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

Saturday 03/04/04 @ 05:16 am

Back from another night of film

Yes, once again I stayed up way later than any sane person would, watching random films. This week, we got through Love Actually, Finding Nemo, Spirited Away and Harry Potter (Philosopher's Stone). I fried about 35 poppadoms, which in hindsight was much too many for the three of us to get through - I think there were about a third leftover.

Anyway, I got the memory card for my PS2 yesterday (well the day before yesterday to be precise, given the current time...). It is now working really nicely. The major problem is that it only has 32 megs of RAM, which really hits you when you try to do anything medium to big. For example, it took over half an hour to compile openssl!

Other than that, it's looking good. Given that it requires a sync-on-green monitor if you want to take advantage of its VESA output (using a TV is really not nice), I tried out a few different monitors that I have. The first attempt (a Hansol, I forget the make) failed miserably, with just a null output. I then tried an ADI Microscan (I think it's a G5 or something), which actually does work. Only problem, which I found out later, is that it doesn't like anything too fancy - e.g. if you start up XWindows then it will run for a bit, until it suddenly loses sync, throws a wobbly for a bit (top of the screen flickery with green lines), then blanks out completely. It seems to work just fine for text mode operation, so I'm sticking to that for the time being. In any case, there's no chance of me carting another monitor back down to Cambridge, so there's no need to get too concerned about it. SSH and X-forwarding will do me fine!

Right, well my bed is now beckoning, so I'm going to get some sleep :-)

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