I’ve posted a trip report for PerCom 2007 over on RickyRobinson.id.au. Some of you might be interested.
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Tag: work
Work stuff.
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New York, NY
I’ve just returned from New York, where I was attending the PerCom 2007 conference in White Plains. The conference was okay. Some interesting papers on using RFID to do some clever things (one that I remember in particular was about using the weaknesses of RFID to do intrusion detection). This year, there were a few HCI type papers accepted, one of which was about interacting with wall-sized video panels. The PerWare and CoMoRea workshops ended with some fairly lively discussions, which is a sign for continued interest in those workshops. My presentations at CoMoRea went well, though I was totally out of it by the end of the second presentation due to a cold or flu which I picked up from somewhere and which I’m still recovering from. Next year’s PerCom will be held in Hong Kong.
I had the weekends on either side of the conference to explore Manhattan. It was the first time I’d visited New York, so there was a lot I wanted to do. My first notable experience of New York was the freezing cold temperatures and the snow. I happened to arrive on the day that a severe snow storm blanketed large parts of the north eastern United States to the extent that JFK, La Guardia and Newark were shut down. When my plane landed at JFK, they’d already grounded most other flights. I ended up sitting around the baggage carousel at JFK with my fellow passengers for more than an hour because – get this – the luggage bay doors had frozen shut. Then, once I’d retrieved my suitcase, I found myself waiting outside in -2° Celsius temperatures for another hour because there was a severe shortage of taxis. Presumably there was a shortage of cabs because outgoing flights had been grounded, which meant there were no passengers being dropped off by cabs, which meant there were no cabs to convey passengers from my flight. Eventually, it was my turn to jump into a cab, and boy, was I in for a wild ride…
As we drove along an expressway (probably Van Wyck) from JFK towards Manhattan, I noticed there were traffic accidents and bogged vehicles everywhere. The snow and sleet were causing absolute chaos on the roads. Little did I realise that the cab I was in was about to get sideways, too. We were driving along, and all of a sudden, the cab fishtailed and slid across three lanes of expressway towards the centre barrier. Unbelievably, at that moment, there were no cars to the left of us, so we avoided an accident on that count, but there was still the centre barrier to deal with. Somehow, at the last moment, the cab driver managed to straighten the vehicle, and narrowly avoided colliding with the barrier. I’m still not quite sure how he managed to pull it off without even grazing the barrier; I was sure that physics dictated the front left headlight would get smashed, but it was like the cab turned on a pivot at the last second, rather than doing a normal arc turn. At this point the driver said: “Whoah! Do you have your seatbelt on?” I put my seatbelt on as soon as I sat down in the cab!
All the way to my hotel on Central Park South, I was trying to put some life back into my poor frozen fingers by holding them in front of the heater in the back seat. I was glad to finally arrive at the hotel (after our little incident, the driver stayed below 50km/h for the rest of the trip, so it took a while) and retire to my nice warm room.
The next day (Saturday, March 17), I strolled (or rather, trudged) through Central Park, taking a round-a-bout trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This gallery has a number of Vermeers, Rembrandts and Rubens, so it kept me amused for the rest of the day. Saturday was St Patricks day, and New York has a famous St Pat’s day parade, which I watched a fair bit of. Apparently it’s quite rare for the parade to take place on snow covered streets. As I was walking from 5th Avenue back towards my hotel after I’d watched the parade pass, a massive chunk of ice fell from some skyscraper into the street a few feet away from me with an almighty crash. All I can say is I’m glad nobody was underneath it (I’m especially glad I wasn’t underneath it), because that person would not have lived to see another St Patrick’s day. For the rest of the day I was looking up at the sky, watching for falling blocks of ice.
On Sunday, I checked out Bloomingdales and then walked to the UN building, which was closed to visitors, and then over to the Rockefeller Center and Times Square. I ended up going to the “Top of the Rock” (that is, the top of the Rockefeller Center), which had an amazing view of Manhattan and surrounding regions. After spending a bit of time browsing various shops, including the Sony shop at the bottom of the Sony Building, I headed back to the hotel to pick up my suitcase and laptop, then hauled everything 21 blocks to Grand Central Station where I caught the train to White Plains.
Upon returning to Manhattan the following Saturday, I went, with a new friend, Matthias, whom I met at the conference, to Battery Park to get a view of the Statue of Liberty. We walked along the Hudson to the World Financial Center and Ground Zero, the World Trade Center site. It’s unbelievable to think that there used to be two massive towers standing at this site, and although construction on some new buildings seems to be getting underway, there’s still a sadness hanging about the place, and I got a kind of eerie feeling while looking over the site. Matthias needed to fly back to Germany that day, so at 3pm or so, we started to head back to my hotel, where Matthias had left his bags for a few hours.
