RickyRobinson.id.au

Russell Beale (of Abowd & Beale fame) gave a seminar at ITEE today. He gave a pretty cool talk about some of the projects he’s been working on at Birmingham. Among other things, he talked about his Bluedating prototype (proximity-based profile swapping), BTShare (proximity-based file swapping) and SmartBlog (a blogging system that supports mobile users). Another cool and useful prototype he talked about was a notice board system that he has attached to his office door. If he’s running late for work or for a meeting, he can send an SMS to the electronic notice board, which is comprised of a PDA stuck to his office door and a backend machine that receives the SMSes. Now people waiting for him to arrive at work, such as undergraduate students, can read the notice board to get an idea of how long they’ll have to wait. A lot of this stuff isn’t new. But what is cool is to see it actually working and being used.

This is classic. Anna brings us the Datapig: a farmyard animal with USB datastick capability. You’ve got to see it!

Over the weekend I saw Garden State, a movie written, directed and starring Zach Braff. This is almost exactly the kind of quirky, character driven movie that I love. It’s just a pity the ending had to be so clichéd. Anyway, I didn’t let that spoil my enjoyment. Andrew Largeman (Braff) is an aspiring TV actor living in LA. One morning he awakes to a message being recorded on his answering machine. The voice on the machine is his father’s, who has called to say that his mother died by drowning in the bath. Largeman flies across the country to his home in Newark for his mother’s funeral. It’s here that the story really begins. Largeman does not have a good relationship with his father (played by Ian Holm), who is also his psychiatrist. Largeman meets his old friends, including a guy who invented silent Velcro. He also meets a girl, Sam (played by Natalie Portman), in a doctor’s surgery. These two befriend each other immediately. They’re a rather unlikely pair, with Largeman being a melancholy character who’s spent the last few years of his life drugged out on head medications, while Sam is lively and exuberant. What follows is Largeman trying to make sense of his life, with Sam helping him along. Sam is the spark that Largeman needed to get his life going again. This is an excellent movie, and it’s definitely among my top three picks for the year (probably just behind Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and The Station Agent – two other quirky art-house movies).

It’s almost Christmas time again, and that usually means finding appropriate gifts for everyone close to your heart; a time of giving. I love the fact that these days you can do almost all your Christmas shopping right from your desktop. You gotta love the web! Well, actually, you gotta love the web and your credit card. But we don’t like credit card bills, though. No, we definitely don’t like those. They’re nasty.

A ten year old grilled cheese sandwich has sold on eBay for $US28000. Apparently the sandwich bears the image of the Virgin Mary, and after ten years it still isn’t mouldy. Personally, I think the markings bear more of a resemblance to the Mona Lisa, though, having not met the Virgin Mary in person, I can’t be sure.

ABC News Online is carrying a story about the way a pod of dolphins shielded a group of lifeguards from a great white shark off the coast of New Zealand. The lifeguards were on a training swim when the pod of dolphins began circling around them tightly. It wasn’t until the divers saw the shark that they realised what the dolphins were doing.

It’s truly remarkable that wild dolphins should display such altruistic behaviour toward humans. There are many stories where dogs have protected their masters from danger. This is somewhat understandable, given that dogs and humans have had a close relationship for centuries. One study shows that dogs have evolved to understand human beings, and that this trait is genetic. Putting it differently, humans have selectively bred dogs so that, to some extent, they can understand the gestures we make, and I suppose, so that they protect us. In effect, we’ve bred them to be loyal. But why should a pod of dolphins want to protect a group of humans? If the story is correct, surely this must rank as one of the best examples of altruistic behaviour exhibited by animals ever recorded.

In a previous post, I documented my enquiry into Enetica‘s interpretation of auDA‘s Domain Name Eligibility and Allocation Policy rules. I replied to Enetica, pointing out that nicknames are not covered by any part of the document in question. Here is Enetica’s very interesting response to that e-mail:

The auDA policy document you quote does in fact say what you say it does, but for various reasons, it is not interpreted that way by registrars. auDA has issued a guideline to registrars which very clearly says domains can be based on ‘nicknames’. This guide has been in force for about a year, and has not resulted in any significant abuse of the domain space.

The document I refer to is at: http://www.auda.org.au/policies/auda-2003-07/ and in particular Schedule C.

Check it out for yourselves. This document, which auDA has created to outline the way the domain name eligibility rules should be interpreted by accredited registrars, is far more lenient than the policy document itself. One day, somebody’s going to have a field day with this.

At a little after 10am on Wednesday morning, the entire Australian academic community launched what amounted to a distributed denial of service attack on the Federal Government’s ARC web site. The reason? The ARC had just announced the Discovery grants for 2005, and everybody was trying to download the document to see if they were among the lucky awardees. Jaga was. So congratulations to her. In the end, the UQ research office sent us an Excel file with the list of all the UQ projects which will receive funding. I only managed to download the entire document from the ARC today! Anyway, we just had some cake to celebrate.

The government needs to think seriously about a better way to distribute this information. By one o’clock on Wednesday, I was pulling my hair out in frustration when, for the umpteenth time, the ARC server decided to close my HTTP connection. The closest I got to downloading the whole PDF document on Wednesday was 58% at 3 o’clock. I gave up trying. Perhaps Bit Torrent should be considered as a viable alternative to HTTP for this kind of thing?

Via Karen: Google Scholar. A search engine for academics.