The Wandering Glitch

2008-11-11T13:01:00.001+11:00

installing remember the milk on gmail gadgets

2008-09-19T08:11:00.001+10:00

OK. After three days of no sleep (for different reasons every time) I do feel shitty now. This time I'm counting on the swim to bring me back online.

2008-09-17T13:22:00.001+10:00

second day of swimming. After 4 hrs sleep last night I ought to feel shitty. But I don't. The new regime is working for me....

2008-09-16T14:40:00.001+10:00

fighting with directoryservices and COM on 2008. seems windows 2008 and VS 2008 are uneasy bedfellows....

2008-09-15T08:37:00.001+10:00

back at premier - no longer via Readify. Can't say I'm unhappy about it.

2008-09-13T21:13:00.001+10:00

tried and failed to find a robust converter for EPS to PNG. Everything fails. (including [Graphics|Image]Magick) I guess - no Rdfmetal manual on google wiki for now

2008-09-09T13:17:00.001+10:00

Both kids have chicken pox. I hope it doesn't spoil their birthday.

2008-09-09T11:15:00.001+10:00

speed reading my news this morning with wordflashreader

2008-09-08T15:53:00.001+10:00

using StringTemplate embedded resource templates for the RdfMetal code generator. Should simplify the install story a little...

2008-09-08T13:02:00.001+10:00

Wow. Awesome origami: http://ping.fm/LYmEF

2008-09-08T12:32:00.001+10:00

watching http://ping.fm/OqVMe - is this what BLINQ has become. Great Stuff...

2008-09-08T11:32:00.001+10:00

At last. A less luddite response to global warming: http://ping.fm/35QIS

2008-09-08T09:35:00.001+10:00

time to reacquaint myself with the current state of the art WRT SWRL. Means leaving th cosy corner of .NET

2008-09-08T09:19:00.001+10:00

stiff from being forced to sleep in a cot again last night.

2008-09-07T21:13:00.001+10:00

another mammoth 4400 session awaits.

2008-09-06T13:06:00.001+10:00

looking for the perfect Lasagne recipe

2008-09-05T15:42:00.001+10:00

folding clothes and waiting to go out

2008-08-31T06:35:00.001+10:00

Sunday 6.33am. Emily is coughing. Thinking about b-trees.

2008-08-30T16:48:00.001+10:00

Q: Would 3 indexes on a triple table be overkill?

2008-08-30T16:42:00.001+10:00

rebuilt my machine with 2008. Day 1 a machine is always faster, but hopefuly this role/feature opt-in approach will keep it leaner. time will tell.

2008-08-26T15:04:00.001+10:00

what's the cheapest way I can get a tablet that's good enough for development?

2008-08-25T12:26:00.001+10:00

lots of random 3rd party bugs cropping up today - I'm the wandering glitch today.

2008-08-25T10:26:00.001+10:00

just ordered: Design Concepts in Programming Languages. got very good reviews.

2008-08-24T20:11:00.001+10:00

my Casio is still in sync with the atomic clock at Boulder +/- 3 secs. And I last updated it last year. Loving Casio!

2008-08-24T19:50:00.001+10:00

why did I ever think this was impossible? http://ping.fm/C6isE

2008-08-24T18:36:00.001+10:00

kids finally asleep. no battle tonight. thankfully. phew.

2008-08-24T11:38:00.001+10:00

trying to get ready to get out into the countryside. 3hrs and counting. Used to be measured in minutes

2008-08-23T18:59:00.001+10:00

getting ready to go out. finally got a haircut. No more sideburns longer than the top for me!

2008-08-23T09:17:00.001+10:00

Watching Monsters Inc for the 435th time.

2008-08-22T21:12:00.001+10:00

new post http://ping.fm/QcsZJ

2008-08-22T20:20:00.001+10:00

I'm thinking of it as venture altruism

2008-08-22T20:18:00.001+10:00

finally found some energy and will to blog again. This time I'm going back to the semantic web, with an essay on practical applications of web 3.0 in the IDE

2008-08-22T15:50:00.001+10:00

signing off for another week. And what a week it was.

2008-08-22T14:50:00.001+10:00

gtalk to ping.fm to the world surely I'm web 2.0 hip now?

hi

2008-05-15T03:15:00.001+10:00

Dear friend:
we are an electronical wholesale company which locates in China,we have lots of good products with high quality and low price; such as digital cameras, mobile, LCD TV, Laptops Notebooks, Digital Video, Mp4, GPS, and so on.
In order to gratulate Olympic Games of 2008 in Beijing, our company have a favourable campaign in this month; buy more, get more discount;
This is a god-given chance. we hope you can hold it quickly.
Have a nice day; thanks
I am waiting for your reply now.
website: www.electricaleden.com
Email: electricaleden@yahoo.com.cn

The Wandering Glitch is Moving

2006-03-23T10:35:00.000+11:00

The Wandering Glitch is moving to wordpress.com.

I finally grew irritated with not being able to categorise my blog entries. So I've moved over to Wordpress, which in some ways is not as good as Blogger (esp the WYSIWYG editing) but blogger broke down the other day, and precipitated this fickle blogger to jump ship. Doubtless I'll be back, but in the meantime I'll be found at http://aabs.wordpress.com/ and if you are Web2.0 savvy (and lets face it - who isn't these days, I mean, HELLO-O?) my RSS feed will be at http://aabs.wordpress.com/feed/. Of course if you are only interested in one category (like photography) then you can access its feed on http://aabs.wordpress.com/tag/photography/feed. Cool Huh? Yeah, that's why I changed.

Of course flickr can still publish to wordpress, so you'll still be able to check out selected blogged photos. If you want the photo-firehose just connect to the feed on my flickr account: http://www.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?id=81359372@N00&format=rss_200 And beware - several hundred new photos are gonna be uploaded any day now. I shall have braodband by the end of the day (with any luck up to 1MB/s) so I may decide to archive the entire 3GB of photos to a private set on flickr...

Derek's Picture of the day

2006-03-23T10:18:00.000+11:00

IMG_0843
Originally uploaded by derekmatth.

Yet another beautious offering from Derek. Very Fin de Seicle, sun setting on the roman empire kind of theme. Me Like.

I gotta git me some of this!

2006-03-21T09:35:00.000+11:00

The mind boggles at the possibilities of shapelock! It is a 'Ultra-High Molecular Weight Low Temperature Thermoplastic ' which is to say - a form of modelling plastic that can be made plyable at just above room temperature, and can be moulded to almost any shape, but which when it cools is hard as steel. Now I have my shed, (well I share it with Cockroaches and Huntsmen spiders and moths the size of mice, but I call it mine) and a double garage (not pronounced like Mirage but like Forage) I also have the opportunity (but not the leasure time) to get more 'practical'. I seem to be spend a lot of my spare time working on my software projects. It leaves me wanting to produce something tangible and useful, rather than something intellectually satisfying. The problem with intellectual pursuits is that once you have gotten your head around a problem, no matter how difficult it seems at the outset, you are left thinking that the problem was actually quite simple. Which brings to mind Steven Wolfram's assertion that there is really only one level of complexity - our perception of higher levels of complexity is really only an awareness of our lack of insight into the problem. Anyway, I want to produce lasting, and useful little gadgets for a change - the kind of things that buzz and flicker. To inspire me I have been visiting the Maker site, which is where I found out about shapelock. What I want from YOU is ideas for the above little doohickeys. What would be cool to make.

The Hidden War

2006-03-20T09:42:00.000+11:00

Several years ago, I worked on a contract in Central London (That's in Great Britain, an island off the coast of America) and I used to commute to work by train (that's a bit like a long chauffeur-driven car on rails). Every few weeks or so, people used to commit suicide by hurling themselves under the trains. Generally, these terminal events took place in or around the Crawley or Hayward's Heath areas. It just so happens that this area was a single line stretch of track and there was no easy way to go around the affected area. The net effect was always massive tailbacks and confusion in the rail network that spread out from the terminals (Hmmm, no pun intended, but weird huh?) affected in London to cover the whole region. This butterfly effect always happened during rush hours and always on weekdays.

