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

Wednesday 07/04/04 @ 07:05 pm

Revision and cheap computers

I've spent the last few days trying to concentrate on revision, which has been a reasonable success. I've actually been managing to get up before 9, which is very unusual for me during the holidays. Making nice revision notes takes way too long though, as I rediscover every year, and so I suspect I'll be moving to pen and paper before long. In any case, I have produced notes for Logic and Proof, though I doubt that is anything to get excited about for most people ;-).

My parents have been nagging me to sort them out with a new computer for some time now, which is not surprising given that they've been using my old computer, which is extremely noisy. Anyway, I finally got around to putting one together for them, which turned out to be quite inexpensive. They already had a monitor, hard drive, case etc, so I just got a new motherboard (an Asus A7N8X), CPU (Athlon 2800), RAM (256 megs) and a cheap graphics card. In total, around �200, VAT and delivery inclusive. So, I gutted an old box, and popped in the new components. All seems to be working fine, but I am quite concerned about the power supply, given that it's only 235W and Asus recommend an minimum of 300W. Oh well - it's coping ok at the moment, but I'll have to get a new PSU in at some point.

While I was ordering all that stuff, I got a new ADSL router, which is again something I've been meaning to do for a while. At the moment, since we only have a USB modem, I've been using my machine as a NAT gateway, which is a slight inconvenience given the different sleeping habits of family members. I can now just shove the router directly onto the network. There is a slight annoyance, in that some time ago, when we were still on dial-up, my Dad routed the phoneline from the hallway, upstairs, and then back down again to the dining room. So, the vicinity of the switch is too far down the phoneline to get a decent ADSL signal. It's not a major problem though - just means that I'll have to make up an especially long network cable, which will have to run under the carpet or something.

I've just had my Mum moaning at me that the computer (which I spent yesterday afternoon putting together) doesn't have Flash installed! Can you believe it? How awful of me not to have spent today installing every little piece of software she might conceivably think to use. I suppose some people just complain whatever you do for them...

Well, in slightly better news, I seem to have fixed the problem with the monitor on my PS2 - it turns out that if I run X-Windows at a higher resolution, it behaves perfectly nicely. Rather strange, to say the least, but if it works I'm not complaining!

I suppose I had better get back on with revision, or something like that. I've also got to do some prep for a one-off D&D session I'm running on Sunday - introducing Carl and Alex to the exciting world of role-playing! It should be fun coming up with a little adventure for a change, rather than the epic world-crisis events that I'm used to! I'm going to set it in the same world as my current campaign, probably a few hundred years before those events, so it should be quite interesting.

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