The former US Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, will appear in an episode of Gilmore Girls. What I’d really like to know is, as one of the few shows that I used to watch on a regular basis, when is it coming back to Australian television? I know I’m not the only one who’d like an answer to that question. Please, Channel 9, bring it back.
A while ago I wrote that struggling farmers should be enticed off the land for environmental and economic reasons. Now a new CSIRO report suggests that drought aid simply prolongs farmers’ agony and delays the inevitable, and that the billions of dollars of aid given to farmers would be better used to help farmers leave the land. These aren’t new revelations, of course; it’s all been suggested before. But this time it’s in a formal report from the federal science organisation, and it comes at a time in this country’s history when water shortages are foremost in the minds of many people. Maybe somebody in a high place will listen this time.
News.com.au reports that The Beatles have been voted the most influential entertainers of the past one hundred years in a survey conducted by Variety. As if you’d need to conduct a survey to tell you that! ;-)
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Jobs
There are a few jobs on offer that I know of, and I’ve been asked to spread the word about them. First of all, there’s a software engineering job or two at global-roam Pty Ltd, who are currently based in Toowong. global-roam develops applications that relate to the National Electricity Market (NEM). NEM-Watch is the flagship product, and it allows users to watch the NEM in real-time. Most, if not all, companies that have a direct or indirect interest in the NEM use NEM-Watch and/or one of global-roam’s other products. These include organisations like Origin Energy, Energex, departments within state and federal governments, as well as newspapers (like the Smage) and companies like Toshiba who provide generator components.
I’ll give a brief overview of the kind of candidate global-roam is looking for. The candidate global-roam seeks will be able to point to some previous applications they have developed, and have a basic understanding of the NEM (there’s plenty of information online about the operation of the NEM if you’d like to do some research). The candidate will be able to develop applications that handle large quantities of data that are sourced in real-time from various locations. Ideally, the candidate will be an ace at designing and implementing intuitive, good-looking graphical user interfaces, and have some experience with .NET and C# in particular. This job is advertised in various places other than the global-roam web site. Free trial versions of all global-roam products are available for download (after obtaining an ID).
When I was in Melbourne, I met Andrew Smith from the Key Centre for Human Factors based at UQ. He asked me if I knew anybody interested in working as a full-time programmer on the Leximancer Project. I couldn’t think of anybody off the top of my head, because most ex-DSTC software engineering person seem to have found employment already, and the Ph.D. students I know are not quite at a point where they can take up a full-time job. I believe the job consists of programming in Perl and Java, although prior experience with Perl is not a prerequisite since apparently the Perl component could be picked up by any competent programmer. The Leximancer Project builds conceptual maps from collections of documents by automagically extracting the important information from the documents. Please contact Andrew if you are interested in the position.
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Biofuels becoming big business
Not last weekend but the weekend before, I caught up with Ben, Anna and Matthew over a cup of coffee. During the course of the conversation I happened to ask Ben, who’s my authority when it comes to cars, about Ethanol and why some people and lobby groups claim that too much ethanol in your fuel mix can damage your engine. His response was that he thought it can corrode some materials used in the engine. More interestingly, he introduced me to the concept of biodiesel: diesel produced from vegetable oils and animal fats. It can be used as a straight replacement for standard diesel which you buy from the bowser. Hobbyists have been making their own biodiesel for years from new or used vegetable oil. Our conversation piqued my interest, and I’ve since been doing some investigating and keeping a lookout for any news stories to do with biodiesel. Well, this morning there was a story in the finance section of news.com.au. It turns out that it’s not just hobbyists who are interested in biodiesel. It’s on its way to becoming big business, driven by high world oil prices and the push for more environmentally friendly fuels. The EU has passed legislation to ensure that biodiesel constitutes no less than 5.75% of all fuel consumption by 2010 in an effort to meet its Kyoto requirements. This has seen the European market for biodiesel grow to $A5 billion per year. There are some Australian companies already getting in on the act. See the news story for more information.
