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 29/03/04 @ 03:07 am

Difficult decision

I've just got an email from Peter Sewell offering me the research internship that I applied for (working on the semantics of TCP sockets). Problem is, I've also been offered an internship working in the product engineering group at ARM. So now I have to decide which one to accept - harder than it sounds!

On the one hand, the research internship would be really good experience for going into research, and would enable me to learn a lot more about TCP (in quite some detail), work with higher order logic (HOL) systems, do a bit of low-level systems programming, and improve my ML (they do most of the coding in OCaml).

The ARM position, though, would get me some industrial experience, and greatly improve my C/C++ programming. It looks like there might be some work on integrating the ARM C compiler into Visual Studio .NET as well, which could be quite interesting. It has the potential to be quite cool.

Decisions, decisions... I think I'll leave it until the morning!

Sunday 28/03/04 @ 07:07 pm

Cambridge win the race :-)

Well done to the Cambridge team for winning the boat race! It was a pity that the boats had to clash at all, especially given the complaints of the Oxford team afterward. I'm definitely of the opinion that it was Oxford in the wrong during the second clash though, given you can quite clearly see their boat moving towards the Cambridge boat. Plus the umpire had given several warnings to Oxford. It is a bit annoying that this happened though, as it would otherwise have been a much closer race, and the losers perhaps wouldn't have been as bitter...

In other news, I've updated a few more pages on the site - there's now quite a bit of info on the Academic, Programming and D&D sections, and I've also put in the Links page.

Saturday 27/03/04 @ 05:29 am

A lovely early-morning stroll...

Just got back from a film session at Carl's - we managed to watch a total of five films (Bruce Almighty, Princess Mononoke, Memento, American Pie and Johnny English), with an episode of Blackadder thrown in for good measure. It's somewhat invigorating walking back home at 5am, when it's just (barely) starting to get light, the birds are singing, and the seagulls are squawking.

I now have to allow my stomach to recover from several pints of Carlsberg and copious pizza and pringles, given that we're going for a curry tomorrow... I mean tonight! Well, better get some shut-eye now.

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!

Wednesday 24/03/04 @ 01:29 am

Isn't php great! :-)

Just got the dynamic menu system working, so it changes the menu depending on what page you're looking at. I'd better mention that at the moment the only written pages (other than this) are the Revision Notes page, and the Question Base page. I should be writing more soon. For the time being, I'm using this page for news/updates, but I'm going to write a script to add news items in the near future, to save me doing it manually (i.e. by looking at my watch when I write this!).

Tuesday 23/03/04 @ 11:58 am

And so the site is launched...

It's about time that I had a proper website, and so here (at last) it is. Why lanther, you ask? Well, in the first D&D campaign I ever played in, I played an elven bard by the name of Lanther. So, in the tradition of remembering old names, here we have lanther.co.uk!

Ok, so what is / is going to be on this site? I'm basically using it as a central repository for a number of random things, which will no doubt expand when I have time / can be bothered to add to it. For those of you that have ever used or heard of Question Base, then this will also be moved over. There's not much point in me giving a detailed synopsis of the site, since you can see what's available from the contents on the left. If you wish to contact me, you can do so at msmith@lanther.co.uk. Have fun!