I used to curse the departing souls of the selfish imolators to hell, blindly assuming that there was a continual stream of people killing themselves all over the country, and I had just been unfortunate enough to be affected by one of them at random. Now I realise that the imolators were guaranteed their place in heaven (with 72 virgins to cater to their every need, and presumably a free rail-pass for good behaviour). You see, I have penetrated the veil of happenstance to see the evil designs of a master-criminal at work. This spider-like Moriarty figure would never be so crude as to send people to blow up trains and buses (note the public transport links here. I'm not kidding) were he not trying to draw attention away from a more subtle and insidious gambit. One which is - I exaggerate only slightly - equivalent to Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Amin and Pol Pot combined in its cumulative horror.

You see, it all stems from Utilitarianism. As any morally sophisticated person can tell you, in a sentence, utilitarianism is that branch of ethics that seeks to do good by maximising the greatest good for the greatest number of the population. There is an implied calculus of pain in this statement that is being exploited by our criminal mastermind for the punishment and/or education of us infidels. It is easy to deduce the coefficients of this calculus as well. We can see from Newton's laws that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. One man (or woman)'s death in Haywards heath is roughly equivalent to frustration and irritation for about 50,000 people for about 2 hours. To standardise, we shall call that unit the 'crawley' and it's equal to roughly 100,000 grumble/hours.

We know that around 2 million people attended the march against war in Hyde park, London in Feb 2003. They were in attendance for about 5 hours, giving a total of 10 million grumble hours or 100 crawleys. That is - Osama bin Laden did the equivalent of 1.7 London Bombings without even having to get out of his seat. Multiply this by all of the demonstrations across the globe since then against the war and we have several times the devastation of the twin towers, and all he has to do is sit there, nice and cozy, in his dialysis machine in his cave there in Afghanistan, without moving a muscle. Add to that the huge dissatisfaction of the world with George W. Bush. Lets face it, how many people in the world have not spent at least an hour a week complaining about the wickedness of his regime and the general blindness of the Americans for not noticing, or caring.

It all adds up. If all the people in the world grumbled for just one hour - that would be equivalent to 20 times the September 11 attacks. Doubtless they have done a lot more than that! You're not including areas of highly crawleyage such as the middle east, and amongst the poor. There's a few more thousand crawleys for you. I find it shuddersome how this architect of woe has turned the very principle of a just and sane society, the very root and branch of liberal democracy, against us. Is it any wonder that this man has not been found, he needs to hide, to best achieve his nefarious ends. In fact he could achieve them even if he were dead. He's a lot like Jesus Christ in that respect, a man who he must respect for the countless giga-crawleys of misery he has spread posthumously across the world.

Any relation to any persons past or present is wholely coincidental. Please don't burn my effigy in the streets.

Adding my microchunks to the collective attentionstream - about bubbles.

2006-03-15T14:40:00.000+11:00

Tony says he's had a hard time persuading Portals to 'get' the advantages of Web2.0. I guess the portals would get Web2.0 from a usability perspective. It makes sense for them not to divert a little effort to it - most of Web2.0 can be built for very little cost on top of existing functionality (it's not rocket science after all!) But then - some of them have been around long enough to want to try to fall into the 'bank' category - i.e. safe, well established, not fly-by-night, hands rather than vapour-ware selling, hysterical, flipperty-gibbets that sound cool but are actually teflon to users. Perhaps by being conservative the portals are hoping avoid the share-price re-adjustment (collapse) that will inevitably come after web2.0 gets exposed as a minor technical fusion rather than the major technological quantum leap that all of it's evangelists would have us believe! I can't personally stand expending my web-time on a site with only one concept - the signal-to-noise ratio is too low. I prefer web2.0 sites like wikipedia where there is content worth reading rather than the banal opinions of strangers. I enjoyed venting these opinions so much I decided to blog them ;-) Perhaps that's the appeal of blogging - it's cathartic. Maybe it's like undressing in a remote place - there's always the thrill that you might get caught by someone.

My first Wikipedia article

2006-03-13T16:15:00.000+11:00

I thought I'd do my bit. Such as it is.

Podcast rant - the Dilbert Principle as revealed by the signal to noise ratio of IT podcasts

2006-03-08T14:30:00.000+11:00

There are many press releases on the web discussing the wonderful (or terrible, depending on your point of view) development of academic lectures being distributed to the world at large as podcasts. I fall firmly in the camp of those who think such a development is a mark of progress and a step towards realising the dream of free access to high quality ideas and well-thought-out commentary that will support the growth of civilisation in this increasingly dark age that we inhabit. So, you will not be surprised to learn, I went in search of the aforementioned podcasts to feed my yearnings for something substantial from my web trawling. Imagine my disappointment when I went to several podcast directories to find those golden podcasts [that are worth listening to] only to discover that there are literally millions of the blasted things that purport to cover science (or whatever discipline you want) but which are actually low-bandwidth channels for the diseased ramblings and insane imaginings of their loopy hosts. For example, under Philosophy one is more likely to find fundamentalist born-again christian, muslim, buddhist or fruitarian podcasts than rational argument on the nature of reality. My personal favourite is "MessiahCast". As with academic journals, moderators and peer reviews are essential for the medium to be of any worth. After all, why would I be interested in exposing myself to mongrel strains of the virulent memes of total strangers? Anyway, I did find offerings from Stanford, Harvard and Bath universities. That is a pretty poor showing considering that Apple cliams to have a whole branch of iTunes devoted to university podcast hosting. WHERE IS IT?

Electroconvulsive Therapy

2006-01-29T09:08:00.000+11:00

Yes, like all the other gullible fools, with highly reactive immune systems, I have invested my hard-earned money in a mosquito-click (tm). On the tin it says that as few as five clicks will inhibit the histamine reaction and 10 clicks will also neutralise the foriegn matter injected by the insect, by denaturing any proteins in them through electric pressure. Well, I should have guessed that if I suffered enough from the bites to pay $20, then I was gonna need a lot more than 5 clicks to eradicate the histamine. I should also have guessed that the place where the reaction is least bearable is the place with the most nerves. I should therefore have also guessed that (maybe just in my case) I get bitten on the knuckles of the hand, and have to click 50 or 60 times to deaden the area enough not to scratch. It's funny that when you describe using this product as "clicking", it seems a lot less unpleasant than "imparting a 13,000V shock into the nerves of your hand, causing painful involuntary galvanistic spasms, and deadening the nerves". What's more, if the thing is able to denature proteins, it must be able to do the same to other proteins in the skin that ought not to be modified. Anyway, it's bleedy irritating to have to electrocute myself repeatedly every time I get bitten, so I shall return to my favourite wonder-drug (Anthisan of Aventis Pharma Ltd, UK). A lotion that is unlicensed in Australia, but which really works. So, whoever is next over from England - bring a tube or two for me will you? I have a feeling this summer is going to be carnivorous.

Picture of the day

2006-01-28T18:57:00.000+11:00

Waterfall
Originally uploaded by Andrew Matthews.

A waterfall in the grounds of Ripponlea estate, Melbourne.

Taken with ISO400 exposure of 1/2000 at F8.0 then put through a high-pass filter and contrast enhanced.

Post-modernist left-wing feminist lesbian analysis, step aside!

2006-01-12T10:47:00.000+11:00

It appears that what I do for a living is established enough to support parasitic 'ologies'. It's incontravertably so when induhviduals can produce the following, without a trace of irony, or embarassment:

“New sources of value are laying the groundwork for an entirely new media value chain; one which leverages micromedia to deliver personalized, post-branded attentionstreams of chunked and microchunked disposable and essential media to communities of connected yet ever more hyperpolarized consumers.”

This microchunk leverages your collective attentionstream to homogenize [y]our hyperpolarized community into a vast post-post-branded collective intentionality of ridicule. Or, in other words, they said: "lotsa blogs lately", and I said: "bollox".

Typoglycemia

2006-01-05T11:48:00.000+11:00

This post about the mind's ability to understand massively garbled text is little short of astounding. I've seen this before, but I thought (in line with my new years resolution to continue blogging regularly) I would post it up here anyway. A conversation starter What can you deduce about the way the mind (or at least the bits used to read text) works? Oy it is nt eh jt to he te ft ad lt ls of te pe to be ae to ud it. (Obviously it is not enough just to have the first and last letters of the passage to be able to understand it.) So the letters within the words are being used in some algorithm, even if the algorithm pays less attention to the order of the letters). Q: What are the factors that make a word recognisable? If I mangled 'Typoglycemia', would you find that as easy to interpret as the word 'understand'? I guess not, which implies that we are already attuned to the words, based on their frequency in our vocabulary. The word order may provide hints in many cases. What else is going on?

