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

Friday 26/03/04 @ 03:12 am

Update system added

I'm now writing this using my php-based site updater, which is pretty basic, but is much better than editing the text files by hand... well, I'm sort of still editing the pages by hand in the sense of writing out the content, but I don't have to worry about remembering the filename to use - it looks at what's on the menu (quite literally) to see what pages are available / can be edited. Plus I can add news items easily (as I'm doing now), and edit the menu itself, using the same interface. Ah, the joys of php :-).

Unfortunately, my webserver doesn't have SSL (and I didn't fancy paying them �60 a year for it!), so that meant having a think about the security of the update pages. I think I've got a fairly reasonable solution though - to get the password, the server sends the client a random key, which the client then shoves together with the password, sending back an md5 hash for authentication. So the plaintext password is never submitted. Since I couldn't be bothered to write a javascript implementation of md5, my thanks go to Paul Johnston for the implementation he has made available.

Looks like it's getting fairly late, so I suppose I'd better get some sleep. I always seem to do this in the holidays - end up pottering around until late, getting to bed late, and sleeping in for most or all of the morning! I should probably start going to bed earlier, but that's easier said than done! Well, at least it's not term-time, when I manage to go to bed regularly at a similar time to this (usually through having started work way too late), and then have to get up before 9 in order to get to lectures on time...

Well, I think I'll leave my pointless bantering at that for now. Hopefully I'll get around to writing some proper content soon. There's also the small matter of revision that I'm supposed to be doing...

Goodnight / morning / whatever!

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