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 26/05/04 @ 11:40 pm

Exams are looming

Ok, so I haven't updated in a while. I have exams soon. Very soon. This means lots of revising and revising and revising and revising and... [ad infinitum]. You get the picture. This is therefore a very quick update before I get an early night in order to get up early tomorrow.

Basically, I've been revising, although I have done a few other more interesting things. On thursday afternoon I went to the botanic garden with Matt, where we sheltered against the rain under a giant redwood and fed bagels to ducks. On saturday night, we went to see Troy, which was really rather good, despite some of the acting being pretty crap (Orlando Bloom is getting worse by the minute - there was even a 'Legolas' moment towards the end). Tonight, we went to Teri-Aki for a meal out, which was a welcome break, although it means I've done much less work than I should have done tonight. Oh well.

By the way, my new camera arrived, so I've been taking a few photos. I'll put some up on the site when I've got time (i.e. after the exams).

Now, in the spirit of 1984, "here comes a candle to light you to bed." You know the rest.

Wednesday 19/05/04 @ 01:55 pm

Less than two weeks to go...

I haven't updated in a while - mainly due to being buried under a pile of work. I have, however, done one or two more interesting things in the last week, so it's not all doom and gloom! Revision is getting there, but I won't bore you with any of that :-).

The 'big event' at the weekend was celebrated in due style - on Saturday night I went through to London with Matt, Andrew and Sarah, to a bar to watch the Eurovision song contest. It was of course very silly, particularly when it came to the voting (which is always extremely political). We did badly as usual, although we certainly beat last year's score (not that it was difficult to do...). Ukraine won, with an act comprising of women running around dressed like Xena warrior princess. On the plus side, we did manage to beat Austria though!

Yesterday, I arranged the fourth revision session, which was a bit of a let-down. In actual fact everybody except one person wasn't able to come, and the one person that explicitly asked for the session anyway, turned up 45 minutes late (by which point I was walking to the bus stop). I was understandably a bit pissed off about that, although I did manage to get some more revision done during the wait. I decided to go home via the botanic gardens, which was nice and relaxing - I even went and observed a few cacti.

In other news, I've ordered a digital camera, which means that I shall soon be taking numerous pictures and posting them on the site. Maybe I should wander around town looking like a tourist - on second thoughts, I'll save that until I'm feeling decidedly more masochistic. For those of you that do CompSci, Sam has put up a site that may be of interest - namely a lecturer quotes database. Some of them are very good :-).

Anyway, I have an exciting supervision on databases to go to now, so I must dash!

Wednesday 12/05/04 @ 04:11 pm

Revision picks up the pace

I've actually been managing to get some more serious revision done over the last few days. Even so, I've still got so much to do, and so little time to do it. I've just finished the third of my revision sessions, for which I managed to spend two hours describing the usual plethora of algorithms. I think I gave quite a good explanation of most (especially arithmetic encoding), although it can get very annoying when certain people pretty much non-stop criticise what I'm trying to explain... yeah, some algorithms can be quite tricksy in the name of effiency, but quit moaning about it! I know I'm ranting, but it really does grind on me when people sit around complaining, rather than getting off their arse and just getting on with it.

[pause for breath] Now that I've got that out of my system, let's see what else has happened this week. Monday was quite a busy day, in that I had three lectures, a seminar and a supervision. The supervision was on lambda calculus though, which is always good for a laugh if you apply yourself :-). Later on in the evening, we ended up pseudo-playing a game called Britain's Brainiest - primarily with the aim of testing Andrew, who (God forbid) is the captain of our college's University Challenge team. He had the trial yesterday, so we probably won't be in it for much longer...

Yesterday I went into the lab for my one lecture, only to have him walk into the lecture theater, announce that he had a sore throat, and cancel the lecture. That pissed me off a bit, given that I wasted a couple of hours, but then again these things happen. I spent the rest of the day revising, and went out to see Van Helsing in the evening - it was a great film, hilarious and incredibly energetic (the sort of film that gives you a welcome break from the reality of exam term).

Today, it's Nick's birthday, so we're going to Charlie Chan for a meal this evening. Unfortunately, I've then got lots of supervision work to do tonight - my supervisor only set the work today, and I've a supervision with her tomorrow... Anyway, I'm going to another seminar in about 5 minutes, on chemoinformatics, so I'll have to stop writing now.

Saturday 08/05/04 @ 09:02 pm

Mouldy Lemons

Today, Nick found a rare sight hidden at the back of his cupboard - a bag of lemons, one of which was wrinkled and mouldy, and smelt quite foul. Strangely enough, the rest of the lemons seemed to be OK, but we threw them out none-the-less. And so, by popular demand, I present to you a lament for these lemons:

I ponder over memories,
Of time with lemons plenty,
How sweet it was, the bitter breeze,
In sunlit groves of lemon trees,
My innocence at twenty.

My reverence is broken as I look with great dismay,
The stagnant smell of tragedy has blown my dreams away,
For my lemon was so pure and bright,
It sang to me throughout the night,
I hungered for its juices light,
That wrinkled mouldy lemon I hold in my arms today,
Has passed away.

Friday 07/05/04 @ 10:09 pm

A week in the life of a CompSci...

