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 18/06/04 @ 03:29 pm

Exam results

Just in the lab now, after waiting around for quite a while for them to put the class lists up... I got a 1st, so I'm happy :-)

Thursday 17/06/04 @ 01:32 pm

May week

The highlight of the Cambridge year has been and gone, though it has been great fun. Owing to the rather hectic nature of last week I've not updated in a while, so take a deep breath and be prepared for a long post...

On Sunday afternoon (that's Sunday 6th), I met up with David at the swimming pool. We did a few lengths, and I even managed to persuade him to go down the slide (he was a bit scared of it, you see...). After we had suitably cooled off, we decided to go over to the new cinema / bowling alley, down Hills Road. Sarah joined us there, and we went to see The Day After Tomorrow. I was really impressed with the cinema - it's the same price as Vue, but the seats are much more spacious, with more leg room, and are overall more comfortable. Also, the popcorn is better :-). As for the film... it was pretty enjoyable, although it did suffer from typical Hollywood-syndrome. It was probably the best thing to watch given the weather though, as it cooled you down quite a bit!

The next day, I went into town with Andrew and Sarah for lunch at Charlie Chan. Not having been there for lunch before, I was pleasantly surprised by the dim sum menu. As usual, the Chinese like to mix sweet and savoury dishes, so you get things ranging from meat dumplings, to crab soup, to this pastry dish that looks a lot like squid (it was very nice though). Our appetites satiated, we headed off. I went into town with Sarah, for a bit of shopping, managing to conveniently separate so that I could buy birthday presents! I spent quite a while wandering around town, before heading over to college to pick up my mail. On the way back, I stopped off via the botanic garden, which was peaceful and relaxing as usual.

On Tuesday afternoon, I went to a course entitled 'cleaning infected/hacked PCs', which was more fun than it sounds - we basically got to infect a load of winXP machines with a range of viruses/rootkits, and then clean them up again. Luckily, the computer room we were in was nicely air conditioned, otherwise I would probably have expired!

I met up with Sam, David and Katharine at the Eagle on Wednesday afternoon, after picking up my May Ball ticket from college. The conversation tended towards role-playing, as expected, although we did encroach on more dangerous territory when we started talking about Ring/The Ring (a somewhat predictable topic given the presence of David!). Anyway, after four hours of not so heavy drinking, I headed over to Borders to kill some time (and money) before meeting Sarah and others at 7. It was Sarah's birthday on Tuesday, but this was the most convenient time for the most people to go out for a meal. We tried going to a Spanish Tapas restraurant near Quayside, but they refused to let us book a table, and upon having no room for us simply gave vague possibilities of space on an arbitrary time scale. This not being good enough to support our exponentially growing hunger, we went to Teri-Aki instead! We had a good meal, then met up with Andrew and Nick at the Ha Ha bar.

Thursday was the sad day of my last D&D session in the current campaign. We kicked off at 1pm in Sam's room, given that both Katharine and David had to nip out for a bit at some point. In the end, it was decided to wait for them to come back, so that they wouldn't miss the fun of the final battle! So, continuing from the events in the last session, the players charged up to the top of Khass's tower, to find that he had opened a portal into Hlairddid's domain and was proceeding to quite literally drown the world! Not standing for this, the players attacked and (eventually) managed to defeat the evil Dwarf, although he did have a few tricks up his sleeve - not least being the 'mislead' spell, that creates an illusory double, while you yourself turn invisible. There was a sad moment when Hlairddid died, and passed his legacy onto Blodeuedd, but other than that the Kings were pretty chuffed that the world had been saved! And so everybody lives happily ever after... for now...

After the session, we headed over to Teri-Aki (again) for a meal. The others all tried some sushi as a started, while I had a nice bit of chargrilled eel. We then headed back to Sam's via Sainsbury. As is expected, when you have a decent sized group of people, it took literally ages for us to all decide on a film to watch. In the end we watched The Usual Suspects (a very clever and entertaining film), followed by Equilibrium (a cross between 1984 and the Matrix). After that, the topics of conversation deteriorated into linguistics and information theory, which is always an explosive combination at 4:30am! I eventually got home and to bed at about half 5!

