I'm Peter Lyle

Motifation and Priorities

Peter Lyle — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 12:49:07 +0000

Just a quick update to confirm that I am not in fact dead.

Thinking at this stage a use for this blog might be to document the final weeks of my honours thesis, because of course in the final weeks of any sort of epic dissertative (word not found?) work one needs to have epic procrastination and distraction. I have no doubt that my house will be incredibly tidy and everything non-thesis in my life will be up-to-date by the time the due date comes around. As to whether I’ll have something to submit, who knows.

Anyhow, the story so far:
Broad research area - Interaction with public or shared displays from mobile devices.
More specific aim or hypothesis - To test the scalability of cursor based interaction from mobile devices with public or shared displays.

How do I attempt to do this you say? I’m doing something that likely involves qualitative rather than quantitative data analysis you say? I picked up my car from having it’s clutch replaced today you say?

Well, to answer those questions, I’m going to assume they were said. The context of the question is largely irrelevant.

I attempt to do this with a scenario involving the dynamic voting of music selection. Think democratic jukebox ala Juloka and the work by Kenton O’Hara et al. (google or trawl ACM archives, or even ask me if interested in more detail).
Yes, most research in CSCW and HCI involves either partially or fully immersing oneself in qualitative data analysis. These areas sort of have roots in the sociology and psychology communities (of the former I think is awesome fun, and the later I think is probably fun but I haven’t done any units in that field). Nevertheless, I hope to get some results hopefully with some time to actually play with them before I have to submit something…
Yes, it’s true. My car got clutch-punched yesterday which thoroughly turned my day upside down and inside-in (because I’m not entirely sure inside-out makes sense for a unit of time, not sure about upside down either but it’s too late on that one). So the car is back, and all I had to do was give the auto-repair shop all my money (although I do regularly give them my money, and in return I have a car that works, thanks KAR )

Ps. As for the title of this post it’s not a misprint, it just so happens that yesterday my Motif turned up, which will be a fantastic distraction from anything important that I should be doing, huzzah!

No C

Peter Lyle — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 10:31:24 +0000

It has been a while. I’ve been working hard, both at work and at uni. The semester is over (for now) and I’ve just arrived back from holidays to the mainland (think nice warm beach, by contrast I’m back in the cold and wet).

I can now say I’ve been exposed to a ‘proper’ game of Talisman (a fun board game, albeit for the high ‘chance’ factor) with errata and both expansions. Thanks to the wonders of chance I managed to have 3 characters killed in a short space of time, meaning I had the pleasure of checking out a number of the characters added in the expansion.

As to the post title, ‘no c’, I’ve actually not dealt with C programming much lately (or ever). C++ is what I had been starting to get used to, but the last few months I’ve been tooling up a lot on C# (and as you might guess, .NET) and so far it has some rather nice language features. I have been missing my Objective-C though, and am probably a little rusty and ill prepared for the latest iPhone SDK release recently.

I do seem to be at a bit of a loss as to what to post about on this blog, and as such most posts seem a little detached. I’d be happy to receive suggestions from others, and it would also give me some vague impression as to whom might actually read these ramblings.

I should however welcome back a number of my friends who have (or will be soonish) arriving back from a trip to the US (and to Apple’s WWDC 2009), hi guys and Jess’s

Oh and on a final note - since re-upgrading the firmware on the Airport Extreme, I’ve had no issue for many months

By Proxy

Peter Lyle — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 12:08:27 +0000

Like many others, I’ve been a big fan of the Tiki Bar podcast, so it’s great to see some friends of mine are making the official game Day of the Tiki.

In other news I’m learning lots of neat stuff in C#, like what you can do with Reflection, Dependancy Injection (via Spring.NET) and an awesome thing called Mocking, which makes unit testing fun

Winning

Peter Lyle — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 05:28:12 +0000

Every now and then I have some success at something. This time two of my fellow classmates and I have scored AUC honours scholarships, which is fantastic for all of us.
The University of Tasmania has been doing particularly well over the last year or so in terms of participation and application for AUC events, which has generally been rather awesome, and something I hope to encourage.
What does concern me… perhaps concern is too strong a word, but more something I believe I’m going to have to look out for, is actually establishing more of a connection between the ‘third year computing mob’ (who tend to go by the name ‘maclab’, just check out planetmaclab.com where all their blog posts end up), and the first and second year students. In particular there seems to be a bit of a gap when it comes to international student involvement, something that would be nice to rectify.

And finally to end on something a little more upbeat I’ve been having productive thoughts about more mac development and thesis prototyping (also mac development), more on this later though, figure I should flesh the ideas out more, and possibly run them past my supervisor.

Smooth sailing

Peter Lyle — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 12:16:05 +0000

Seems the airport connection issue is resolved. Downgrading and upgrading the firmware did the trick. I am however down to 1 external hard drive providing me with a mini and not-hugely-fast NAS off the USB port of the extreme (I say slow as it seem like a bad idea to manage photo libraries remotely over a wireless network, but I’m not quite sure of the best alternative to this, given its current and ever-expanding space requirements). The second hard drive is either at fault (it’s a smaller 2.5″ external drive that requires 2 usb connections), or the powered USB hub through which it was connected.