Karen’s 1985 Corolla, which runs on unleaded and an additive (because the engine was designed for Super), is performing admirably for the moment, but we’re resigned to the fact that we’ll need a replacement within the next few years. I’ve been considering the purchase of a diesel car for some time now. They are generally more efficient than petrol engines, which means you need to fill up less frequently. They’re popular in Europe and they seem set to make an impact in Australia beyond 4WDs and heavy vehicles. I’ve got my eye on the Peugeot 307 XSR HDi. :-)
Until you can buy biodiesel from the pump, you’ll have to make it yourself. I’m not sure that having a biodiesel lab in the backyard will go down too well. But making your own fuel certainly has cool factor.
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Ashes leave sore spot
It’s a bit late in the day for this, but since I especially kept the newspaper snippet, I thought I’d put it up anyway.
The majority consensus is that the Ashes series just past was one of the best there’s ever been. The Poms deserved to win, and they were entitled to celebrate the way they did – parades through London and all the rest of it. It just showed how much that little urn means to them, and how dearly they’ve wanted to us. It’s a pity that some so-called Aussies are having a much harder time taking our defeat sportingly than the Australian cricket team themselves.
When I was in Melbourne a few weeks ago, I bought a copy of The Age and came across the following bit of nonsense in the Letters section (click to enlarge).
I don’t imagine Simpson’s donkey followed the cricket, and I think Simpson himself would have taken this defeat on the chin and given each of his opponents a big pat on the back and said “Bloody well done, mate”. And I reckon that he’d say this in a very English accent, given that he was born in England and spent little more than four years in Australia. He also had a donkey which he named Queen Elizabeth. I’d also like to point out that the legend of the man and his donkey comes out of our military defeat at Gallipoli. Think about this: one of our most revered national holidays remembers not a victory, but a defeat and all those who died in that defeat. Yet "bitterness" is not a word any Australian associates with ANZAC day. Why then, would we be bitter about the Ashes loss? Both teams gave it their all, thereby producing some of the most riveting test cricket you’ll ever see, and in this instance, England won.
On the issue of arrogance, well, let’s just say that Mr Crozier-Durham of Melbourne obviously has a different definition of the word to what I do. I’m not sure why he calls the Kiwis arrogant for complaining about the infamous underarm bowling incident. He also seems to have a thing against the legendary Barmy Army. I think Shane Warne probably loves playing in front of those guys. Any so called cheap shots directed at Shane Warne were made in good humour. Unfortunately Mr Crozier-Durham doesn’t seem to have a sense of humour. As to the snipe about some Aussies being weak-minded because we can take defeat graciously, pooh to you Mr Crozier-Durham. We’ll give the Poms a good hiding next time, but it won’t be because of people like you.
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Kerry calls it quits
Today was the last day at the DSTC for one of its icons, Dr. Kerry Raymond (Distinguished Research Leader, Adjunct Prof., ITEE). All the best in the future Kerry!
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Congrats Anna and Will!
Anna is getting married to Will! They’ve launched their own version of Wedlog to mark the occasion. Congratulations guys!
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What a week!
Sometimes it seems as though months can go past without much happening, and then, all of a sudden, lots of things happen in the space of a few days. The past week has been jam packed with notable events.
It all began last Saturday, when Karen and I looked at nine houses in the Forest Lake area. The last house that we saw was the best of the lot. It was perfect for our needs, and we liked it very much. We visited another house on Sunday morning (which was not too bad, but a lot older and therefore in need of some patching up here and there) and then took our parents to see the one that we liked from the previous day. They liked it too. On Tuesday we made an offer and a price was agreed on Thursday. So, unless something disastrous happens in the next thirty days or so, Karen and I will be the proud owners of a three and a half years old house in Ellen Grove.
