Blogging from beneath the Channel

I’m blogging this from beneath the English Channel (“La Manche” to the French) from the comfort of a seat on the Eurostar. It’s so much more civilised than flying: more leg-room, a simple X-ray instead of arduous and slow security checks, and it delivers me straight to Waterloo/Paris-Nord instead of over an hour from the City centre. Highly recommended (although no wifi: this will have to wait to be posted until I get back to Cambridge).

Versailles and Paris were also interesting. Versailles it pretty much all about the Chateau — I didn’t get to go inside unfortunately, but the gardens were mightily impressive. As a town Versailles is OK, although the old town where we were staying is rather quiet once the coach parties leave. Similarly work meant I only got to spend an afternoon in Paris, although that was enough time to go up the Eiffel Tower and stroll down the impressive Champs Elysee. I hadn’t realised you could go inside the Arc de Triumphe, but someone said it’s very good so I shall make that and The Louvre (an impressive building from the outside, I imagine even better inside) a priority next time.

Death by laser pointer

It seems that people have now been using Powerpoint for sufficiently long that “Death by Powerpoint” is a rare event at conferences these days. Alas, this morning I felt the life being sucked from me by misuse of a laser pointer.

The two most obvious problems that inflict laser pointing users are that:

  1. it causes the speaker to turn their back to his/her audience so they can point at the screen;
  2. a bright spot whizzing around the screen in a random manner is very distracting.

I think a more fundamental problem is that the ability to point at one’s slides also encourages the speaker to talk to the slides rather than using them as a visual aid supporting one’s talk.

Google Portal?

Personalised Google looks interesting. I’ve always liked the idea of MyYahoo! but the interface is quite cluttered so it never became my homepage. The interface of the Google portal is actually one of the coolest parts of this page — you can use “drag and drop” to re-order the information! Being a Beta-service, the available information is a little limited at the moment and US-centric—for example, Google news is available but not Google UK News.

New Blogging Tools

Last week I upgraded this blog to WordPress 1.5. I remain very impressed with this application, not for any particularly “killer” feature, but simply because it just seems to work so well. I recently helped my house-mate set up his own blog and he hardly needed my help at all, it was that easy.

In this new version of WP I particularly like the new themes system which makes it considerably easier to customise the layout of the various pages, and the fact that registered users automatically have their details filled-in when they post a comment. My own theme is based on Steam as I am not a fan of fixed-width layouts.

On the subject of blogging tools, I have also discovered a neat new tool for blogging off-line. I have been rather underwhelmed by various blogging “clients” I have tried in the past as they seemed to offer little over WP’s excellent web interface (especially when augmented with the spell checking plugin). However I recently discovered mtsend.py, a small Python script that allows you to write an entry in your favourite text editor and then post by invoking the script from the command-line. It’s not going to replace the web as my primary interface, but it will make it easier to write entries when I’m disconnected from the ‘net.

Thesis Submission!

I actually finished binding the third copy of my thesis at 15:55 yesterday afternoon. Unfortunately, this being Cambridge, the Board of Graduate studies closes at 4pm so I had to wait until this morning to actually submit my thesis… but now it’s DONE! 🙂 I shall have to prepare for the viva at some point, but for the moment I am looking forward to a bit of a rest and preparing for my trip to Australia.

The final word count was 42,776. Many thanks to everyone who proof-read chapters for me!

Highlighting “TODO” Items in LaTeX

Several people have asked me how I make TODO appear in the margin of my thesis wherever I want to highlight an area that needs further work. The trick is to define a new LaTeX command called “todo” in your pre-amble:
\newcommand{\todo}[1]{\marginpar{\textsf{\textbf{TODO}}}
\texttt{\small{TODO:#1}}}

(all on one line)

TODO items can then be marked up in the text as:
\todo{Add a reference here.}

Memories of Canada

Looking through my home directory this evening I came across some notes I made about my experiences in Canada (sadly now over three years ago!). Here’s what I had to say:

Vancouver

A lovely city, very laid back, with “big city” amenities, without all the usual noise, dirt, etc.

Places to stay: The downtown HI is good but lacks atmosphere. Jericho Beach is great if you want to hang-out on the beach for a few days, but it’s a bit of a pain to get into downtown. GVB is clean, central & has a very friendly atmosphere, plus they organise trips to the pub every night! Highly recommended.

Night-life: Good party town (something of the ‘Amsterdam’ of N. America!). The Stone Temple on a Thursday night has hi-balls (shot+mixer) for $1! [Unfortunately I doubt this is still true!]

Stuff todo: For the ultimate ‘Canadian’ experience, you have to go rollerblading in Stanley Park. The views from Canada place are superb & the Lookout tower was surprisingly interesting.