The LinkMe Xmas Do 2005

2005-12-21T13:39:00.000+11:00

IMG_0751
Originally uploaded by Andrew Matthews.

Here's Kerry and I after a great evening at the LinkMe christmas do.

I must admit that it's a pleasant change to go to one of these things and have a good time, especially since for years I have adopted the "forge no ties" policy to my clients.

Oh, and the food was good too.

Quote of the day

2005-12-02T13:47:00.000+11:00

There is no greater joy than soaring high on the wings of your dreams, except maybe the joy of watching a dreamer who has nowhere to land but in the ocean of reality.

France Elevates its Security Level - via Alan Williams

2005-11-24T11:56:00.000+11:00

As many of you may be aware, in light of the current nightly disturbances occurring all over France, the French government has just announced a raise in its terror alert level from "Run" to "Hide". The normal level is "General Arrogance", and the only two higher levels in France are "Surrender" and "Collaborate". The rise was precipitated by a recent arsonist fire that destroyed France's white flag factory in an ethnic suburb of Paris, effectively paralyzing the country's military capability. It's not only the French that are on a heightened level of alert: Italy has increased the alert level from "Shout loudly and excitedly" to "Elaborate military posturing". Two more levels remain, "Ineffective combat operations" and "Change sides". The Germans also increased their alert state from "Disdain" to "Dress in uniform and sing marching songs". They have two higher levels: "Invade a neighbour" and "Lose". Seeing this reaction in continental Europe the Americans have gone from "Isolationism" to "Find another oil-rich nation for regime change". Their remaining higher alert states are "Attack random countries (ideally those without any credible military)" and "Beg the British for help". The British are also feeling the pinch in relation to recent bombings and have raised their security level from "Miffed" to "Peeved". Soon though, security levels may be raised yet again to "Irritated" or even "A Bit Cross". Londoners have not been "A Bit Cross" since the Blitz in 1940 when tea supplies all but ran out. Terrorists have been re-categorized from "Tiresome" to "Bloody Nuisance". The last time the British issued a "Bloody Nuisance" warning level was during the Great Fire of 1666.

From Kurtzweil AI - Refocusable pictures

2005-11-23T10:14:00.000+11:00

This will be revolutionary:

A computer science Ph.D. student at
Stanford University has outfitted a
16-megapixel camera with a bevy of
micro lenses that allows users to
take photos and later refocus them
on a computer using software he
wrote. Ren Ng's camera pits about
90,000 micro lenses between the main
lens and sensor. The mini lenses
measure all the rays of incoming...

Fern Bud

2005-11-20T15:28:00.000+11:00

Fern Bud
Originally uploaded by Andrew Matthews.

This bud for a tree fern was about the size of my hand with fingers outstretched. It would be great to get a time laps of one of these unfolding. mind you, the humidity would have fritzed my camera way before it got through the sequence.

I love the fractal symmetry in the self similarity on each scale. I wonder how many levels of spiral there are in these buds? I guess I could work it out my looking at the levels of structure in an outstretched frond.

Frond - I love that word. I once bought an album by a band called 'the bevis frond', just because I loved the word - bloody stupid really, cos the music was an atrocity as I recal, anyway the minds a blank.

Truly google whacked

2005-11-10T11:18:00.000+11:00

A bizarrely self referential kind of whacking. I was looking for the URL of Derek's new blog site (having brill-o-padded the previous link out of existence) only to discover a whacked page about google whacking - on my own site.

funny

2005-10-14T23:20:00.000+10:00

I thought this one was so funny I had to immortalise it by posting it here...

Donald Rumsfeld is giving the President his daily briefing. He concludes by saying: "Yesterday, 3 Brazilian soldiers were killed." "OH NO!" the President exclaims. "That's terrible!" As the President sits, head in hands, his staff quietly watch this display of emotion. Finally, the President looks up and asks, "How many is a brazillion?"

A nocturnal visitor

2005-10-14T22:47:00.000+10:00

This little possum has been paying nocturnal visits to our back yard. It seems he/she also likes to pose for pictures, but hasn't learnt that to present a truly dignified pose, one has to present a profile.

An unfortunate hereditary affliction

2005-10-14T22:39:00.000+10:00

It seems that Thomas and Emily have inherited an affliction from their paternal grandmother. The affliction is one of having prehensile second toes. Is it right that one that has never had to wear shoes should have a bigger toe than their big toe?

I am a father - of two.

2005-10-05T17:37:00.000+10:00

It's been five days already, and the urge has come upon me to write a blog entry to say what's been going on. Friday afternoon I got a call from Kerry saying that she'd had a 'show'. Naturally I wondered whether it was a cabaret or the normal sort. It turned out to be a whole lot more biological than that, involving mucus plugs and contractions and Emily's feet slipping down into the birth canal. We thought that it might be another false alarm - we'd already had one so we tried not to get too excited, but the pains continued to grow so Kerry gave the labour ward another call and this time they summoned us in for observations. It quickly became clear that these contractions were the real thing, not the brackston-hicks variety that had been going on for months. They mounted and the hours passed, and eventually the doctors decided that they might as well go ahead and whip them out, since we were here anyway. At midnight they wheeled Kerry into the operating theatre and started to prep her for the caesarian. That meant inserting a needle the length of my index finger, and the width of a bic biro into the gap between two of her vertebrae. At that point the reality of the situation slammed into me at full force, and I sat there in a cold sweat going green, while Kerry was ushered into an operating theatre with about 20 doctors and nurses standing about. At this point I remembered all the advice about deep breathing - funny, I always thought it was meant for the mothers... Kerry was unfazed by the anaesthetists work but I'm sure it would have been another story if she had seen the size of that needle. Christ! Gives me the willies just thinking about it now. I'm not a squeamish sort, but I was so worried about Kerry and the twins that I got all emotional. Ahem. Anyway. When I was admitted to the inner sanctum, they had laid Kerry out on the operating table with a large screen between her head and her belly - to hide from her the grizzly mechanics of the procedure - another good idea, she didn't wanna see that either! I stayed with her, despite having claimed I was going to photograph everything. She was on a table with arms that came out of the side for her to rest her arms on, for easy access to the aneasthetist. It looked to me like one of those humane execution tables for administering lethal injections. Kerry looked so lost and scared, so we stared into each others eyes and whispered daft nonsense to each other. Almost immediately the aneasthetist said, "oh, they've made the incision already, they're just making their way down to the womb". Within seconds of that Emily made her appearance: From that point onwards the pace picked up, and I took a peek around the drape to see them tugging Thomas out by his ankles (his head was a little too big for the gigantic slash in Kerry's stomach!) He seemed to have been wading head deep in Shea butter, but I was later told it was Vernix - another brand of snot that mothers dispense free to all children. Thomas has been a frisky little fella since he came out - not surprising really considering he got his nuts squished by the surgeon on his first outing! Anyway I'm getting a little ahead of myself. As soon as both babies were safely out, along with their life support systems. The surgeons went to work sewing Kerry up, while I was taken over to see T&E as they were assessed to see whether they needed anything immediately. They were weighed, measured, their breathing checked (and a little O2 administered) before I was given each in turn to take over to Kerry, who was kinda indisposed at the time due the fact that a surgeon was buried up to his elbows (I'm not exaggerating at this point at all!) in her abdomen. Kerry was cool as a cucumber, and just looked so full of joy as first Emily and then Thomas were brought over. She only got a minute or two with them before they were snatched back and put into portable intensive care pods to be wheeled up to the neonatal intensive care ward (where we have lived on and off for the last week). The babies were fussed over when they arrived in the "newborn services" department. For the record I shall call this department the neonatal intensive care ward. I hate it when people upscale a name to lend it more dignity than it deserves. I have discovered that I also hate it when they downscale a name to not scare the natives. I mean. Newborn services sounds more like a motorway service station than a place that monitors newborn babies intensively. Anyway, I think the nurses there do a wonderful job and deserve more recognition. Rant Over. As soon as the babies were ensconced, I dived back down to Kerry who, being all sewn up now, was lying around in recovery. I've found myself doing that ever since - I am now torn three ways. I find myself on a strict rotation system between T,E, & K. Eventually guilt drives me from the one I'm with the the one of been with least. I can't wait for them to come home, so I've got them all under the same roof! It's been a week since Kerry went into labour, and she and the twins are doing fine. So fine in fact that they may be released before two weeks are up. Not bad for babies that are 5 weeks premature! T&E are out of the isolette incubators, away from the UV lamps, sans needles and heart and respiration monitors and (in Thomas's case) without a feeding tube as well. Emily is still too tired to feed very much so she is still wearing the feeding tube, but she's getting more lively with each passing day. There are some really sick children in the neighboring cots, so we are counting our blessings and are glad that jaundice is all that we have to contend with! I thought it was worth preserving the original message as well, while I was at it:

Hi Everyone, At 12.31AM and 12.32AM on the 1st of October 2005 we welcomed Emily and Thomas into the world in Monash Medical Centre (Clayton Campus). Everything went perfectly and mother and twins are thriving. Emily was born first. She weighed 2.59Kg and was 46cm tall. Thomas who was born a minute later weighed 2.422Kg and was 47cm tall. They are both in incubators at the moment since they are about 4 1/2 weeks premature, but they seem to be in perfect health, and will probably be transferred out of the incubators into cots sometime this afternoon - i.e. before they are a day old. They both inherited their good looks from their mother and their placid nature from their father (no, really). Kerry was incredible, as usual, and bravely withstood having a surgeon's arms up to his elbows inside her belly with stoic good humour. I have to admit I was not as brave, and started to freak out at the anaesthetist's first needle. (mind you - I saw the length of the needle, she didn't!) Anyway, she's already looking bright and cheerful, and happy, and totally, totally blissed out. I'm the same - we have been blessed with two gorgeous little angels. I can't wait to get to know them better. For those of you able to get to the hospital, visiting hours are between 2 and 4pm and about 7-8pm. Sunday or after would be a good time to come in, when Kerry has had a chance to rest properly - I don't think she's had a proper nights sleep for about a month, but a day or two might help her to recover a little. For those of you who're too far away, I've put up a slide show with the latest pictures. With more to follow. We'd both like to thank Nicole again, who after a frantic day, with god knows how many deliveries already, decided to stay with us till after 4am, and was there with us for the birth. She was amazing, and helped transform what could have been an agonising and stressful time into the most profound and life changing experience either of us have ever had. Not only that, she made it fun! Thanks Nicole. Please give us a call on +61 *** ****** so that we can ramble on at length to you about how beautiful our babies are. ;-) See you, Andrew PS. If I missed anyone, it's cos I didn't have all of the contacts in gmail - could you pass this on to them with my apologies. Also, sorry if you get this more than once, I haven't slept for two days and a little dumb right now. PPS. To calculate the time difference between the UK and Australia just subtract 3 from the time there, and then change from AM to PM or PM to AM. i.e. midday in UK would be 9pm in Australia, and 9am in UK would be 6pm in Australia. (I think.)

Arvo Part - Songs of Repentance

2005-09-29T09:46:00.000+10:00

Last night Kerry and I saw the Melbourne Chorale perform Arvo Part's Songs of Repentance at St Patricks Cathedral. It was a beautiful concert and one I'll not forget in a hurry. The music began with Allegri's Misereri which blew us both away, but the music continued to improve (IMHO) with the Part part. The choir sang in that gorgeous subsonic Russian orthodox christian style with edgy dissonances that fixate your attention. The atmosphere was electrifying not only because we were in a gothic cathedral with an electric storm going on outside making the whole edifice creak and sigh. The rain was pouring and the lightening periodically shone through the stained glass windows. We were listening to doleful songs of repentance and the atmosphere was one of a millenial mass for a collapsing world - thunder and lightening going on outside, the tolling of a bell in the cathedral and the distant sounds of police sirens... Absolutely incredible! I could go on.

Books that I have loved.

2005-09-08T17:15:00.000+10:00

I produced this list for Chris Palmer, who was interested in doing some background research on design patterns, design issues and programming best practice. I was planning on just jotting down some titles as they occurred to me, but when I sat down to think about all the books (of Computer Science or programming) that had inspired me, the list began to grow and grow. So I thought it might be worth committing it to a blog entry that I can refer to and extend later on. These are things that were influential to me - some of them are now obsolete or irrelevant technologies (at least to someone specialising in C#/.NET), so should be ignored where appropriate, but there are nuggets of wisdom in them too. The design section is a little short - I guess my opinions are a combination of having made mistakes (the ones I noticed) and the consensus that is emerging out there (reflected in countless best practice articles on the forums and esp. MSDN which is a distillation of the forums) Some of the techniques rub off from using particular APIs - some rub off from watching the way APIs have changed over the years. Anyway, the ones that are there, are generally _current_ best practice... Computer Science (& AI) Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid - Douglas Hofstadter Probably the most beautiful book ever written. This is without doubt the most inspiring book I have ever read. It ties together strands of ideas from computer science, art, mathematics and neuroscience and (playfully) demonstrates the equivalence of so many deep and seemingly disparate ideas that I came away with a whole new outlook. I spent a whole summer working through this book, doing paper and pencil simulations of his languages and automata. It won the Pulitzer prize, which for a book on cognitive science is quite amazing. I can quite understand why, because it draws you into a deep and complex subject without you ever feeling out of your depth. The Art of Computer Programming, Volumes 1-3 Boxed Set - Donald Knuth This is arguably one of the best books on computer science. It is a distillation of the early work on computer science and contains an in depth analysis of the fundamental data structures and algorithms for sorting, searching, random number generation &c. It doesn't reflect current programming concerns and all fo the code examples are in assembler, but it is deep and wide, and thus worth a $150 of anybodies money. Introduction to Algorithms, Second Edition - Cormen, Lieserson and Rivest This is my default reference for algorithms, much more clearly written and illustrated with pascal style pseudocode rather than MIX assembler. Less depth than Knuth, but with good analysis of algorithm time/space complexity. Compilers - Aho Sethi and Ullman This book is famously known as "The Dragon Book". Compilers are one of the most complex peices of software you will ever write. This book focussed very heavily on state machines, and language equivalencies. I learned more about computer science from this book than from any other two books I ever read (except possibly GEB-AEGB). I guess I ought to place this near the top of the list. Artificial Intelligence (3rd Edition) - Patrick Winston A broad introduction to the science. A background reference. (This guy runs/ran MIT AI lab) Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World - Kevin Kelly A very inspiring look at the inter-connections between various sciences that inform and are informed by complexity theory (It was so hot 10 years ago, but where is it now?). Adaptation in Natural and Artificial Systems: An Introductory Analysis with Applications to Biology, Control, and Artificial Intelligence - John Holland This is the book that introduced the genetic algorithm, and promoted the emerging science of complexity theory. It contains a hard but cool mathematical analysis of the process of evolution. The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence - Ray Kurtzweil This guy is a futurist who prodicts an omega point very soon. His ideas are over optimistic, but leave you breathless in their scope. Mind Children : The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence - Hans Moravec Very similar to the above. Radical hard AI with apocalyptic overtones, but very inspiring especially if your interested in how one of the leading roboticists views the future of his science. Design Object-Oriented Analysis and Design with Applications - Grady Booch Booch was a leading methodologist prior to the introduction of UML, and is arguably the largest influence on that standard. This book provides various heuristics to employ when designing OO software. I came away thinking that there was a lot of truth in this book, but that I was only ever going to 'get' it by going out there and programming. Design is not an academic subject in that sense - its got more to do with practice than theory. Just as one could read about aesthetics but never learn to paint, so one can read about design but never master it. I suppose its more of a way of criticising your efforts rather than a framework. I guess a design pattern is what's left when you criticise your design in various problems and find that you've boiled your designs down to something similar each time. (I need to take a writing course - sorry) Design Patterns - Gamma, Helm, Johnson and Vlissides (the gang of four) The boiled down essence of 20 years of object oriented design. High value stuff, only depart from these designs after much thought... Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture - Martin Fowler The same, only for enterprise designs. Lots of good stuff about data persistence and O/R Mapping here. Enterprise Integration Patterns : Designing, Building, and Deploying Messaging Solutions - Hohpe & Wolfe The same. Programming Inside OLE - Kraig Brockschmidt This really got me into component based design. The whole thought process of working with COM is conducive to better software development, and (if you extend the idea to its logical conclusion) to service oriented development. Advanced C++ Programming Styles and Idioms - James Coplien Eiffel : The Language - Bertrand Mayer This book explains the value of design by contract. It also demonstrates the core class libraries of the eiffel language, that were extremely elegant. It's a pity this language didn't take off. Exceptional C++ Style : 40 New Engineering Puzzles, Programming Problems, and Solutions (C++ in Depth Series) - Herb Sutter This book explores some advanced reasoning behind the use of exceptions that apply as well to C# as to they do to C++. Some valuable concepts for dealing with errors. Modern C++ Design: Generic Programming and Design Patterns Applied - Andrei Alexandrescu Effective C++ : 55 Specific Ways to Improve Your Programs and Designs - Scott Meyers The C# Programming Language - Anders Hejlsberg Advanced .NET Remoting (C# Edition) - Ingo Rammer Techniques & technologies

