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

Saturday 31/07/04 @ 09:41 pm

Long Time; No Updates

Ok, so it's been quite a while since I last wrote an update here, and so inevitably I must liberally slap myself for such lack of decency. Of course, quite a lot has happened in the month and a half since I got my exam results, so there is a fair bit to talk about. I won't talk about it all now; though I couldn't bring myself to have a whole month without any updates. So this is July for you. Isn't it great ;-)

So, that weekend in June after I last updated... On the Saturday, I caught the train down to London, to meet up with David and Ruth, and go see the Red Hot Chili Peppers in Hyde Park. Of course (which goes without saying) their performance was fantastic! We also had James Brown (of soul fame) as a support act, although the first support act was a group called 'Chicks On Speed', which were so bad that they got booed off stage. Somewhat hilarious to see a crap band shouting "fuck you" at thousands of people in Hyde Park, after having various things vigorously thrown at them :-)

The next day, I buggered off back up to Bridlington for a little while. I arrived there later that day, and came back down to Cambridge on the Wednesday. In particular, I went out for a nice meal at Manor Court with Alex (the restaurant is particularly noteworthy, as they have Scrumpy Jack cyder on tap ;-), and we also managed to get through the whole of 10th Kingdom in just two nights - it's really sweet, and worth seeing :-). On the Wednesday, I went into town for lunch with Alex, though her car broke down after running out of petrol on the turning just before the petrol station. A comedy situation, though it was remedied after borrowing a petrol can from the station, and narrowly avoiding calling out the garage :-).

So, later that Wednesday, I arrived back in Cambridge ready to start my internship on the Thursday. Since then, that's what I've been doing. It's really great fun, and I'm learning loads (rapidly becoming an expert on various subtle features of TCP and it's implementations ;-). I even spent quite a while digging around in the Linux kernel to understand it's flow control mechanisms, from which I produced a fairly comprehensive report, which I will post up here at some point. I've been mostly debugging features to do with the BSD implementation however, since much more progress has been made with that respect. We even found, the other day, an interesting way of performing a DoS attack on a BSD machine, until I realised that the blocking methods of modern firewalls will prevent this (although admittedly their blocking of SYN/FIN packets is for other reasons ;-). We do have something in the way of strict deadlines looming, as Steve (the main guy TCP-wise, and who wrote most of the testing infrastructure) is leaving in September to do a graduate medicine course, I'm finishing mid-September, and Matthew (Mr UDP) is starting his PhD in October. We might have something in a reasonable state by then ;-).

In other, more general, news, I'm having a week off the week after next, popping back up to Bridlington for a bit. After that. I've got another four weeks of work, before a week at home, then two weeks in California, going to visit Roland in San Diego. After that... well, another week at home, and then back to Cambridge for my final year as an undergrad! Woohoo!