Welcome to lanther.co.uk

Welcome to my website. Please feel free to browse at your will, using the menu on your left. The main page below is home to my (long neglected) weblog for those of you that are bored enough to take an interest in what's going on in my life :-). I'm currently a Principal Scientist at Adobe, working on the architecture for asset management and collaboration in Creative Cloud. Prior to this, I was the lead developer for Creative Cloud Libraries - a revolutionary new way of sharing creative content between different applications, devices, and people. I previously helped to develop Adobe Scout, which was a visual profiler for Flash and AIR applications. Prior to this, I was a researcher in the Language Based Technology group at the Technical University of Denmark, Copenhagen. I was part of the MT-LAB project, which is a collaboration between DTU, Aalborg University, and ITU, investigating formal verification techniques for advanced software systems. My particular research was concerned with probabilistic and stochastic analysis of distributed systems. I did my PhD in the Laboratory for Foundations of Computer Science, University of Edinburgh, supervised by Professor Jane Hillston. Previously, I studied at Robinson College, Cambridge. I originate from Bridlington, a little sea-side town on the Yorkshire coast. In the summer of 2005, I was a Senior Technical Associate at Fraser Research, in Princeton, New Jersey. Non-academically, I've been studying Japanese since January 2006, and I have been playing the fascinating game of Go since September 2006. I was previously the president of the Edinburgh University Go Club, and was a member of the Japan-UK 150 sub-committee for Scotland. My current grade is around 3kyu. Other than that, there's not much else to say. Feel free to enjoy the site! 楽しんでください！ Michael Smith

Monday 18/04/05 @ 01:24 am

Semantics of lazy updates...

Ok, so I'm probably not going to explain my laziness when it comes to updating this blog. Yes, I'm very busy at the moment, but that shouldn't really be an excuse. The question is, what's been going on in my life since Christmas, that has left me so out of it? Where do I begin? Here goes....

Aside from all the usual study crap, I've been sorting out both an internship for this coming summer, and a PhD place for the next 3-4 years. In other words, the usual sorting my life out kind of thing. This summer, I'm heading over to Fraser Research in Princeton, to do some research on formalising flow control algorithms for large scale access networks. It should be absolutely fantastic, and I can't wait! Of course, I have to get through my exams first, and I have a worryingly large amount of revision and project work left to do. With regard to the latter, the dissertation is about half way there, but there's still some 'extensional' coding I'd like to do, depending on time. Hopefully I'll be in a much better state by the end of the week when I go back to Cambridge; just need to keep cracking on with it.

As for my PhD, I've applied to Edinburgh, Birmingham and Cambridge, on the topic of statistical abstraction of real programs - I've put my research proposal on my academic page. I visited Birmingham toward the end of March, and was up in Edinburgh last week - I must say that Edinburgh is a fantastic city; reminds me of a larger version of York. It's managed to retain the charm and history of a country town, whilst developing into a thriving city. I particularly like the castle, and also Arthur's seat, which is a big rocky crag that dominates the city skyline. I won't say much more about my applications, since things are still in progress - basically it's a case of dependency on funding, so I'll just have to wait and see.

Legacy of the Easter bunny

Other than visiting Edinburgh, I've done one or two things this Easter break, though nothing particularly exciting. Alex has been on holiday in Italy - that pope-ular place - and brought me back a nice leaning Pisa mug. It looks somewhat precarious when full of coffee. Speaking of coffee, I've taken to making large cafetieres of the stuff. I know it's not good for me, but I do like my German blend... these days I feel less inclined to drink Java, given that I'm coding in OCaml. Pity that coffee beans don't grow in the desert.

In other news, I now have a shiny new laptop, a Thinkpad R51, on which I am running Ubuntu linux (Hoary). In thinking of a name, I simply had to go for Chade (as you can guess, I've been reading too much Robin Hobb recently ;-). I've been incredibly impressed with both the laptop and the distro - excellent compatibility, and I haven't had any real problems as yet. Unfortunately the same can't be said about the graphics card on Sonata (my main PC), which has now completely died - it's a Gainward (I won't be going with them again), and crashed about a month ago with VGA output dropout and a corrupt VGA BIOS screen on reboot. It did work again after a complete power cycle, but it's now gone completely. I'm not impressed, considering when I first got the card, it died after just two weeks, and it took a month to get a replacement from them. I've now got a new PNY GeForce6 card, which seems fine so far.

