a real funny bloke, and he had eyes like a hawk. Unfortunately we didn’t spot any cassowaries in the Daintree Rainforest. I went for a swim in Emmagen Creek with some of the other people on our tour. Cape Tribulation was a very idyllic looking place, with its secluded beach and gentle waves.

Monday was spent walking around the town of Port Douglas. We walked up to the lookout for a nice view of the beach. Wouldn’t mind buying one of the houses up there on that hill! On Monday afternoon we caught the bus back to Cairns.

On Tuesday I walked Karen to the Cairns City Council building where she had to give a presentation to various government types. Then I headed off to Kuranda on the Skyrail cableway. The Skyrail was impressive in that it was a fairly long ride with two changeovers in the middle. At each changeover, you can do a five minute bushwalk through the Barron River Gorge rainforest. I had a cable car all to myself for the entire journey. Kuranda itself was pleasant, but extremely touristy. I checked out the markets and went for a couple of bushwalks through the rainforest. The train ride back to Cairns on the Kuranda Scenic Rail afforded some nice views of Barron River Gorge. Karen and I had dinner on the Esplanade.

We spent Wednesday wandering around Cairns. We checked out the main shopping centre. We got back home at around 8pm on Wednesday night. A nice holiday, and Karen’s presentation was very successful.

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Random observations

Call me slow…

… but I just noticed that Google Scholar has added citation exporting (which, for some reason, it calls importing; guess it depends which way you look at it) to a number of bibliography formats including Bibtex. To enable this feature, go to Google Scholar, then click the Scholar Preferences link next to the search bar. Scroll down to the bottom of the preferences page and you should see the relevant setting that you need to change.

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Random observations

From Zero to 1.65 billion in less than two years

Speaking of Google acquisitions, YouTube has been snapped up by the Web search giant for the not insignificant sum of US$1.65 billion. YouTube was founded in February 2005. Not a bad pay-off for twenty months’ work! Okay, so a lot of the work was probably done before the company was founded, but still…

Anyway, this acquisition comes less than two weeks after Mark Cuban suggested that you’d have to be a moron to buy YouTube because of the litany of lawsuits that are, apparently, just waiting to happen. Material is often posted to YouTube by users who are not the copyright owners.

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Random observations

More Writely

As I pointed out in my previous post, I have just discovered Writely. Writely also allows you to upload documents in Word, OpenOffice, RTF and other formats, and to export to a variety of formats including Word, OpenOffice and PDF.

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Random observations

Writely

This post was written using Writely, a web-based word-processing application. As far as web-based WYSIWYG word-processors go, I must say I quite like it. It even supports the direct posting of documents to your blog, as long as your blog software supports an XML-RPC based API (which WordPress and many others do). But blogging is just one use of Writely. You can use it in place of your regular word processor if you so wish. Furthermore, it allows you to collaborate on a document with other Writely users. Writely is free to use. You just need a Google account (Upstartle, the company that developed Writely, was acquired by Google in March this year). I’m sure everybody must already know about Writely and that I’m just very slow. I came across a reference to Writely while reading about Web 2.0 (don’t you just love buzzwords) in case it was relevant to a project proposal I’m helping to put together.

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Random observations

Gondola Cruise

Last night Karen and I took a gondola cruise up the Nerang River and through some Gold Coast canals. This was part of a wedding gift given to us by my friends. The cruise included dinner, and it lasted about 1.5 hours. It was magical. Instead of giving a detailed account of where the gondola went, what we saw and what we ate, I’m just going to recommend that you go and do it some time, if you haven’t already. Thanks once again to everyone who contributed to this gift; we really loved it!