The next day I took a boat cruise around Manhattan Island, which was very worthwhile. There were some awesome views of the Manhattan skyline and the various bridges connecting Manhattan with New Jersey and Long Island. The guide was a fountain of knowledge about New York. Then I caught a 3 o’clock showing of the Broadway musical The Producers, which was hilarious.
On Monday, I took the subway downtown to Wall Street to photograph the New York Stock Exchange and some other buildings. Trinity Church, between Trinity Place and Broadway at Wall Street, is a beautiful building in the neo-Gothic style (at least, I’d say it’s neo-Gothic from what little I know about architecture). Then I headed back uptown to the Museum of Modern Art, to while away the final hours of my New York trip. I’m not the hugest fan of most kinds of modern art. I dig many of Cézanne’s paintings and a lot of Picasso’s work, but I fail to appreciate anything as abstract as a Pollock or a Mondrian. I was hoping that seeing some of the paintings by Pollock, Mondrian and company up close would give me a new perspective; but, alas, they still didn’t do anything for me. Nevertheless, it was well worth the $20 entrance fee.
One of the highlights of a trip to New York is the food, from the street vendors to the delis to the upmarket restaurants. My modest travel budget didn’t allow me to try any cuisine from the last category, but I did sample the sidewalk fare. One subtly interesting fact is that a large proportion of the street vendors use halal meat, while some of the others are kosher. This was good news for me, as I still refrain from eating pork. In Australia, you might, if you’re lucky, find chicken-based hotdogs at Woolworths or Coles; but from what I hear, they’re a pretty poor substitute for the real thing. Meanwhile, New Yorkers seem to devour these halal hotdogs by the truck-load. I ate at a few different burger joints (Burger Heaven was great), and dined at a few delis. I also tried the Italian restaurant across the street from where I was staying for my second weekend in New York: good food, good wine, good service.
I had a good time in New York. I was a bit wasted during the second half of the trip due to the stupid ailment I picked up, but other than that it was a blast. Really glad to be back home though!
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Schulze & Webb: Awesome
Before I go any further with this post, I want to thank Ben for imploring the readers of his blog to check out this presentation from some guys called Schulze & Webb. These days, you get pointers to so much stuff out there on the web, a lot of it interesting, but a lot of it only so-so. Then, occasionally, you’ll come across a gem, which truly was worth reading, and the presentation by Schulze & Webb, for me at least, is one of those gems. A word of advice if you do decide to read it, though: if you’re going to read it, read it right through as there’s a lot of good stuff in it.
I can relate to the presentation, titled The Hills are Alive with the Sound of Interaction Design, and its authors, Schulze & Webb, on a number of different levels. For starters, they use the example of football, specifically that magical goal Argentina scored against Serbia and Montenegro in the 2006 World Cup, to illustrate the concept that the means or the experience is more important to most people than the end result. In scoring that beautiful goal, Argentina strung together 24 passes before Cambiasso struck the ball into the back of the net. Football fans all over the world appreciate that goal because of the lead up to it, not the goal itself. This is also one of the reasons why football lovers can tolerate nil-all draws, and indeed why it can be truthfully said that some nil-all draws are more enjoyable than games in which five goals are scored: there’s so much more to the game than the goals. But football is only the most obvious example. The same can be said of other sports from cricket (the innings-long battle between batsman and bowler, rather than the fall of the wicket) to tennis (the rallies, rather than the rally-ending shot). Anyway, using football to illustrate a neat concept is a sure way to get me on side!
Their presentation also resonates with my recently written “About” page. They both speak of thresholds, boundaries and tipping points. They both talk about figuring out how to develop new things that harmonise with human experience and the human cognitive model (I love their bumptunes hack for the Powerbook; I wonder if the MacBook Pro has an accelerometer?).
Several months before submitting my Ph.D. thesis, I made the decision that I wanted to refocus my subsequent pervasive computing research more towards the user, or at the very least, to ensure that if I was going to be developing middleware to support pervasive computing applications, I would lobby hard to have some time and resources set aside to build decent, cool applications to exercise that middleware. It turns out I didn’t have to lobby that hard! But the point I’m trying to make here is that the Schulze & Webb presentation has provided a timely reminder of why I made that decision to think more about the user in the work that I do: it’s because in the research space I work in, that’s where the rubber hits the road. You can build middleware, context management systems and so forth, but in the end, it’s all in support of what the user wants to do, and it’s a fun challenge figuring out neat applications that people actually want to use because they’re a joy to use.