On Wednesday, I was offered a position as a research scientist at a new lab in the city. On Thursday I had a meeting with my current boss to inform him of the situation. I was due to travel to Newcastle, Rockhampton and Townsville in the space of three days next week to install our new product (deSide version 2) at various clients’ facilities, and then to Melbourne the following week to attend the Energy Users Association of Australia conference at the Grand Hyatt. Part of the reason for these travels was so I could meet our clients and vice-versa. Luckily there was enough time for Paul (my boss) to rethink who to send on these trips. The meeting I had with Paul was long, but he took the news as well as could be expected. I’ll be sorry to leave global-roam after such a short stay because I’ve thoroughly enjoyed my time there and learned a great deal about what it takes to develop software that people actually use on a daily basis, but happy to be stepping into a job that allows me to work on problems very similar to those I worked on during my Ph.D. candidature. I’m still to negotiate a finishing date with Paul, though I expect I’ll be staying on until sometime near the end of the year.
As if buying a house and having to tell my boss that I was leaving was not stressful enough, today was also the deadline for deSide development and testing. It’s all finished bar maybe ten percent of the installation file, which I’ll have to do tomorrow morning. Also, this week I’ve been setting up a Linux box to act as a gateway between global-roam’s LAN, Roam Consulting’s LAN (Roam Consulting is a sister company of global-roam whom we share office space with), a Cisco 877 ADSL router/modem, a Netgear ADSL router/modem and one other ADSL router/modem. I wrote a failover script so that the Linux box will switch between our primary Internet link (the Cisco modem) and our secondary link (the Netgear modem). For Roam Consulting, it’s the exact opposite. The script also had to take into account the fact that our SMTP server has to change depending upon which link is in use (we don’t have our own internal mail server). I set up a couple of dummy DNS zones and the failover script adjusts the zone files accordingly (i.e. changes the IP address associated with the hostname ‘smtp’ and increments the serial number for the zone). We’re putting each company (global-roam and Roam Consulting) onto its own subnet, separated by the Linux gateway. This means that we have also had to set up a Windows domain controller for our subnet.
So, that was my week. The weekend will be spent finishing the deSide setup file and then hunting for a reputable building and pest inspector. There are a couple I like the look of, and Karen also has some ideas of who to use, so it shouldn’t be too hard to arrange, assuming they’re not all booked out for the next few weeks. Tomorrow evening Karen’s parents are taking us out to dinner for a belated engagement celebration, which I’m really looking forward to. Also, I hope I find the thirty minutes I’ll need to touch up my responses to my thesis examiners’ reports. (Hmm, I suppose I could have been doing that now instead of writing this long blog entry). Finally, I’m looking forward to sleeping a bit. :-)
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Melbourne
I’ve just returned from Melbourne where I presented a paper at The 9th International Conference on Knowledge-Based Intelligent Information & Engineering Systems (KES 2005) and visited some relatives. The trip served to reinforce how much I like Melbourne. The conference venue was quite spiffy (Hilton on the Park), though there was lots of audio interference between some of the rooms. Conference attendees who registered as students (like me) didn’t get a copy of the proceedings in hard or soft copy (although I’m glad I didn’t get the hard copy, which came in four LNCS volumes), nor did their fee provide entrance to the cocktail party of conference dinner. This turned out okay because I found the really nice little restaurant that Karen and I went to last time (corner of Little Collins St and Block Place). There was an awesome mariachi band playing. Those guys totally rocked. The food was great too.
I saw the part of the National Gallery of Victoria that Karen and I didn’t get to see last time. There was a temporary exhibition of about 100 pieces from the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, but I’d already seen them all with Karen when we visited Holland earlier in the year. There was also an exhibition of some of Albrecht Dürer’s sketches. I was impressed by some of the pieces the gallery has managed to procure for its permanent collection. There were several paintings by Rubens (though Rubens was so prolific that his pieces seem to be everywhere) and Rembrandt as well as a Monet.
All in all a good trip. I didn’t get to meet Rhys because he’s galavanting around South East Asia on business again.