Write a compiler (any compiler) it'll expand your perspective of how software works.
TCP/IP programming - write a sockets based programming system - send objects down it. It'll give you an insight into how far we've come from 10 years ago, and why it is a good thing.
Master nant - write nant scripts for a complex project, then augment it with a task of your own. This is the build tool of the moment, and is better than VS.NET project files.
Mess about with NMock and mock objects - see where this leads you in developing code. You'll find that to use it your code will have to be cleaner.
Develop an abstraction framework around some complex system that allows it to be removed/enhanced without writing/modifying any client code. This is hard to do and naturally promotes good design. This is where the bulk of my design efforts are spent these days - everything else flows out of this effort. Once you start doing this sort of thing you'll notice that most best practice is actually idiomatic application of this technique.
Develop/use a code generator - most code is the expression of desires through the expansion of code (design patterns) with metadata. Name anything that you have written lately that wasn't like that to some extent.

Some beautiful images from Derek

2005-09-02T16:18:00.000+10:00

I'm not sure that this image does the original on Derek's site justice, but click on it and it should take you there.

Hillary Briss' "Special Stuff"?

2005-09-02T16:10:00.000+10:00

Does one experience nose bleeds when suffering from CJD? The report says "raw materials for fertiliser and feed imported from the Indian subcontinent in the 60s and 70s contained human bones and soft tissue". So indirectly we were performing acts of cannibalism when we were eating beef. Where does that place the relationship between cows and humans? We are eating them and they are eating us? Who is higher on the food chain?

Now here's something I'd trade in the Hyundai to own

2005-09-02T11:22:00.000+10:00

This Toyota concept car seems to have adopted the Fisher-Price/Window Media Player user interface approach to ergonomics. I'm not sure whether the dashboard is a touch screen, but I love the idea of exploring the object model of the car. I also love the idea of being able to control the car using a touch screen keyboard. In this age of automatic gearboxes and speed limiters, there is no reason for us still to be pulling and pushing levers to control the car - it's a technological throwback, a bit like when a plane's ailerons were controlled by cables attached to the joystick. That age has long past, but we still use joysticks - why? Bring on the coffee cup holder keyboard to set gears and speeds. In fact why not control speed using an iPod scroll wheel? I suspect it will be a while before something like this filters out to the public, but I look forward to the day.

2005-08-29T11:14:00.000+10:00

God knows what kind of tree this is, but it looks like a tree full of chick-peas.

The first sample

2005-08-29T11:10:00.000+10:00

Across the bay Click on the picture above to see my first attempt with the new camera. What dya think?

We got a new camera

2005-08-29T09:37:00.000+10:00

We got ourselves the Canon PowershotPro1 in readiness for the big day (so that we can preserve the gore in glorious technicolour for all time). It's a (as the Aussies would say) Beaut! Expect to see quite a few landscape and macro photos appearing here in the near future. The link above is to the DP Review site, which contains more information on the camera than the manual does (and that took me all weekend to absorb). The overall conclusion from DPReview was that it was a good canmera, with one or two minor problems relating to speed, but it got a Recommended status.

Cord blood yields 'ethical' embryonic stem cells

2005-08-19T14:22:00.000+10:00

New scientist is carrying a story about the use of cord blood in the preparation of embryonic stem cells. When K & I saw references to preservation of cord blood around the hospital we thought that it was to be preserved for later use by the baby in the case of operations and anemia. Now I am wondering whether they actually want it for other people. In which case my eagerness is slightly less! And there's another thing - what is different about the blood flowing through the cord anyway? I thought that a baby's immune system was suppressed during gestation and for a while after (while breast-feeding?) and that that was necessary since the baby was receiving umbilical infusions of its mother's blood (and antibodies etc). Is the blood different in the placenta? Is the placenta maintaining its own blood supply that is cut off from that of the mother? How does it get oxygenated? So many questions.

My OPML file

2005-08-18T12:14:00.000+10:00

I thought that since I have installed SharpReader (the best RSS news reader on the net) for Kerry on Carbon, I might upload a few of the feeds that I read daily for her (and you) to check out. Take a look at this file. You may have to convert the file to have the extension ".opml" to be able to import it into sharpreader, but it should work eventually. Its quite cool what is being done with RSS lately, my meager feed collection includes feeds for the weather, for VSS checkins at work, for new jobs posted in Melbourne, blogs, gmail, photos from friends and of course news syndication - it even has newsfeeds of new newsfeeds. I wonder what else is being done with it. I know that it's become the latest thing to attack Microsoft with (over whether they are renaming the technology to web feeds or just naming a feature in IE7). Either way, it seems to be garnering a lot of venture capital these days, especially in the mobile sphere, so someone must be doing something cool with it.

Deeply disoriented - my Ray Kurzweil parody

2005-08-17T20:54:00.000+10:00

"I find the whole orientation of the heavens to be contrary to all that I've known as true". So said Andrew Matthews, at a recent conference of the cognescenti. He went on to add that the orientation and movement of the heavens in the antipodes is exactly the opposite of what is found in the northern hemisphere, and that he is the first to recognise this fact and to talk about it.

2005-08-17T14:07:00.000+10:00

This is my memory jogger for Rome. I guess this isn't the sort of thing you post to the public, since each of these phrases has relevance to Kerry and Me, since we were there. Q: Do any of these evoke thoughts of your own?

Flickr Photo Site

2005-08-13T13:01:00.000+10:00

I've been rooting through my old and slightly newer photos. You can see some of the usual and not so usual suspects in compromising or not so compromising pictures with more or less amounts of alcohol in their bloodstreams. One thing I love about Flickr (which I've also come to love about GMail) is the use of metadata tags to describe content rather than hierarchical file structures. In here I've tagged it with the who what where and when of the pictures. Let me know what you think.

Kerry at 28wks

2005-08-13T11:32:00.000+10:00

Kerry at 28wks
Originally uploaded by Andrew Matthews.

Ha Ha Surprise
It was all just a drunken stunt!

OK. no it wasn't, but I bet Kerry never thought, when she posed for this, that one day she would come to think of this shape as normal!

Dad looking cheerful

2005-08-13T11:25:00.000+10:00

Dad looking cheerful Originally uploaded by Andrew Matthews.

Is this the ghost of Christmas' past or dad feeling left out because the lesbians were all trying to stick their tongues in Derek and Kerry's ears, while the gays were after a dance with him (Prison Style)?

Yes I know what you're thinking...

2005-08-11T13:19:00.000+10:00

...that flipperty gibbet is brillo-padding his blog again. Not content with the perfectly good one that he already has, he's gone and changed it back again. But as I always say, you have to keep it fresh. Hence the reason why I changed it back to the old theme. I hope you like it.

The latest inspiring hard-AI quote from Kurzweil

2005-08-11T12:28:00.000+10:00

The executive summary is that we will have computing capacity to handle whole brain simulations by around 2020, and that Moores law applies to functional brain mapping as well as to processors.

"I figure we need about 10 quadrillion calculations a second to provide a functional equivalent to all the regions of the brain. IBM's Blue Gene/L computer is already at 100 trillion. If we plug in the semiconductor industry's projections, we can see that 10 quadrillion calculations a second will be available for $1,000 by around 2020. "So now the controversy is focused on the algorithms. To understand the principles of human intelligence we need to reverse-engineer the human brain. Here progress is far greater than most people realize. The spatial and temporal resolution of brain scanning is progressing at an exponential rate, roughly doubling each year. Scanning tools can see individual interneuronal connections and watch them fire in real time. We already have mathematical models and simulations of a few dozen regions of the brain, including the cerebellum, which comprises more than half the neurons. It is reasonable to conclude that in two decades we will have effective models for most of the brain."

[drools]

2005-08-09T10:06:00.000+10:00

How could I live without this? This is to wireless digital home entertainment, what the ipod is to the personal music player. OMYGOD I WANT ONE!!!!!!!

Dr Chasuble's Patent Hair Elixir

2005-08-08T09:15:00.000+10:00

Another masterpiece of the art. This one even includes a little error to help make the client feel not only blessed with good fortune at having found the elixir but also heroically perspicatious at having found that their grammatical capacities are as overdeveloped as their hair soon will be. Thanks to Derek for this gem.

Pimp yo blog up byaatch!

2005-08-04T16:45:00.000+10:00

It has been almost 5 months and I haven't diddled with my blog in any way. If this were a laptop I would have reemed it out several times since then. so I have made use of the gorgeously Windows XP themed ice-bubble theme from blogger-templates. Watcha think?

Flat-earth Society

2005-08-04T11:39:00.000+10:00

This site is entertaining in the same way that nonsense poetry is. It is ingenious, and its obvious that a great deal of effort has been put into it, but it is not intended to make any sense. I am also bowled over by how powerful the memes are to be able to force these people into expending that much effort in the pursuit of the arguments. I've seen the poor souls compelled out into the rain on a Saturday morning to spread the word, despite the fact that these (seemingly respectable) people are being rained on as well as showered with the contempt of their fellow men. That driving compulsion is such a terrible thing in the hands of unscrupulous men. Woe betide us (forgive the slip into biblical grammar) if someone were to ever find a way to master the memetic manipulation and infection of the populace. The human mind would be the battleground for a war of ideas. Now hold on, I know what you're thinking. That's the whole of human history. I guess we are walking around in the rubble of a Stalingrad of the mind. And the visitors on the flat-earth society web site are the dead and walking wounded. I think that Derek wants to be a stretcher bearer. And as you can see, dear reader, I want to be a war poet. Sadly I lost my pencil, so I shall settle for being a innocent bystander caught in the crossfire, but hoping that the allies will liberate me from a world of doxological propoganda (and hyperbole).

Erik Werenskiold

2005-08-03T15:31:00.000+10:00

Having recently been slandered, and accused of being a geek (A geek! Me?) I thought it was about time to share with you all my artistic side. And to do that I thought I would provide a link to a beautiful painting that we saw when we were in Oslo last year (or was it the year before that?) This painting totally captured my imagination, and I haven't seen anything as good in years. It is called "Peasant Funeral" by Erik Werenskiold, a Norwegian painter, about whom there is very little in English that I could find. It doesn't do the picture justice, since it is the eloquence of the expressions that catches the heart. Here's a pic I snapped with my phone, which again is not good enough to convey what I saw, but might give you a glimps of Werenskiold's skill and insight. This picture makes me think of the quiet strength and dignity that Gray alludes to in his poem "An Elegy Wrote in a Country Church Yard". In the details you can see the misery in this man's face, uncomprehension in the face of the child, and helplessness in the faces of the other mourners. you can see that he's lost a loved one and can't see how to cope with it, but knows that he must. I guess it also weirds me out because the main character looks like my dad!

I'm still coming to the aid of the unlucky (and cancerous)

2005-08-03T10:29:00.000+10:00

I received a very heart-rending letter today from a lady whose email is helenamed@i12.com (yes spiders, please use it) who needs my help. As a renowned Charitable Organisation I am now the first port of call for all such desperate people who, ridden with cancer and sadly widowed from a rich, industrious and virtuous husbands, need to transfer money out of accounts that work in very strange ways. I am ever glad to be of assistance to the rich and needy worldwide, and to do that I still need your donations readers. So please keep on sending the money.

Kerry at 24 weeks

2005-08-01T16:31:00.000+10:00

kerry at 24 weeks
Originally uploaded by Andrew Matthews.

I took this photo a few weeks ago. Kerry still keeps on growing. She's already bigger than some of her friends when they were at full term. It's getting a bit uncomfortable for her now. I'm spending a lot of time giving her foot rubs now! Not that I mind - she has perfect feet, or at least that's what she keeps telling me. ;^}

little oberon bay 3

2005-08-01T16:16:00.000+10:00

little oberon bay 3
Originally uploaded by Andrew Matthews.

This is little oberon bay on Wilson's Prom. Taki and I went there at the start of the year. It is sooo gorgeous to look at in this photo, and despite the fact that the temperature was up above 30C the water was bitterly cold and we couldn't cope for long.

I think it may have had something to do with the fact that there was only open water between us and Antarctica. Either way, it was easy on the eye.

This BTW is a test post from Flickr

A sign of things to come...

2005-07-29T21:39:00.000+10:00

Finding that we didn't have room for a drying machine, and figuring that Melbourne summers are long and hot and dry, we decided that a clothes horse or two would be a better short term investment. And, keen as she is, Kerry decided to give one a try.

Lots of baby clothes

It gives me the shivers - I see a future littered with drying stinky babies romper suits. Our neat and minimalist, and even quite stylishly modern on a good day, existence is about to become very biological. Not that I mind - I also see myself becoming virtually American in my capacity for maudlin sentimentality about fatherhood. Like I said - very biological.

The power of advertising

2005-07-29T21:19:00.000+10:00

I've always been a believer in the power of good advertising, which is why I was so pleased to see this fantastic example of the art in Melbourne this week. It has it all - it has the doleful situation of the foolish dolt who has so willfully left himself in a state of baldness that is, as we can see by the "after" photo, so obviously reversible. I salute this masterpiece of modern advertising, and hope that television advertisers can learn from it.

Kerry has a blog (or two)

2005-07-29T21:06:00.000+10:00

Kerry has entered the fray, and will soon be blurting forth her every whimsical thought for your delectation and amusement. Support her - she's not just a mum, you know, she's a blogwife! Besides, when you're as big as she is, you can't divert yourself with gymnastics...

Another reason I'm looking forward to Vista

2005-07-27T13:20:00.000+10:00

Vista (or Longhorn if you haven't heard yet) also will support Adobe's latest typographic enhancements:

Brain modeling - first steps

2005-07-27T09:11:00.000+10:00

The following appeared in Kurtzweil AI: IBM and Switzerland's Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) have teamed up to create the most ambitious project in the field of neuroscience: to simulate a mammalian brain on the world's most powerful supercomputer, IBM's Blue Gene. They plan to simulate the brain at every level of detail, even going down to molecular and gene expression levels of processing. Several things come to mind after the initial "coooooooooooooool!!!!!". The first is that they are considering a truly vast undertaking here. Imagine the kind of data storage and transmission capacity that would be required to run that sort of model. Normally when considering this sort of thing, AI researchers produce an idealised model where the physical structure of a neuron is abstracted into a cell in a matrix that is able to represent the flow of information in the brain in a simplified way. What these researchers are suggesting is that they will model the brain in a physiologically authentic way. That would mean that rather than idealising their models at the cellular level they would have to model the behaviour of individual synapses. They would have to model the timing of the signals within the brain asynchronously, which would increase both the processing required and the memory imprint of the model. Remember the success of the model of auditory perception that produced super-human recognition a few years ago? That was based on a more realistic neural network model, and had huge success. From what I can tell it never made it into the mainstream voice-recognition software because it was too processor intensive. This primate model would be orders of magnitude more expensive to run, and despite the fact that Blue Gene can make calculations at a rate of 2 per micrometre at the speed of light, it will have a lot of those to do. I wonder how slow this would be compared to the brain modeled. I also wonder how they will quality check their model. How do you check that your model is working in the same way as a primate brain? Would this have to be matched with a similarly ambitious brain scanning project? Another thing that this makes me wonder (after saying cool a few more times) is what sort of data storage capacity they would have to expend to produce such a model? Lets do a little thumbnail sketch to work out what the minimum value might be based on a model of a small primate like a squirrel monkey with similar cellular brain density to humans but a brain weighing only 22 grams (say about 2% of the mass of the brain).