Of course, I had to get up at a decent time on Friday (1pm, say), as it was the May Ball in the evening, and Alex was coming down from Brid for it. She arrived in Cambridge at about 3pm, then we started getting ready for the ball. At about 7:30pm, we were ready, and we got a taxi over to college. We were pretty near to the front of the queue, so we were some of the first to get in. The ball itself was fantastic - there were some great fireworks, we saw a hypnotist, we saw N-Trance, and there was plenty of good food and drink! I went on the dodgems a couple of times with Alex, which was great fun! Overall, I found it much more enjoyable than last year (although they did do a pretty good job then) - it was a fantastic night :-)

After the survivors photo at about 5:30am, we headed home, meaning that I got to bed at around 6:30am. We didn't get up until early afternoon the next day, when Andrew gave me and Alex a lift into town. We grabbed lunch from Pret, and headed over to Christ's Pieces for a sit down. Unfortunately, the heavens opened up, and there we were sat, getting wet. Luckily, the clouds cleared very quickly, and we had a wander through town, before heading over to college to get a copy of the survivors photo for Alex. That done, we went over to Queens, to the SciSoc garden party. This was informal, but very pleasant, given that the weather had turned for the better. We then went for an Indian at the Curry Mahal, and ended up ordering way too much (two poppadoms, a starter, and main course each). We therefore left rather stuffed, and waddled over to the Vue cinema, to see Harry Potter (which Alex had yet to see).

On Sunday, we got up reasonably early, and spent the late morning / early afternoon in the botanic gardens. We had to head back rather too soon though, to get Alex to the train station on time. Unfortunately, we found that half of the trains had been cancelled, so after some conversation with a rather unhelpful customer service person, we opted for her to get the replacement bus service to Peterborough, and make her way back from there. In any case, she didn't get back home until after 9pm, which is ridiculous! Anyway, after I had seen Alex off, I went over to the driving range with Nick, Sarah and Naomi, to (badly) hit a few balls. It was quite good fun though!

The last few days have been much quieter - I've basically gotten to the stage where I can't be bothered to do anything strenuous! I've watched a few more films (Amelie, Big Fish, Akira), and I've been reading a book on the rise of 'computer game culture', which is quite entertaining. Anyway, I have a 'cake and wine' party tonight, with my DoS and all the Robinson CompScis, and my exam results come out tomorrow, so things are starting to happen again. I'm also going to the Red Hot Chili Peppers concert in Hyde Park on Saturday, so I'm looking forward to that! Unfortunately, this new-found freedom won't be lasting for long, as I start work a week today...

Sunday 06/06/04 @ 02:03 pm

Exam-free repose

On Friday, I got up at a suitably non-early hour, and went into town with Andrew. We met Naomi at Teri-Aki for lunch, where I had some tuna and eel sushi. I must say that I quite like it, although the texture is the worst part - it does taste rather slimy, but then what do you expect for raw fish? After lunch, we headed over to Moss, to find a dinner suit for the may ball. I bought a very nice one, which I'm rather pleased with, although it fits pretty much perfectly at the moment, which means I'd better not gain any more weight... I also stocked up on my essential coffee supplies, from the guy at the market place, while we were in town.

In the evening, Matt, Sarah, Andrew and I went out to see the third Harry Potter film. It was very entertaining - I particularly liked the guy that played Professor Lupin. The main downside is that Daniel Radcliffe's acting is seriously not developing, and remains as wooden and lacking in emotion as it has been in the previous two films. Aside from that, the film is well worth seeing!

Yesterday, I went into London for the day with Andrew and Sergio. Upon getting to the train station, we found that the Cambridge/Kings-Cross line was down, and so we had to get a very slow train into Liverpool Street (it took about an hour and a half to get there!). We arrived in London at about 11am, and promptly went over to the East India Club for drinks and lunch. Unfortunately, their lunch didn't start until 12:30, so we decided to just have sandwiches, given that Sergio had an interview at 1. These sandwiches took rather longer to arrive than we had bargained for, and so we had to eat rather hurriedly, and grab a taxi to get to the British Library.