...or at least it would have been, if it had been in any way normal. For one, I've had no supervisions all week, on the basis that one of my supervisors hasn't responded to any of my emails asking (begging?) for supervisions to be arranged. My other supervisor is Australian, and realised yesterday that he had a cricket match on, so would have to cancel today's supervision. At least he'll be setting some more work before monday...

I did, in any case, make up for the lack of supervision by going to a seminar this afternoon, which was much more interesting than the title would lead you to think. Basically, it was to do with reasoning in first order modal logics using these things called 'counterpart relations' - extending Kripke's multiple worlds to talk about the relation between a variable and its 'counterparts' in future worlds. There was a much smaller turnout than with the seminar I went to last week.

On a whim, I wrote an SK-combinator interpreter yesterday, in C! Rather random, I know, but our lecturer on functional programming was talking a bit about it, so I thought I'd practice my C and YACC! Strangely enough for a C program, it worked pretty much first time - if you're interested, here is the lex source, the yacc source and the interpreter source. I'll leave you to compile it yourself - I've been running it on my PS2, so I haven't actually tested it on any other platform (let me know of any problems). I'll probably put up a page with little code-snippets like this at some point.

I had quite an interesting day on monday. Despite it being a pretty miserable day, I went into town after lectures, to go clothes shopping with Matt. I was in desperate need of some new clothes, and to this end our shopping trip was very successful. We had lunch at Henry's over at the quayside, which was very nice (although I suspect that it would have been uncomfortably busy had the weather been much better). We then promptly proceeded to tour most of the shops in the town center (Cult, TopMan, River Island, Gap etc.). I was persuaded to get some rather 'unconventional' items - the most striking of which was a bright green top and some 'designer' jeans (by 'designer' I mean that they have holes in them). Despite my initial reservations, I'm now really please with what I've got - it does actually look really good, and it's certainly a big move away from the more boring clothes that I usually wear. After this shopping spree, we retired to Borders cafe for a coffee, and then spent a further hour looking around the music section!

In the evening, we all went out to Trinity Vaults for the birthday party of Harriet (Andrew's girlfriend). It was quite a good evening - I got talking to Rosie, who didn't seem too frightened by me being a CompSci! We seem to have quite a lot in common (she's also a fan of Tolkien!). There was quite a bit of kafuffle with finding candles for the birthday cake, and getting people in the right place, but we managed it in the end. Unfortunately the evening was brought to a premature close, after certain people had a little too much to drink and had to go home. Apart from that, it was a good night though :-)

As for the rest of the week, I did the second of my revision sessions on thursday, which went well (although due to timing issues, the turnout wasn't so good). Also, I finished reading 1984 - I've come to the conclusion that it's a fantastic book, although it's both incredibly scary and depressing. As a social commentary though, it's a perfect example of how badly wrong things could potentially go - hopefully not in my lifetime though :-)

Last night, I went out for a drive with Matt and Andrew, which ended up taking us to the William Gates Building. I gave them both a guided tour, which suitably impressed them (I think), after which we wandered around the outside of the Cavendish in the dark. When we got back, I persuaded them to watch Spirited Away (fantastic film, might I add), although Matt fell asleep during it unfortunately...

Anyway, I have to get a bit more work done before we watch a film or something this evening.

Monday 03/05/04 @ 12:43 am

London on a Saturday night

So, I went with Matt and Andrew through to London on Saturday. We took the train through, and stopped off for a coffee, before heading over to the East India Club. It was actually a really nice meal, although the place was absolutely dead! Anyway, Andrew gave us the guided tour, and we had a few drinks in the bar. Later, Matt headed off to the London nightlife, while Andrew and I got the last train back to Cambridge.

Today, I had the last D&D session before the exams, so there will only be one more in May Week to finish things off. Overall, I've not got a great deal of work done this weekend, though I've been doing a bit of revision this evening.

Saturday 01/05/04 @ 05:33 pm

Friday nights...

We really should learn from experience by now, but Friday night is not the best for going out in Cambridge. After having a curry, Sarah, Matt, Nick, Andrew and myself headed down to river bar, which we promptly found to be incredibly busy. So, we headed to a place called Ishca, which was quite nice, but even more expensive than river bar! After having one (expensive) cocktail, we tried to find a relatively quiet pub to go to, of which there were none. We ended up wandering over to Parker's Piece, so we thought that we may as well try out the University Arms. However, it was decided not to gatecrash another wedding reception, so that put pain to that idea.

So it was that we gave up, and went home. Andrew and Sarah got a taxi, while Nick, Matt and I set off walking. We saw Ruth and David, and stopped for a little chat, then Matt decided he would race us across Parker's Piece. This turned into a homeward-run, although I gave up just before getting to the Mill Road railway bridge - I'm not as fit as I should be...

When we were all back home, Naomi came round with a quiz for us to do. Of course, Matt and Sarah were considerably better than me, Andrew and Nick, especially when my team-mates deserted me during the sports round to go and make cocktails.

Anyway, today I got up somewhat later than I should have, and have done pretty much nothing other than going to Tesco. I'm going to the East India Club tonight with Matt and Andrew (who is a member), which should be quite an interesting experience.