Yesterday, I went through to Hornsea with Carl and Alex, with the particular aim of going to the elusive chocolate shop, acclaimed by Alex. After their generous portion of chocolate bread-and-butter pudding (Carl had some other chocolatey delight I believe), we were all completely stuffed. We ended up going rowing on Hornsea mere, which was good fun, except for us getting grounded on several occasions, and my rather embarassing maneuvering to start. Alex was a great help in sitting there and shouting at us. Unfortunately, she was too far from my oar for me to significantly splash her; Carl and I, on the other hand, were rather wet by the end!

Afterwards, Carl had to head back to York, but Alex and I had a traditional film night, complete with Chinese takeaway, and watched Castle in the Sky, The Princess Bride, Grease 2, and a couple of epsodes of Narnia. My DVD collection continues to ever increase, though I'll have to go a bit easier on it next term, until I start working and get paid!

Hey now little mouse, show me what to do!

As for the rest of last term, there were a few bits and pieces that happened, namely:

• The roleplaying campaign I've been in since October has finished - entitled 'The Numbers of Ja'arj', I played a Dwarf called Tultrig; the servant to a family of snivelling brats, on a quest to save the world from being plunged into chaos, but mostly adding to the problem. I found out at the end that my two destinies (picked at random at the start of the campaign) were 'lucky' and 'forever alone' - the latter I thought was rather sad, but did explain the hostility of everyone towards the poor old Dwarf. It wasn't as bad as one of the other characters, whose destiny was 'pointless death' - he plunged to his death down the side of a cliff whilst the rest of us were fighting the final battle with the evil wizard Dark Roy (actually spelt in a more occult way, but I still profess his relation to Killroy ;-)
• Sarah came to visit around the middle of the term; although it was only a short stopover, we managed to have the obligatory lunch at Charlie Chan's (though Matt and Sarah managed to turn up about 20 minutes late ;-), and we had a nice walk back to college, and a look at Paris photos and stuff (which I still intend to put online, when I have time).
• I've had plenty of meals out and stuff, which has not been having a great effect on my waistline - oh well, I'll have to start going to the gym over the summer. I managed to meet up with David quite a few times, and warped his mind even further than it already is by introducing him to such delights as Papa Lazarou (League of Gentlemen), The 10th Kingdom, Foamy the squirrel, and Look Around You (there was a new series of this recently, but nowhere near as good as the first). We managed to meet up with the elusive Katharine at the start of term, and then briefly (i.e. for an hour) at the end! Intending to be organised in arranging these things doesn't always work...
• As mentioned before, the SemCom project has been going nicely - at least up until the review meeting I got right on target with things, and was ahead of schedule. Unfortunately, the rest of term got really busy with supervision work, and so my head start was lost. In any case, I'm pretty impressed with what I've done so far, and it's certainly beyond what I initially set out to do (though it would be nice to get the .NET stuff all working). I'll put up the documents as soon as the dissertation and stuff is finished. I also recently got it to generate code for F#, the Microsoft Research version of OCaml for .NET. I'm pretty impressed with it as a whole, though I seem to have found a bug in fsyacc, and it's rather annoying that 'assert false' is not polymorphic, as it is in OCaml.
• I've managed to get a suprising amount of reading done recently - last term I gobbled through Robin Hobb's Farseer Trilogy (which is excellent), after reading the Illuminatus Trilogy (weird but pretty good) and David Farland's Brotherhood of the Wolf over Christmas. This holiday, I've read Brideshead Revisited (which Andrew was nagging me to read for ages, and rightly so), and am now working through some more David Farland. Of course, the next Harry Potter will be out this summer, and I'm eagerly awaiting A Feast For Crows (George R R Martin's next book). I also bought the Game of Thrones board game recently, but I need somebody to play it with :-(
• Over Christmas, and this holiday, I've been through to York a few times with Alex, to see Carl. We've done most of the things there are to do there, although we still have the brewery on our list. At the beginning of the month, we went through, and Alex and I had lunch at Little Betty's Cafe, while Carl was doing his Sunday football stuff. I was quite pleased, since they served Blue Mountain coffee (yummy!), so that was nice. We visited the Yorkshire Museum, and of course ended up in shops like Travelling Man and Enigma (the place I bought my dragon from). In January, we managed to get to the Castle Museum, which is fantastic - they have a mock-up of a Victorian street, complete with cobbles and shops and the whole set-up. I still enjoy walking round the Shambles though; I love quirky little old streets and stuff like that :-)

So long and thanks for all the fish

Well, that was a nice long update; once again, I intend to keep up to date more often. And perhaps I will, given that I tend to get bored during revision time. We'll just have to wait and see, I suppose :-)

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