The challenge in my particular line of work is this: how do you create applications for emergency and disaster prediction, response and recovery which are “fun” to use? How do you design an application for the emergency services sector which creates an experience as pleasurable as watching Argentina’s second goal against Serbia & Montenegro in the World Cup? Is it even appropriate to create fun applications for an industry that, by definition, regularly deals with human tragedy? I hope the answer to the third question is a resounding “yes” if the applications help to save more lives than would otherwise be the case. Perhaps the word I’m looking for isn’t “fun” but “rewarding”. An application that makes its user feel rewarded for using it is a successful application because, presumably, the user will want to continue using it. An emergency worker feels rewarded if they are saving lives and making snap decisions that turn out to be good ones. Therefore, I think a good reformulation of my goal while I remain part of the SAFE project at NICTA is this: to develop rewarding applications (and supporting infrastructure) for the emergency services sector. This isn’t far off my official job description, but what it does is bring into sharp focus the importance of considering the users’ experiences as they interact with the application and system.
Thank you Ben. Thank you Schulze & Webb.
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How to Get Things Done
After a recommendation from Rhys, I read David Allen’s How to Get Things Done (called Getting Things Done (GTD) in the USA and elsewhere). I’d heard of GTD in various places such as 43 Folders and Tim Mansfield’s blog, and I’m positive that Ben mentioned it to me some years ago, but for one reason or another I’d never really taken much notice of it. This time I decided to follow up on my curiosity, and I’m pleased that I did. Don’t let David Allen’s sometimes clumsy explanations or his annoying and frequent use of the word “psychic” deter you from reading his book; at its core, How to Get Things Done offers a powerful way to make progress on all those jobs, large and small, that you need to complete. In this blog post I’m just going to explain the parts of the book that I’m already putting into action, and I’ll assume that the reader has some familiarity with GTD.
Collecting
I have three inboxes. There’s an inbox for physical stuff like forms, reading material and so forth sitting on my desk at work. There’s my e-mail inbox, and then there’s my brain dump inbox which is the voice memo recorder on my mobile phone, which has been getting a very good workout lately. Often, I’ll think of something that needs doing while I’m on the run. The quickest way to capture those thoughts is simply to speak it into my phone after pressing a single button. I’m attempting to implement the collection phase just as the book sets out, so I won’t write any more about it here.
Processing and Organizing
The stuff in my physical inbox gets processed exactly the way the book sets out. The way I process my e-mail is slightly different to the book. Although it’s not specifically mentioned in the book, it seems there’s an assumption that any e-mail filtering rules are disabled, so that you’re forced to look at and process all the mail coming into your inbox, determining whether it’s junk to be discarded, whether it’s actionable or whether it’s reference material or support material for a current project. I’ve disabled all my e-mail filters, and I’ve set up the following folders:
- [Assignment Support] for e-mail that relates to an ongoing project (what David Allen calls “projects”, I call “assignments”, simply because the word “project” has a specific meaning within my workplace). An assignment is any task that requires more than one action to complete it;
- [References] for e-mail that contains longer-term reference information that might be useful in the future;
- [Requires Response] for any e-mail that requires a response to be written which cannot be dealt with immediately, either because it will take longer than two minutes, or because more information is needed before I can respond;
- [To Read], which contains long e-mails or e-mails with attachments which can’t be processed immediately; and
- [Waiting For], which temporarily holds e-mails that I’m waiting for a reply for, or which contain instructions for someone else to carry out some actions.