Anyhow in other news the maclab ‘done Italy’ (ie. been to an Italian restaurant) this evening. Food was perfectly nice if not a little slow (thinking about it other Italian restaurants I’ve been too have generally been slow with food delivery, could just be my time perception or picking bad nights however). As to where else we visit I’ll have to leave that decision to the collective maclab brain-on-a-spreadsheet that is ‘the Quacklet’

Teething

Peter Lyle — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 00:44:02 +0000

Seems some people have experienced some odd behaviour on their Airport Extreme’s with the latest firmware. Downgrading and re-upgrading looks like it may just have resolved the issue for me. On the flip side I had a scare coming home last night to add photos from the recent maclab dinner party, seems I’ve confused iPhoto (or perhaps it’s just me), and my largish collection (stored externally due to hdd space limitations) seems to have ‘disappeared’, and the iPhoto Library bundle seems to think it’s a couple of factors smaller than I’d expect. Viewing the package contents reveals it’s all still there, hence the confusion.
Overall the dinner party itself went quite well, although I should have ceased my consumption well before I did, and am grateful I did not partake in the ‘icecream will kill you’ sized deserts that many others braved.

Update (Sunday 22nd March 2009):
Seems when iPhoto couldn’t find the library it decided to recreate it, and created folders in /Volumes//iPhoto Library, and thus when the network share was mounted finder was getting a little confused as to what was going on. Unmounting the network volume, and moving that smaller iPhoto library seemed to get me back to a recognisable state, as I could then remount the drive, and import the photo’s from the other library. Panic averted

To the Internet House!

Peter Lyle — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 05:58:36 +0000

So, bit of a splurge this week, installing a couple of airports, both domestic (express) and international (extreme) in my house. Didn’t bother with planning approval, and now have a total of 4 wifi networks derived from the word ‘intertron’.
Airport Extreme, upstairs, hosting a couple of hard drives for time machine and network file stores.
Airport Express, downstairs, allowing me to press play on my iphone, which presses play on my macbook pro, which makes the good speakers produce noise, which makes me relax.
Now, if I were to do the same under linux, I’d need to work out how much my time is worth, and multiply that by how long it would take to determine an appropriate hardware and software solution to the problem of reducing cable mess, introducing a backup solution, and the ability to play audio without worrying about cables strung across the lounge.
This figure doesn’t take into account the net knowledge increase by going the Linux route which is certainly not to be dismissed. That knowledge could go onto providing others with useful knowledge and providing a benefit to the community overall. On the flipside however, the time I would have lost, depending on how it is valued, can now be spent potentially learning anything I so desire, thus providing a lot more flexibility and opportunities to procrastinate, or even put time in towards my thesis which - as any piece of research - one might hope that it contributes to a larger body of knowledge on a global scale.
Unfortunately some of said time has been lost in the formation of this post, although credit must go to arctanx for whom a conversation prompted this post.

Progress

Peter Lyle — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 04:02:51 +0000

I’ve had Manning tell me many times this week that I look tired, and I’m not entirely sure I’ve always felt it, but he may indeed be correct.
On the flip side, I’ve had to deal with some changes at work outside of my day-to-day stuff, non-work meetings with supervisors, not-objecting to being voted onto the TUCS exec committee, and other unrelated project updates.
Overall, I think I’ve given up a week of life for nearly a week of work, almost breaking parity.
I also had the opportunity to play with iMovie ‘08 (old now I know), that’s been on my macbook pro since I bought it, but I’ve never had a reason to use it until now, for a short video-application that I needed to submit to somethingarather about somethingarather…

Say no to bacon overdose

Peter Lyle — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 10:03:58 +0000

So I’m sitting here minding my own business and chatting to friends on IRC when Gentle Nicholas decided he’d share with us all the wonders of Bacon in all it’s glory. My wife’s immediate reaction was to forcibly close the lid of my laptop and threaten vegetarianism.

900

Peter Lyle — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 02:45:03 +0000

It has been alleged that a significant number of people will be receiving a cash handout from the Federal Government sometime in the not too distant future to the tune of 900AUD (or thereabouts). Rather than look at any the political debate that surrounds this, I’d like to take a brief look at the more important question: Which camera lens should I buy?
A quick rundown of the situation as it stands:
Camera body - Pentax K200D
My lens collection -

Pentax 18-55 / F3.5-5.6: The slow but lightweight kit lens that is no longer used
Sigma 17-70 / F2.8-4.5: Like a kit lens, but heavier, faster, wider and ‘more telephoto-ish’, the current walk-around

The lens collection on loan from my father who I discovered used to have a working Pentax setup (nice of Pentax to not change mounting bracket… seemingly ever). Admittedly all manual focus and manual aperture:

30 / 2.8: Seems like it needs a service or something, don’t use this much
50 / 1.7: I do use this one a reasonable amount, and seems quite sharp at 2.8 and up.
70-210 / 4: Quite a nice telephoto really, catch for me is the manual focus only

So, with all that in mind, I need to consider what I might actually need for the sort of photography I’m trying to become more involved with. At the present moment my walk-around seems to be doing fine, but I’m thinking it would be nice to either a) get a pancake prime (there is a 40/2.8 and 70/2.4 from Pentax with rather pleasant reviews) to ease the neck-strain of walking around, or b) get something in the ultra-wide-angle space, either prime or zoom, and I’m not ruling out fisheye (having recently seen a number of opportunities where a fisheye would have made for a rather nice composition).

For now I’ll just sit back, and consider even the (shock horror) possibility of not purchasing a lens, as there is certainly more to life than camera trinkets (or so I keep getting told by the wife).

I could of course spend all the money on red balloons, to try and outdo the previous effort by the Jess Squared collective in the Maclab