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 30/04/04 @ 06:59 pm

Another week has passed

This week hasn't been particularly exciting in any major aspect, although I have done one or two things. I've had a couple of supervisions (one on compiler construction and one on complexity theory), which went fine. One upshot is that I now have the .NET IL specification documents, which means that I can have a look at writing a (simple) compiler for .NET once I have the time (which probably won't be until the summer). Yesterday, I went to a very interesting seminar on compiler certification, given by Mr OCaml.

Today, I gave the first of my revision sessions, which went pretty well. I ended up spending much too long talking about logic & proof, and too little time talking about semantics, but other than that it was fine.

I made the mistake, on Wednesday, of going to Borders on a 20% student discount day. Of course, I ended up spending way too much on books, although I bought a few interesting titles - a text on linguistics, one on 'philosophy of mind', and a copy of 1984 (something that I've been meaning to read for a long time). Well, I now have an even bigger 'to-read' pile, which is most certainly not a good thing when I'm supposed to be doing revision. I can try to persuade myself that philosophy is heavily related to artificial intelligence, but I doubt we're going to be examined on the subtleties of Descartes!

Anyway, looks like we're going to river bar tonight, so I should hopefully manage to become suitably inebriated!

Monday 26/04/04 @ 12:45 am

Lovely weather

It's been quite a busy weekend, in the good sense of busy - the weather has been fantastic, and I've done quite a lot of stuff. Carl arrived on Friday afternoon, and we had a barbeque in the evening, which was rather pleasant. We got through a couple of jugs of Pimm's and lemonade, which was rather fitting given earlier comments that Andrew hadn't been drinking as much of it this year! Anyway, we all stuffed ourselves, and then watched Lost in Translation later on.

On Saturday, we went over the the University Botanic Garden, which was actually the first time I had been. It's a really nice place - very tranquil, and with lots of interesting trees/plants. They have a couple of Giant Redwoods, which (despite already being pretty large) are relatively young, and still have quite a bit of growing to do! I must say that I was really impressed with the gardens in general - I'm certainly going to go and do some revision there on a suitably nice day.

Later in the afternoon, we went punting. We went from the Granta up to Magdalene Bridge, and back again. I punted for most of the way, although Nick did take over for the last little stretch. It was good fun, and definitely good weather for it - plus, this time, I didn't fall in :-). We went for a quick dinner at Dragon, down Mill Road, then went to see Kill Bill Volume 2 in the evening. It was really enjoyable, and although not quite as 'gorey' (if you can call it that) as the first, it had its moments. I particularly enjoyed the 'eye-removal' operation :-). The best character by far, though, has got to be Pei Mei - absolutely fantastic!

Today (well, yesterday if you want to be pedantic), I had the usual D&D session, which was rather busier than usual - in fact I had a total of eight players to deal with. Most of the session consisted of a rather long and multi-faceted battle involving mind-flayers, worgs and demons. It's strange to think that this campaign is coming close to finishing - I'm doing one more session before breaking off for the exams, and then completing things in May Week.

I think that pretty much brings us up to date - Carl has gone back up to York, and I'm now back to getting on with work/revision (at least I was until I started writing this...).

Thursday 22/04/04 @ 06:13 pm

First day of lectures

I had my first lecture of the term today, which has the rather interesting title (for a CompSci course) of Economics and Law. It seems like it's going to be quite interesting - definitely something that I should know more about! There is a slight problem that my DoS can't find anybody to supervise it, but then again there is only one question on it out of all the papers, which I doubt I would choose to answer anyway...

The last few days have been fairly quiet to be honest, although I'm sure that's going to be changing soon. I've had a tutor meeting (the result of which, along with an email to the domestic bursar, is that there shouldn't be a problem having college accommodation over the summer), and a DoS meeting. I've also finished writing my Data Structures and Algorithms revision notes, so I can now start looking at the next course on my list.

I've started to think about arranging revision sessions, like I did last year. The interest looks pretty good, so I think I'm going to start early next week. I'll have to sort out the room bookings and finalise times etc. pretty soon. I'm using compsci.lanther.co.uk as a general information/resource page for this.

In other wildly exciting news, I spent this afternoon (with Nick and Andrew) spring-cleaning the kitchen. It really was getting into rather a nasty state, but it's looking much better now - I practically managed to get through a whole bottle of cleaning fluid (OK, that's a slight over-exaggeration, but we used a lot)!