Sergio's interview was with this guy from some Italian law firm, which was for some reason to be held at the cafe of the British Library (sounded rather dodgy to me...). Anyway, Sergio went to the wrong place, leaving me and Andrew to find an Italian-looking person in a bow-tie outside the cafe (Sergio had gone to the wrong floor). It was the right person, so we directed him upwards. The interview underway, we decided to explore the library a little, only to find that a reader's pass was required to enter it, and that we would need written permission from the University Library in order to obtain one. So we wandered round an exhibition on silk instead (granted, it was more interesting than it sounded - they had quite a large stock of ancient Chinese manuscripts).

After half an hour, I got a phone call from Sergio, saying that his interview was over. When we met up with him, it turned out that he had got the job, which was very good news! We headed out of the library, and grabbed a taxi to the Tate Modern - the next stop on our agenda.

The Tate Modern is a very interesting place - I must admit that there is some very good artwork there, although this is mixed in with pieces that a pre-school child could easily out-do. Of course, it was very nice to see the originals of many of these famous paintings, so it was well worth the visit. After we had looked around the galleries, we walked across the Millennium Bridge (now no longer swaying), and then headed over to the shopping areas in search of a hat for Andrew.

Upon arriving at Selfridges, Sergio took us to a rather nice Brazilian restaurant where we each had a selection of Tapas, and a couple of caipirinhas. We then wandered around Selfridges, moaning about the price of suits, considering their quality. We found out that they had recently lost their hat department though, and we couldn't be bothered to go looking for another place, so we made our way back to the club.

Back there, we had a rest and a drink, before going down to dinner at about 7. As before, the food was very good, as was the service, and I very much enjoyed the meal. The place was slightly livelier that the last time I went, and we retired to the bar after the meal. We then got talking to an older member of the club, who had some rather strong opinions about terrorists and the British Empire, which lead to a heated debate, although he did buy us all port. It was soon getting rather late though, so we made sure that we left plenty of time to get the train back. As it turns out, we caught the last train from Liverpool Street, which once again took a good hour and a half to get back to Cambridge.

So that was Friday and Saturday, and today is likely to be somewhat less eventful. I'm going swimming pretty soon, but other than that, I'm going to have a lazy day.

Friday 04/06/04 @ 12:10 pm

The sweet taste of freedom

Here I am. The exams are over, and I've completed two thirds of my degree - the scary thought is that this time next year I'll only be a few weeks away from graduation. I'm surprised at how quickly the exams went - then again they did only span four days (one on each). The exam on Monday went pretty well - I made a couple of silly mistakes, but nothing too serious. Tuesday was worse, in that I messed up Computation theory (by leaving myself too little time and not trusting my instinct), so I'll only have got about half marks on that question. The others were fine, although I did rush one of them. Thursday was rather similar, although to be fair, four of the questions did go very well. I managed to mess up Databases, by not writing enough down, since I realised that I had been thinking along the right lines afterwards. Thursday went very well though, and there were only a few minor mistakes (one of which was caused by misreading the question and therefore explaining more than I needed to). Overall, things have gone pretty well, and I hope that I'm on track for another first... we shall have to wait and see though - the results come out a week tomorrow, or so I'm told.

Anyway, enough about exams. They're done :-). After the exams, I went over to the Eagle with Alaric, Immad and Adam, where we met up with a load of other CompScis. We stayed for a drink, then wandered over to Wetherspoons, where we found that despite the early time it was already too busy to find seats in order to get food etc. So we went to the Ghandi to get some proper food. After filling up on curry, we went back to Wetherspoons, which by this time was overrun with CompScis. We bumped into Alex, who introduced me to a number of people that I had never seen before but was told were IB CompScis. So, we ended up going back to Jesus to the room of a guy called Dave, where we had more to drink, until one of the Jesus porters came and chucked us all out. Fair enough, the music was a bit loud (and there were some people with exams still to go), but this only adds to my perception of Jesus porters being the most miserable and grumpy that I know (my previous experience was in the second week of my first term here, when a porter refused to put my supervision work in the pigeon hole of my supervisor because it was a Sunday...).

Anyway, other than that it was a good night. I managed to find my way home from Jesus, then had a bit more to drink (since everyone else was still up and drinking) before going to bed. Today, I have to go into town to buy a dinner suit for the may ball. We're going to see Harry Potter 3 tonight, so I'm looking forward to that. Plus tomorrow, I'm going into London with Andrew and Sergio, for lunch and shopping etc.

By the way, watch out for the photos page appearing soon as promised...