Places to go:

  • Whistler: The town lacks any character what so ever, but views from top of mountain are superb.
  • North Vancouver: There’s a great indoor market at the sea bus terminal. Capilano Suspension Bridge was a little disappointing but worth seeing (go to Lynn Canyon Prov. Park for same sort of experience on a smaller scale & less comercialised). Climbing Grouse Mtn is a lot harder than it first appears — it’s a very steep climb — but rewarding if you are up to it.
  • Seattle: Pretty downtown skyline & generally a nice place, but not a “must see” tourist destination. The Underground History Tour is excellent, as is (so I have heard) the Experience Music project. The HI hostel on Vashon Island is a very cool place to stay, but getting there without a car was a pain.

S5: A Simple Standards-Based Slide Show System

One of the problems of using LaTeX for presentations[1] is that positioning graphics is annoyingly fiddly. The web’s cascading style sheets — with it’s highly flexible and very powerful layout abilities — ought to be ideal for producing presentation slides, and indeed somebody has produced an impressive framework for doing so.

[1] Don’t get me started on Powerpoint — producing anything with more than one mathematical formula is as annoying as positioning graphics in a LaTeX slide.

TARDIS spotted in Monmouth

Since I’m spending so much time thesis-writing at the moment, sadly Dr. Who is currently the highlight of my week. :-/

This week’s storyline was excellent — classic Dr. Who — and the exterior of the undertaker’s house was very recognisably filmed in Agincourt Square, Monmouth, where I went to school. What a pity the current Doctor is so stupid he had to be saved by Charles Dickens… 🙁

I’m also not convinced by the sans-cliffhanger-ending format. I can understand the BBC wanting to move away from the old format of stringing storylines out for three or four 30 minute episodes, but they could have retained the spirit of the cliffhanger by ending each episode with a cliffhanger that begins the next storyline: each episode already has a preview for the following week anyway.

Oh well, now all I have to do is find some way of sneaking away from next Saturday’s family party for 45 mins to watch it. 😉

21st Century Doctor Who

I’m sure there are plenty of Dr. Who fans out there posting detailed dissections of tonight’s first new episode, so I shall limit myself to just two comments:

  1. In the trailers and promo pics, Christopher Eccleston looked very dull — his image lacked the flamboyant insanity of his predecessors. However, in motion, he is fantastic — just slightly insane enough you really do wonder what he will do/say next.
  2. The interior of the TARDIS is too dark. It used to look like a science lab and be really bright — the whole point being that it was the one place you knew the Doctor and his companions were safe because there were no shadows for monsters to leap out from.

Anyway, I’m definitely looking forward to next week’s. 🙂

GPGMail and Fink

This evening I installed the GPGMail which allows me to use the GNU Privacy Guard (gpg) with Apple’s Mail.app.

I installed gpg using fink. There are a number of projects to bring “standard” UNIX tools to OS X. What’s nice about fink is that offers pre-compiled binary packages (no waiting around for stuff to compile!) and uses the Debian package tools I am already familiar with. Fink also offers a number of other potentially useful packages such as the Gimp.

One problem I did have is that the default sources in /sw/etc/apt/sources.list are for the main sourceforge.net archive in the US which is incredibly slow. No where on the web could I find a list of suitable mirrors, so I had to deduce it myself. The following seem to work well in the UK:
deb http://kent.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/fink/direct_download 10.3/release main crypto
deb http://kent.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/fink/direct_download 10.3/current main crypto

Searching the ACM Guide to Computing Literature

Tracking down references for my background chapter recently, the ACM Guide to Computing Literature has been very useful. Unfortunately its search feature is frustratingly useless. For example, searching for Access Control Policies XPath returns no hits, whereas googling for the same terms and restricting the search to acm.org returns the paper I was looking for as the first hit.

Given the simplicity of the the query (four keywords from the title of a paper published in an ACM proceedings), I really don’t understand why the search engine is so bad. My current workaround is to use Firefox’s bookmark keyword feature to search Google instead. Just create a bookmark to:
http://www.google.com/search?&q=site:acm.org%20%s
set the keyword to be something easy to type like “acm”, and then typing “acm <keyword (s)>” in the location bar executes your search.

Thesis Titles

Apparently the title of my thesis has to be fixed in advance of my submitting the dissertation itself. Unfortunately choosing exactly the right title is proving harder than writing the thing!

Possibilities are:

  • Trust and Risk in Access Control for Global Computing
  • Trust and Risk in Access Control for a Global Computing Infrastructure
  • Using Trust and Risk for Access Control in Global Computing
  • Trust- and Risk-Based Access Control: Access Control for the Global Computing Infrastructure
  • Trust/Risk-Based Access Control: Access Control for Global Computing

I doubt this will make much sense to anyone reading this but comments always welcome. 🙂