It looks like this weekend is going to be pretty busy, as Carl is coming down for a couple of days. Of course, this means that I'm going to have an extra player in D&D on sunday, so if all the regular players and Donny turn up, I'll have 8 players - aaargh! I'm sure I'll cope somehow, although it does mean I'll have to get this week's prep done early (i.e. tonight/tomorrow). Anyway, with any luck the weather will hold out tomorrow, so we'll be able to have a barbeque... I shouldn't have said that; I can feel the storm clouds coming even as I speak!

Right, well I'd better be getting on with some more stuff now (which includes eating at some point). I'm going to see Shaun of the Dead with Matt later on tonight, assuming nothing else comes up. Come to think of it, Kill Bill Volume 2 is out tomorrow, so I shall have to see that sometime soon!

Well back to the grind then...

Monday 19/04/04 @ 11:20 am

Back in Cambridge

I got back into Cambridge on Saturday, and promptly spent the afternoon unpacking and doing food shopping at Tesco - exciting stuff! We had an interesting dinner of raclette, introduced to us by Nick, which basically consists of melted cheese (with potatoes and pickles). Very nice though. In typical Cambridge style, I then spent a couple of hours arguing with Andrew over the definition of language!

I had to get up quite early yesterday in order to get the D&D preparation done that I had failed to do over the last five weeks! It didn't take long though - I basically knew what I was going to do; I just hadn't written down the details. Anyway, the session went pretty well - plenty of interesting plot developments involving dragons :-). I also threw in a chimera (of the three-headed variety) for good measure. Also because one of the PCs once commented that they were 'cool'. How I enjoy being evil...

I now have three days before lectures start in which to get some more work done :-)

Saturday 17/04/04 @ 12:30 am

I hate packing :-(

And so it is time for me to say farewell to the little town of Bridlington for yet another few months. I've just about finished packing (other than my computer, obviously), so I'll be getting some sleep fairly soon before the three-hour journey down to Cambridge tomorrow morning. I absolutely hate all the hassle and annoyance of moving backwards and forwards - especially given that I have so much stuff (mainly books...). It's almost like having to move house six times a year!!

In any case, I spent today doing mostly nothing - well I tried to get a bit more of my revision notes done, and to prepare for this term's D&D sessions (the next of which is on Sunday). The latter was rather unproductive in terms of actual content, but at least I now have a much better idea as to how the campaign is going to progress from here. One thing I definitely need to do is to get rid of some of the NPCs that seem to be tagging along with the party - at the moment there are six PCs and three NPCs in the party, which becomes very tedious when it comes to battles / initiative tables. I need to keep one of them around at least though, as Donny plays him when he's around in Cambridge and able to come to a session. Anyway, I won't say much more than that, in case any of my players are reading this ;-).

Right, at this point I think the time has come to quite literally say 'halt'. Goodnight!

Wednesday 14/04/04 @ 11:44 pm

A ramble about a ramble...

I went for a little walk up on the North York Moors today - around Captain Cook's Monument (basically a big monolith with a plaque). It was really quite pleasant - about 8 miles, so not too long, mainly over heather moorland, with a few woodland stretches. It seems a shame in a way, as it's the last walk I'll be having on the moors for a while, given that I'll be down in Cambridge for the next five months.

Of course, that excursion means that I've not got much work done today... I'm rapidly coming to the conclusion that Bridlington is the epicenter of a wave of unproductivity, which seems quite stupid as there is decidedly nothing of interest to do around here. Oh well; I'm sure I'll get loads of stuff done when I get back to Cambridge [he keeps telling himself]!

Anyway, on with a bit of work before I go to bed...

Tuesday 13/04/04 @ 01:15 am

The delights of being a GM!

I've just got back from an all-day D&D session with Carl and Alex, in which I have introduced them to the fine game. Took a little longer than I expected, but then again neither of them had played before, and rolling characters / explaining rules can take some time. As I said before, I'll put more details up when I have time, but for now here is a synopsis...

Enter two adventurers (a Dwarven fighter and an Elven cleric) to the town of Beruvan, close to the borders of the Dark Forest (believe me, no world is complete without a Dark Forest!). There are tales of a certain Baron who managed to abduct the ancient 'scriptures of Beruvan' from the Regent. An officiate of the council hinted that the adventurers would be greatly rewarded if they helped to return them.