Average weight of adult human brain = 1,300 - 1,400gm
Number of synapses for a "typical" neuron = 1,000 to 10,000
Number of molecules of neurotransmitter in one synaptic vesicle = 10,000-100,000
Average number of glial cells in brain = 10-50 times the number of neurons
Average number of neurons in the human brain = 10 billion to 100 billion

If we extrapolate these figures for a squirrel monkey the number of neurons would be something like 1 billion cells, each with (say) 5,000 synapses each with 50,000 neurotransmitters. Now if we stored some sort of data for the 3D location each of those neurotransmitters we would need a reasonably high precision location maybe a double precision float. That would be 8bytes * 3 dimensions * 50000 * 5000 * 1,000,000,000 which comes out at 6,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes or 5-6 million terabytes. Obviously the neuro-transmitters are just a part of the model. The patterns of connections in the synapses would have to be modeled as well. If there are a billion neurons with 5000 synapses, there would have to be at least 5 terabytes of data for synaptic connections. Each one of those synapses would have its own state, and timing information. Maybe another 100 bytes or more for that information or another 500 terabytes.

I suspect that the value of modeling at this level is marginal, when they could represent the densities of neurotransmitters over time they could save the cost of data storage hugely. I wonder of there is 6 million terabytes of storage in the world! If each human on earth contributed a megabyte of storage then we might be able to store that sort of data.

Lets assume that they were able to compress the data storage requirements through abstraction to a millionth of the total I just described, or around 6 terabytes. I assume that at all times the synapses would be visited to update their status. That means that if the synapses were updated once every millisecond (which rings a bell, but may be too fast) then the system would have to perform 6 *10^15 operations per second. Assuming also that the software would have numerous housekeeping tasks and structural tasks to perform, so it might be no more than 25% efficient, in which case we are talking 2.4*10^16 operations per second. Blue Gene/L system they will be using is able to perform 2.28*10^12 flops, therefore they would take around 1000 seconds to perform one cycle of updates.

They will be restricting their models to cortical columns that would restrict their model to about 100 million synapses, which would be much more manageable in the short term. I wonder how long it will take before they are able to produce a machine that can process a full model of the human brain?

I am a charitable NGO and I didn't know - it.

2005-07-22T09:42:00.000+10:00

I have been receiving increasingly desperate messages from various scions of once elevated families of the Ivory Coast, Kenya and South Africa. They have all these funds tied up and the need ME to help them release it (in confidence of course, but I know you, dear reader, will not tell a soul)! I feel honoured to be considered for the noble task of helping these courteous young people out of their dire circumstances. I just need a donation from you dear reader to allow me to free up the funds to send to them to free up their funds to send my cut back to me so that I can pass it on to you. Contact me for my bank account details.

Meta-evolution - evolving the capacity to learn

2005-07-19T09:48:00.000+10:00

The real value of a language learning (or any other kind of learning) organ, as Chomsky called it, is that its most valuable output is the _capacity_ to be so sensitive to the environment that mental processes grow to represent it. That is, the diversity of environments that humans find themselves in is so rich and varied that a hard wired and inflexible capacity would be of limited value compared to a "meta-learning" facility that develops to represent the environment the organism finds itself in. Meta-evolution would be of more evolutionary value than just plain evolution - a learning capacity that can evolve in the real-time of an organism's life seems more valuable than the simple evolution of a set of skills and competences that must be evolved over time as environments change.

Why I'm looking forward to Longhorn

2005-07-14T10:32:00.000+10:00

Mike Swanson has written a fairly faithful translator between Adobe Illustrator and XAML. It is now only a matter of time before the tedious square window is a thing of the past, and graphic designers can really be let loose on interfaces. To get an idea of what will be possible - take a look at the page linked to the title of this entry.

As the Buddha said...

2005-07-14T09:39:00.000+10:00

...life is pain. And it seems that some of us (and I'm including myself in this camp till proven otherwise) are born with an inherited tendency to feel more pain than others. This curse is known as "primary erythromelalgia". And is somehow related to a defective sodium channel in the pain signalling neurons. I blame my parents.

Breaking news

It seems that one of the guys that I'm working with has a father-in-law who was a body guard for Adolph Hitler. A nasty bast*rd by all accounts.

When a brill-o-pad goes bad...

2005-07-11T13:36:00.000+10:00

...sometimes you get out your brill-o-pad with the best of intentions and it all goes bad. Nitrogen has had something installed on it that disagrees with it and performance is getting progressively worse. There are a few suspects: SQL Server 2005 CTP, VS.NET 2005 beta 2, and a limitless number of other crud that oughtn't to be on there. I think that whatever it was it infected N via the settings migration wizard that XP uses to port My Docs etc between systems. This performance degradation is inherited from its previous setup. I think this is a form of karmic punishment, for no sooner was Nitrogen reincarnated that it was beset by the ills and sins of its previous life. If only there were a way to enter the enlightened state of having a hardware platform that natively runs an emulation layer that can be saved, rolled back and otherwise fiddled with. In fact if that were the case you could have an easy way to start running VMs on third party machines (you could access them via VNC for instance). That way you could lease a clean installation with some additional storage space where you could put your data. The OS and apps could be reinstantiated for you each time you run the computer, and then connected to the the data disk that stores what you were doing last time. I think that if the price (and performance) was right I would consider running such a virtualised machine. Especially if I could alternate between different OS's depending on my requirements. Question: what technique could OS manufacturers use to store settings modifications? If you had a transactional file system that allowed you to rollback, you could wipe out changes if they proved to be negative. But what if you only discovered the problem after performing lots of beneficial changes? I wonder how difficult it would be to have an OS that set baselines on the file system so that you could identify a specific set of changesand excise them without removing subsequent changes as well. How much overhead would that require? Would be enormous.

I've done my civic duty for the year...

2005-07-08T13:50:00.000+10:00

Well, Aabs Dbc is now out there in the public domain now. Yayyy!!!!! I've created an open-source project on sourceforge, and advertised there for help with documentation, installers and general app developers. I've uploaded an initial source code release - and configured my paypal settings. I can't wait to see how it is received by the public. Pay the site a visit, and let me know what YOU think. And, of course, if you want to make a donation... ;o) Here's the SourceForge link.

Programming Gem of the day

2005-07-07T13:00:00.000+10:00

I think this one requires no disparaging commentary, it's funereal dissatisfactoryness stands as a balefire to all of you who want to write code that is both tenebrous and brittle.

adCol.Add(new
  Advertisement(dr.GetString(0),
    dr.GetDateTime(1),dr.GetString(2),
    dr.GetString(3), dr.GetInt32(4),
    dr.GetBoolean(5), dr.GetFloat(6),
    dr.GetString(7), dr.GetString(8),
    dr.GetString(9),
    dr.GetDateTime(10),
    (int)dr.GetInt16(11),
    (int)dr.GetInt16(12),
    (int)dr.GetInt16(13),
    dr.GetString(14),
    dr.GetString(15),
    dr.GetString(16),
    dr.GetString(17), dr.GetInt32(18),
    dr.GetString(19),
    dr.GetString(20),
    dr.GetString(21).ToCharArray()[0],
    dr.GetString(22).ToCharArray()[0],
    dr.GetString(23)));

This example has been formatted for extra readability - it was on a single line. I would also like to point out that I had ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO WITH THE PRODUCTION OF THIS PIECE OF CODE!

Kerry smells - or at least I hope so!!!

2005-07-07T09:27:00.000+10:00

The smell of mother helps in the growth and development of a newborn child's olfactory centres. This is used in the process of bonding and is closely related to the way that the rest of the brain wires itself up to perceive the rest of the world. Just as I've been saying for years - reality itself is the force behind congitive development! Now, the burning question is - should Kerry go "au naturelle" prior to the birth so that the twins can smell her "natural" body odours ;-) maybe even ahave a curry or two? Or should she dose up on the Chanel #5?

What's making me [drool] today?

