Nostalgia - A visit to my Primary School

Nostalgia is a funny thing. Regardless of how you may have felt about something - whether it be a place, person or people, event, or period - from earlier in your life "back in the day", looking back, you'll often find yourself having a strong sense of fondness for how things were. Accompanying this, there is also often a kind of curiosity about how things are now. Is everything still the way that it was back then (or as you seem to remember it)? Has the passage of time been kind on those aspects which you hold most dear? And what is there now that wasn't before, that those following in your footsteps now get to enjoy and cherish?

Starting PhD Studies

As of yesterday, I have officially started on my next big adventure. For the next few years, I will be an official member of the HCI Lab at the University of Canterbury working towards a PhD in Computer Science!

http://www.cosc.canterbury.ac.nz/research/RG/HCI/HCIlab/

Getting back on track...

It's been a few weeks since my last update. Since then, there are finally signs that I can now be cautiously optimistic that the situation has stabilised at last, with the machine in question now under heavily-supervised probation for "non-critical activities".

Quick update on malware issues

What an eventful few weeks it has been... I'm currently still typing this out on my tablet while waiting to see if a scan in progress on the infected machine turns out any more obvious malware. It's quite fun watching the progress as I type this post, as severel of my other antivirus/malware apps seemed to have picked up on the scan currently in progress, and are having a jolly good time checking out what the competition is checking it seems (hehe ;)

Argh! - Malware Removal

Over the past week, I've ended up wasting quite a bit of time trying to resolve a bunch of annoying issues on my main development machine to the point that I'm now at my wits end trying to resolve these.

HKTrip12: Day 5.5 - Leaving Hong Kong (or the Longest Short Night)

This tenth installment covers the overnight flight from Hong Kong to Sydney, a spot of aerial photography, and Char Leong.

HKTrip12: Day 5 - Last Day in HK

After a bit of a long hiatus, here are the remaining few episodes from my trip to Hong Kong in late November 2012.

This ninth installment covers the last day spent in Hong Kong. It includes ramblings about the Airport Express Service, Times Square, Cyberport, and visiting ancestors at the cemetery.

Driver Debugging Tools

Over the past few weeks, I've been working on various tools and tweaks to make it a bit easier to track down problems with drivers. I'll start with the latest and most visible addition, before showing off some of the less visible things...

1) Driver Value Indicators
In r.55489, I've just committed a way of showing the relationship between the "driver value" (i.e. result of the stuff in NKEY panel) and the values applied to properties being driven (i.e. sliders). This is shown in the screenshot below:

Interesting papers (with links)

Over the past two years of so, I've read quite a fair number of research papers (somewhere in the vicinity of 300+). Although many (~150) were directly related to my honours project work and ended up being concerned with all the various visualisation schemes developed for navigating and presenting large datasets (TL;DR commentary - there is a lot of stuff out there already. They've tried practically every idea you could think of, the next few which immediately come to mind leading on from those, and on a few side tangents). There are also a number of other interesting results I've come across which you might find interesting too...

The Little Manual of API Design

While flipping through some of the blogs on my reading list this evening, I came across a link to "The Little Manual of API Design" by Jasmin Blanchette. If you're a software developer reading this, I strongly encourage you to read, absorb, and internalise the lessons presented here. Furthermore, as the article I found this link from argues, if you're a user interface designer, you probably also want to read and understand this, since API's (Application Programming Interfaces) are still a form of interface for communication between humans, computers, and other humans, so the concepts presented here do carry over.

Without further ado, here is the link (from Blanchette's website):

http://www4.in.tum.de/~blanchet/api-design.pdf

The Power of Open Source - Visual Keying Bugfix

While checking my email this morning I was reminded of the power of open source...

Lantern Festival

Christchurch hosts a "Lantern Festival" every year around (usually a few weeks after the start of) Chinese New Year celebrations. Here are some of the highlights of the event: