RickyRobinson.id.au

It’s been a really good couple of days with respect to my Ph.D work. Today I finished debugging the wide-area half of my service discovery protocol. It’s all working very nicely, which is kind of exciting. However, I’ve changed a few of the classes that were being shared by the local-area part of the protocol, so I have to go back and touch up the Ants stuff. Shouldn’t be a big problem. So here’s what I’ve accomplished so far with respect to my prototype, and the order in which I accomplished them:

• Query/Advertisement parser
• Expression scanner/parser/matcher
• Ant-based service discovery protocol for small, dynamic environments
• Chord implementation (Distributed Hash Table layer)
• Wide-area service discovery protocol, including distributed query/advertisement parsing with scoping

The scoping function allows queries to relax their requirements so that, for example, if the query tries to find a printer a particular room on a particular floor in a particular building and so on, but there is no matching printer in the specified room, then the query backs off and returns any matching printer on the specified floor. If there is still no match, it backs off even further until the scope boundary is reached. Scoping is not automatic. A scope needs to be specified in the query, just in case the user would prefer no match rather than a partial match.

So it’s been a good week. Furthermore, Jaga has started questioning the importance of implementing the reputation management functionality that I was previously expected to implement in my prototype. The only reason we were going to implement it was to get performance figures for a paper we were writing. We’ve since submitted a shortened version of that paper, and we are unsure exactly what performance figures will tell us anyway. It’s obvious that my service discovery protocol will incur a performance cost if reputation management is added, and there’s no other similar reputation management system to compare it to. So I think we’ve decided that I might implement it if I have time to spare. But the way things are looking at the moment, my thesis could well be finished soon after August. I might not opt to submit my thesis until January in order to take advantage of the six month extension scholarship (yes, I’m scheming), which means that I’ll have near on five months to "spare". I might use that time to convert my thesis into a few papers so that I have more publications listed when it comes time to submit. It would also be cool to set up a few really cool case study/scenario type things to test my protocol on (in addition to whatever testing I do in the next few months). I think we have enough devices of various sorts to do a really neat demo. The PACE group at the DSTC will probably want to integrate my protocol with their system as well, which might require a bit of work. Anyway, I’m really happy at the moment!

I also spent part of today finishing off the assignment 2 handout for the Distributed Computing subject. That didn’t take long. It pretty much amounted to taking the first assignment handout and changing the word "Elvin" to "CORBA". Well okay, not quite, but you get the idea.

Easter was pretty good. Lots of Easter eggs and chocolate rabbits from various sources. I’ve still got heaps left. Maybe I’ll go and eat some now.

My weekend was excellent. I watched two FA Cup semi-finals and the last ever NSL grand-final. Manchester United will play Millwall in the FA Cup final, and Perth Glory won the NSL final. Quite fitting that they won, really. But I was going for Paramatta.

Today was spent fixing up two papers which were then submitted to a workshop which will be held in Spain. Hopefully at least one of them will be accepted. I don’t know whether I would go to the conference or whether Jaga would go. It doesn’t bother me either way, and one of them has to be accepted first!

I’m looking forward to having a great weekend.

Had a big night out last night. This morning I woke up with a very sore bottom. I was a bit hesitant to check what was wrong with it. To my absolute shock and consternation, I found I had Tux the Linux penguin tatooed on one cheek and "Microsoft Sucks" tatooed on the other cheek. This is very surprising, given that my geek attitude is much less in evidence these days. But apparently after a few drinks I am still that geek rebel. Suddenly I’m remembering flashes of the Valley from last night. I wonder what else I did? Anyway, I’ve booked myself into the PA hospital for surgery, because there’s no way in hell I’m living the rest of my life with a penguin tatooed on my arse.

Southampton are back in the top half of the English Premier League table. I hope they stay there! There was yet another cracker of a match between Arsenal and Manchester United. It ended in a draw, but was full of controversy as usual. It looks like Arsenal will run away with the league this year. They would have to have the mother of all collapses if they somehow manage not to finish on top.

By the looks of my last entry, I can’t spell "epitome". I really should get in the habit of checking my entries over before posting them. Nah.

I had a very nice weekend. RA came around on Sunday and we had lunch and dinner at the Three Monkeys, my favourite little cafe. We talked for ages and I’m sure the cafe staff were wondering if we’d ever leave. Anyway, a nice little catch-up.

Today was rather slow. It’s very hard cutting a paper down to size. In this instance I have to cut it down from ten pages to five pages. Some passages were easy to cut out because they were the epitomy of vacuousness. I have a feeling I’m going to have to cut the paper down to about three pages and rewrite the remaining two, otherwise the paper will end up being complete and utter garbage. It will still probably end up complete and utter garbage. Oh well, we’ll just have to wait and see.

RGW was confirmed as a Ph.D candidate today. His confirmation seminar was very interesting. His topic is to do with trust, security and privacy in ubiquitous computing environments.

Some guy was using his mobile phone in a bathroom stall today. At least I hope that’s what he was doing. It was kind of weird walking into the bathroom and hearing a person talking (in Chinese) behind a toilet door. Kind of disconcerting when you’re trying to use the bathroom yourself!

Had a productive day yesterday. Among other things I wrote an XDR class for marshalling and unmarshalling data directly to a stream. It makes sending and receiving Superstring queries and responses much easier. I had another XDR class but it was really only useful for datagram communication. Today was far less productive. I had students to deal with and a two hour prac to supervise. For some reason I was also pretty tired.

‘Twas a slow day today. I just read over a couple of papers I’ve been involved with in preparation for a meeting with Jaga tomorrow, then went to my prac session. There are an extraordinary number of students this year who haven’t programmed in Java before. The ones that haven’t programmed in Java are all Masters students. I’m doing my level best to get them up to speed, but I think some of them are going to struggle.

I had lunch with SB today, during which we saw a very big and bold bearded dragon jump up on some guy’s legs in order to steal his lunch! It failed in its attempt as the guy’s friend shooed it away with a book or something. The scary looking monster had been eyeing our lunch for quite some time before turning on the other guy. There are heaps of these dragons around the lake area, but none quite so bold as this particular specimen. SB will soon submit his Ph.D thesis. His topic is to do with vertical handover.

I didn’t mention that last week I wrote a Java version of the Chord protocol. I started on Monday, had it basically finished by Tuesday and was debugging it for the rest of the week. I got it completely working on Friday, and it turned out that the two bugs that had me befuddled were due to omissions in the pseudo code from which I implemented the algorithm, and not to my programming skills. This pseudo code appears in the Chord paper itself, and the omissions were, I thought, quite critical. Those MIT people don’t know what they’re doing. ;) Now I just have to put my service discovery protocol on top. After that, there are a couple of other programming tasks to do, but then I can concentrate on getting some numbers or building usage scenarios (I know I should have finalised by now how I’m going to test this thing, but I’m still mulling over the alternatives) and then writing my thesis. So the finish line is definitely within sight. (Please don’t let it be a mirage!)

It’s only ten past nine, but I am dead tired. Going to sleep now.

I’ve captioned all my photos from New Zealand. There are a few that will have to be re-captioned because I’m not entirely sure of place names and so forth. I can glean the place names from the footage that my brother took with his new video camera.

I went to see Once Upon a Time in Mexico today. Very violent, and to be honest I was largely unimpressed. Johnny Depp was pretty good though. Last weekend I saw The Last Samurai which was a much better film. In fact I liked this film a lot better than any of the Lord of the Rings films. It’s an epic, and it worked. Even Tom Cruise was good! There was violence, but it was violence of the kind that depicted an aspect of Japanese history and culture. Just after seeing this film, I watched a documentary on SBS about the samurai. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the movie had depicted the samurai culture very accurately indeed. This movie is well worth seeing.