2005-07-06T09:30:00.000+10:00

Monad is a next generation command line interface from Microsoft that is due to become part of Longhorn. The architect, Jeffrey Snover, is so persuasive that you will end up nodding and wondering how you lived without it in the past. He has taken the best of bash, awk, perl, VMS-DCL AS400 and WSH command line environments and has merged that language with a native .NET object pipeline model so that the command line directly pipes around .NET objects rather than text streams. Everything in the operating system, and everything else available to languages such as C# from the .NET framework are available in the same script. He describes a situation where you can grep an LDAP directory as easily as you can grep for files in the file system, the entries found are .NET objects that can then be piped through to some other command or have their properties examined and modified. Sounds seemless, and I can't wait to try it! [drool]

From the journal of Neuroscience - An excuse for cultural stereotyping and rampant sexism!!! Yay!

2005-07-05T14:42:00.000+10:00

It says here: "in the absence of nuclear receptor 2E1 (NR2E1), even laboratory mice can become fierce, displaying pathological violent behavior ". It's now obvious that the UK government has been manufacturing an NR2E1 suppressant for years and releasing it into the water supplies of council estates and spiking Stella Artois with it. Do women undergo a drop in the levels of NR2E1 every month? [It's just a joke, alright!] Presumably excess levels of NR2E1 can have the opposite effect? Whatever the truth is, I don't want and argument OK!

And another thing...

2005-07-04T09:47:00.000+10:00

Dom suggested that "The distance to our goals always seems further to those realists without sufficient knowledge.". My personal experience in software indicates that when you are attempting to solve a difficult problem with many unknowns, you cannot predict the degree of complexity of the problem or solution without actually solving the problem. Good estimation in a software project is an exercise in pessimism. I also find that my pessimism is never enough! At the beginning of a project I am filled with youthful exuberance and optimism that blinds me to the fact that when I am waist deep in complexity (and office politics) my exuberance isn't enough to get me through the project - at that point progress throttles back to the baseline progress afforded by grim determination. This is a very good description of the AI research community, and presumably many other areas of science as well. A war is equivalent to the deadlines-looming stage of a project where we always seem to pull miraculous rabbits out of our arses. The plateau period of slow progress cause by disillusionment can be seen at work in the AI research community now. Anti-results such as Minsky's proof of the limitations of certain types of neural networks and the failure to make quick progress have muted the youthful exuberance of the AI community and it is now in baseline progress mode. This probing of the unknown reminds me of Turing's Halting Problem - For certain problems where information is lacking, the only way to work out whether a program will halt is to run it. When a program over-runs you can't know whether it is about to halt or not. So there is a basic undecidability about complex software that is reflected in software projects. This is the "software crisis" we were all taught so much about in university - the reason why more than 50% of major projects go over budget, are late, or get scrapped altogether. We were taught that there is no silver bullet and that the only way to overcome the crisis was to adopt strict programming discipline and make use of automated proof systems to identify items of code where halting and correctness were not possible. But we live in a capitalist economy whose driving force is the market. Software engineers are required to maximize functionality and minimize costs so formal methods. Proofs are not an option. Consequently we make conservative estimates about what is possible with a given number of programmers in a fixed time. I see no difference between this working environment and that of scientists who are also driven to produce short term results for their investors with limited resources - they don't even know if there is a solution to the problem - they just know that there always has been before. So, Dom, I think I'm suggesting that rational pessimism is justified when predicting the time taken to perform a poorly specified task of great complexity, and I can prove it!!!!!!

Why is consciousness so hard to think about?

2005-07-04T09:32:00.000+10:00

Derek asked whether I was agreeing with Roger Penrose by suggesting that we are missing some fundamental key to the understanding of consciousness and reality generally. I'm not arguing that the brain can only be simulated by a quantum computer. I'm only suggesting that the 'deep' problems always seem to be just over the horizon. There seems to be something essentially hard about distinguishing thoughts from the titanic amount of computations in the brain. Which ones are contributing towards consciousness, and what is the shape of the algorithms that they form? Do we approach a godellian paradox when we use consciousness to analyze consciousness? The universe is the densest possible representation of the universe, and therefore you need processing power and storage on the same level of complexity to fully understand it. However the reductionist approach states that you can understand the processes of a complex system, without possessing 100% information about the system. Surely the same is true of the brain, we will have to make simplifications to represent the brain in a brain but not necessarily gross ones. So what I'm suggesting is that we need newer powers of analysis to make such understanding possible to humans, either that or we must use something superhuman (such as a very large computer) to analyze the processes involved. To do that the computer would have to be very smart indeed, and thus we find ourselves at another paradox. The Church-Turing thesis proves that any Turing machine can simulate any other given enough storage capacity, the question is how much storage capacity is required to truly characterize the processes in the brain? Is it something on another level of complexity or is it simple? Some have argued that consciousness is the sensation of having a nervous system - there is no mystery to consciousness - all things have it to greater or lesser degrees, depending on the sophistication of the ways that they interact with the universe. These are the hard questions of the day, and is it possible that they are not solvable?

Giganotosaurus

2005-07-03T16:26:00.000+10:00

This is me with Giganotosaurus, or as he is otherwise known "The Great Southern Lizard", discovered recently in Argentina. He is a scary looking bugger. Where T-Rex would weigh in at about 6 tons of teeth and muscle, Giganotosaurus weighed at 8 tonnes. He had 15cm teeth, and was around 13 meters from the tip of his ferocious maw to the end of his whip-like tail. He could swallow grown men whole with ease, and could probably catch them even if they were in a jeep.

Are we entering a dark age, or are we already in it?

2005-06-30T08:51:00.000+10:00

This from Eurekalert: You may think that with faster internet connectivity, internet phone calls and iPods, that we're living in a technological nirvana. But according to a new analysis we are fast approaching a new dark age. The results show that the number of technological breakthroughs and patents peaked a century ago and have been falling steadily ever since. But this is a controversial view not held by most futurologists. The reason why an observation like this is controversial is that futurologists take a determinedly optimistic view of the future. I suspect this is a survey of American patent applications. There is a subjective increase in the wealth and comfort of Americans that leads them to think that they must be in a golden age. But wasn't Rome similar prior to its collapse? The Romans had become decadent, they suffered from an internal rot and cultural decline. They embarked on fruitless foreign adventures as a means of distracting an overlarge, and underused military. The recent resource wars in the middle east seem aimed at distracting the world with a sleight of hand allowing America to parasitize Iraq without feeling morally inferior. If we truly are in a worldwide decline in creativity, what does that mean? Victorian scientists used to predict that all of the major discoveries had been made and the future was going to be a period of filling the gaps and creating a prosperous age of automation. Were they right? Our explanations of the fine detail of what goes on is a little more precise, but really we have just been adding decimal points to the accuracy of our picture. The whole of twentieth century physics has involved creating pictures of the world that even their inventors didn't understand or trust! Einstein made significant advances in quantum physics in an attempt to falsify it on aesthetic grounds! Maybe the lull is exemplified by the history of Artificial Intelligence? Artificial Intelligence grew out of the availability of computing hardware in postwar America (called giant brains at the time) and the theoretical advances that had been made prewar by the likes of Turing, and von Neumann et al. Von Neumann and Turing both took a mechanistic view of the brain, that it was to all intents and purposes a "computer made of meat". There was great optimism that the algorithms of the brain would be quickly understood, and a means to emulate the brain would be found in "10 or 20 years". Minsky and others were finding ways to simulate neurons in hardware. All in all it seemed that AI would flourish in the 70s providing added impetus to the space race, and mankind's transcendence. Researchers found that emulating human perceptual capabilities was actually much harder than performing the sort of tasks that humans find hard (like maths and logic). Philosophical problems arose over our very definition of intelligence and consciousness (it seemed to always be imminent). The whole effort became mired in attempts to work out what it was that they were really after. The over optimistic forecasts came back to haunt the researchers and the whole enterprise was scaled back to become a peripheral research enterprise in most universities. The high country was abandoned in favour of vocational education - computing for profit rather than fun. Maybe we don't seem to be advancing as fast because we are now trying to solve the truly intractable problems of science that require a fundamental change in our understanding of the world or the brain or whatever. Maybe we can't solve these problems without skills that are not currently in our conceptual repertoire?