So, they headed south to the chateau of the Baron von Pfufflich, passing through the small village of Flamston. In this village, a mysterious character named Ulrick Jifson decided to help them with information as to how to enter the chateau, so long as they helped him by retrieving a ruby for him. Thus they sneaked into the chateau through the sewer (being attacked by a giant spider along the way), and 'borrowed' some guard uniforms as a disguise. Also rescuing a little girl from the dungeon (who was to be involved in some ceremony of the Baron), they left her to wait for them.

Unfortunately, they blundered into the tower of the treasury and were unable to explain themselves to the guards, leading to their arrest. Luckily, the guards fell asleep, and the little girl came to their rescue. This time, disguised a little better, and pretending to be escorting the girl, they managed to sneak past the guards, and with a little trouble defeated the guardian of the treasury.

As they entered the treasury however, they were affronted by the Baron himself, once again arresting them and stepping up the guard. He took the girl from them and headed away from the chateau with his associate. This time, their rescuer was Ulrick himself, who went off on his own to find his ruby, leaving the adventurers to escape from the chateau.

Following the Baron into the forest, they were met by a mysterious druid boy called Hlairddid. He warned them of the dangers of the forest, and asked them to leave when they failed to answer his riddle. In any case, they proceeded, reaching the mystic tower where the Baron was performing his ceremony. Rushing out to attack, they managed to meet their foes in an heroic battle (the companion of the Baron turning out the be the Regent of Beruvan). Hlairddid returned to thank them, and destroyed the scriptures once and for all.

Right - well that was a slightly longer synopsis than I was intending, but you get the picture. It turned out to be quite a fun session!

Sunday 11/04/04 @ 03:57 am

Happy Easter :-)

As has become somewhat customary, I'm posting this update just after having got back from a film session. I'm a little disappointed that we only managed to get through three films this week, but then again we did only start at about half 9, after a good few games of Tekken! So, we watched AI Artificial Intelligence, Dune (the 1984 David Lynch version) and The Last Unicorn. The latter was one I hadn't seen before, and was rather enjoyable, with some amusing moments such as a conversation with a pirate cat!

I suppose I had better say what else I've been doing these last few days - well, to be frank, nothing particularly exciting. I've been getting on with some revision, playing a bit more Final Fantasy X-2, and reading the archives of A Modest Destiny; a great webcomic that I've only just discovered. I'm running the one-off D&D session that I mentioned in the last post on Monday, so that should be entertaining to say the least. I will put something about it on the D&D page at some point when I have time.

Anyway, happy Easter one and all!

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.

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 :-)

Thursday 01/04/04 @ 12:24 am

Linux takes over the Playstation

I haven't updated for a few days, not that a great deal has happened. I decided to accept the semantics placement, so I've had to turn down ARM, which I feel a bit bad about. Anyway, I now have to brush up on my knowledge of TCP, and read up a few revelant papers. There's quite a comprehensive one on the related work with UDP semantics, which I'm working through reading. Some of the semantic definitions (expressed in HOL) are not the easiest to digest, so are not really suitable for bedtime reading!

Speaking of bedtime reading, I'm currently reading The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker, which is a fantastic book. Katharine recommended it to me a while back when we were discussing the differences between natural and computer languages - it's one of those books that I really should have read a long time ago. I must say that it has heightened my interest in linguistics, and perhaps even inspired me to go hunting after some Chomsky... maybe I'll leave that until the summer when I have a spare week or two!

Yesterday, I placed an order for a particularly cool piece of kit - Linux on the PS2! Surprisingly enough, it arrived today! I think it's a pretty good deal - for around �90 (when you include delivery and VAT), you get a PS2 hard drive, ethernet adapter, USB keyboard and mouse, VGA cable, plus of course the linux distribution itself. Unfortunately, in my endless stupidity, I forgot that it would need a memory card to boot from, and given that I don't want to format over all my save games (lose hundreds of hours worth of final fantasy? - not a chance!!), I'll have to pop into town and get another card tomorrow (I can't be arsed waiting for a delivery). Other than that, it's looking pretty good. I just need to route the ethernet through my PC and I have full broadband internet access on the PS2, for games as well. I could connect it directly to the network, but the switch is downstairs, and I don't fancy laying another cable down. Given that I've got two network cards in my comp, I may as well put them both to use :-).

Anyway, revision is sort of happening, though not as much as I'd like (no change there...). I've still got enough time to spend about a day on each course (well at least, for the more major courses), so I should be able to at least draw up some pseudo-revision notes in that time. Strange - I've only been back for two weeks, and already I'm having to think about going back again. Oh well, at least in the summer I'll get a meaningful rest (get it? meaningful -> semantics? Go on, kick me - I dare you).