The first two folders contain sub-folders which are used to store e-mail for particular assignments (in the case of [Assignment Support]) or which relate to specific topics (in the case of [References]). I no longer have a “Sent” folder. E-mails I send appear in my inbox. This forces me to make a decision immediately as to whether the e-mail I’ve just sent can be deleted, or whether it should be moved to one of the above folders. At work, I use Outlook for e-mail. It’s not my favourite e-mail application by a long shot, but for various reasons I am using it at work (although I might soon be using Entourage – more on that later). E-mail that comes into my inbox which is actionable at a specific time or on a particular day gets dragged over to the Outlook calendar. Any actions arising from e-mail that must be done at some point, but not necessarily at a specific time gets dragged over to the Task list in Outlook. No task in the Task list has a reminder set. It’s simply a list of Next Actions that need doing at some point. I prepend each task in the list with a context such as “Home”, “Work”, “Shops” etc. Of course, any actions deriving from things in my physical inbox get put in my calendar or task list also. It usually takes no more than five minutes each morning to convert the voice memos, mentioned above, into next actions and/or projects. If the thought I have relates to something that needs to be done at a specific time before 9am the next day, then I take the time to put the action into the calendar on my phone so I’m reminded at the appropriate time. After converting the voice memos to actions etc., I synch my phone calendar and task list to the one in Outlook at the beginning and end of each day. Notice that my phone is being used only for collection and for reminders. Under normal circumstances, I do not directly enter actions or projects into my phone: it’s too slow and cumbersome using T9 to create calendar entries and tasks while I’m on the run. The one-button press voice memos, on the other hand, they work a treat!
In addition to the e-mail folders, I have organised much of the material on my computer into various directories with similar names to those above.
I’ve gathered all my physical papers and other stuff and organised them into labelled manilla folders. Then I store the folders in alphabetical order in my filing cabinet at work. I shouldn’t really have been surprised at how much faster I can find things now. I’m also in the processing of establishing a tickler file at home and at work for organising physical things which I’ll need at a particular date in the future (bills that must be paid, plane tickets, football tickets and so on). The tickler file is so simple, but I reckon it’s a veritable stroke of genius.
Assignments (projects) get listed on a private web page I can access from work or home. Generally this page only gets looked at and updated once or twice a week, so it’s not something I have to carry with me everywhere I go.
Reviewing
I am trying to institute a weekly review, whereby I gather any open loops (stuff) and then process it according to the above procedure. I remove any completed assignments and create new ones if need be. One of the things I like about GTD is that the whole thing is a bottom-up process. Assignments are created primarily because you’ve decided something needs to be done, and to get it done will take more than one action. The assignment is really just a marker that stays in the Assignment list until all the dependent actions are completed. This contrasts to typical project management techniques where you identify the project first, then try to break it down into sub-tasks. With GTD, it sometimes happens like this, too. But most of the time it’s the other way around.
Doing
Then there’s actually doing the actions you’ve identified. Hopefully, if I’ve got the above phases sorted, the doing just happens. David Allen’s book sets out some ideas for choosing which action to complete at any particular point in time. The calendar and the Next Actions list organised by context makes the decision much easier.
The subtitle of the book is The Art of Stress-Free Productivity. Initially, attempting to implement GTD will probably cause you more stress. A key theory of GTD is that getting everything out of your head and putting it in a trusted system will enable you to relax and focus on completing the task you have in front of you. The problem is, in the beginning, it’s very difficult to trust the new system you’ve implemented, and you worry about whether you’ve collected all your open loops and whether you will remember to review your lists and so on. It’s easier to “trust” the faulty system of keeping everything in your head; it seems more comfortable even though you know it’s flawed. After a few weeks of GTD, though, it becomes much easier to trust the system, and you do begin to feel less stressed and more productive. I’ve still got a long way to go, though.
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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 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.
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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.
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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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.
I spent most of the week down in Canberra, where I attended the Safeguarding Australia Summit with Karen and a few other NICTA people. The summit consisted of a plenary stream, a NICTA stream, and a satellite technology stream. The last day of the summit was taken up by the Research Network for a Secure Australia (RNSA) Conference. A number of good speakers gave keynotes in the plenary sessions. Perhaps the most impressive talk was given by Deputy Assistant Commissioner Peter Clarke of the Metropolitan Police in the United Kingdom. His presentation covered a whole set of operations that the police carried out and are carrying out in relation to recent terrorist activities in the UK. For the most part, the keynote presentations avoided Left/Right political bias, but there were times, during the panel sessions, where political bias quite visibly crept in. One slightly uncomfortable moment arose when, during a panel session on “Homegrown Terrorism”, Ameer Ali, Chairman of the Muslim Community Reference Group, fielded a question from a Zionist lobby group about Hezbollah. However, during the same session, Federal Agent Frank Prendergast of the Australian Federal Police, gave what I thought was a very considered presentation on the role of the AFP in combatting terrorism within Australia, and the relationship of the AFP with the Australian mainstream Muslim community, who, for obvious reasons, are one of the community groups most directly affected by ongoing investigations into terrorism and so on.
The conference was quite different from what I’ve been used to in the past. The plenary stream was very interesting, but the technology streams were more or less a bunch of industry people trying to market their wares.