In other news, when I finally do submit, I promise to actually try to write something that's, you know, interesting. At least to try.

Talking to my beloved last night, I said something along the lines that I'd never been excited by my thesis topic, and she pressed me. If that was the case, how did I end up choosing it? During the explanation I found that I'd raised my voice and became quite animated, and I realised that I might have rewritten history. I've previously written about some of the practical history of my candidature, but not the topical history. So how did I get here?

In the early noughties, I was doing a course in my masters called intelligent web systems, and doing a pretty bad job of it actually, mostly because I wasn't spending much time on it. That, and the fact that we could write our assignments in any language we liked, so I decided to start the night before it was due and do it in python, which I'd never used before. I digress. The final assessment was to write an essay of a couple of thousand words about anything that broadly fit into intelligent web systems. I was teaching at the time, so I was thinking about educational things, and so I chose to write about edutella, a p2p network for searching semantic web data with the aim of facilitating the exchange of educational resources.

In my final semester of the masters, I enrolled in a "dissertation", a one-semester course writing a few thousand words on a topic of my choice. I did the dissertation because I wanted to avoid having to enrol in the research masters program, preferring to try to go straight into the PhD, and needed to demonstrate that I could write. Not that I actually wanted to do a PhD, but the powers that be had made clear I had to do it if I wanted to keep my job. Still teaching and thinking about education, and in an attempt to make things as easy as possible for myself, I decided to continue on from my essay, looking at retrieval of educational resources.

The state of play was that, mostly, educational resources were stored in repositories. To retrieve them, systems would search human‑assigned descriptive metadata. That's pretty much still the case. I talked to some wise people in the school, and came to the conclusion that this library-style approach to retrieval could be improved using techniques drawn from the information retrieval community. For a start, I could extract text and search the primary resource, rather than secondary data.

That's where I got excited about things, but it's where I should have started to realise that doing a PhD wasn't a great idea for me. The dissertation ended up being about 5000 words, and I struggled. But I went ahead and blindly enrolled in the PhD anyway.

On the strength of my dissertation, and knowing the right people, I was seconded to RMIT's Teaching and Learning Portfolio, to do a scoping project aimed at helping improve the management and reuse of educational resources. During this time, along with Henric Beiers, I conducted a bunch of interviews, focus groups, and a survey. How did other universities manage resources? What are the barriers to reuse? How did educators want to find resources? This work would become a chunk of my thesis, and by that time I felt my path was pretty much set.

After three years part time, I decided to leave my job, go full time, and spend the next 18 months finishing my PhD. Six months in, working on applying IR methods to retrieval of resources from respositories, I realised I had no faith in the area. Millions and millions of dollars were being spent around the world trying to set up these repositories, and the top down approach just didn't seem to be working. I'm sure there are many, many people working on these projects who would vehemently disagree with me, but that's how I felt at the time. How had those educators said they wanted to find educational resources? They wanted to search with Google.

So I threw away six months' work and tried to regroup. I changed focus to filtering educational resources from search results returned by a regular search engine (Yahoo! because their API was easier to work with), changed to thinking more about learners in general rather than academics. The question of how such filtering systems should be evaluated became the next chunk of my thesis. The final part was the implementation of a simple filtering system, throwing a bunch of resource features at some machine learning classifiers and seeing what worked.

I'm now approaching the end of the road, I'm due to submit my thesis to the school in six weeks (I'm quivering with stress at the thought of how much work that's still left to do).

And after all that, it seems that at times I have been excited. But I sure as hell hate it now.

I've been serving this blog as HTML5 for a while now, but that was basically just a change doctype. I've now redesigned, with some layout inspiration from Daring Fireball, and I'm using the new HTML5 structural elements. My goal was to get rid of as much clutter as possible, both visually and in the HTML and CSS, and give myself a more enjoyable base from which to experiment.

If you notice anything broken or ugly, or you have any other feedback, please let me know.

Revelations that the federal government wants Australia's 400-odd internet service providers (ISPs) to log and retain customers' web browsing data, so law enforcement can access it during criminal cases, have sparked alarm in the industry.

Big brother wants all your bits and bytes

I find it completely mind boggling that Conroy can be mouthing off in parliament about "the single greatest breach in the history of privacy" and then be considering laws that would compel ISPs to hand over data without a court order.

Both our major parties are complete crap. It's very depressing.

Do please wait until I'm not using them any more, but I'd like to put it on public record that at that point, I'd like my organs to be given to those who can still use them.

Australia has an opt in organ donation system; people aren't organ donors unless they've actively agreed to be. I've made sure that my loved ones know that I'd like to donate my organs when I'm dead, but it can't hurt to shout it from the roof tops. Even if only a dozen or so people can hear me if I shout from here.

If you're in Australia, you can register to be an organ donor too.

... asking users to input their email address and password from a third-party site like GMail or Yahoo Mail is completely unacceptable

Adactio: Journal—The password anti-pattern

Jeremy Keith's password anti-pattern post came across my radar again recently. This was written almost 21 years ago in Internet time (2007), and it's still an issue today, even with the growth of OAuth as an alternative.

We should start a shame file. I've only just signed up for it, and it looks like it might be really useful, but the first entry is Dropbox.

3-D is a waste of a perfectly good dimension. Hollywood's current crazy stampede toward it is suicidal. It adds nothing essential to the moviegoing experience. For some, it is an annoying distraction. For others, it creates nausea and headaches. It is driven largely to sell expensive projection equipment and add a $5 to $7.50 surcharge on already expensive movie tickets. Its image is noticeably darker than standard 2-D. It is unsuitable for grown-up films of any seriousness. It limits the freedom of directors to make films as they choose. For moviegoers in the PG-13 and R ranges, it only rarely provides an experience worth paying a premium for.

Roger Ebert on 3D (emphasis mine)

I've only seen one 3D film in the modern era. Perhaps you can guess which one, especially if I tell you it was like Dances with wolves in space (I think my friend Cameron first said that).

I saw a few 3D films during 24 hour scifi fests at the wonderful Valhalla cinema, such as a Mothra film that I may or may not have fallen asleep in, and I felt then just as I felt after seeing Avatar; 3D is a gimmick that adds nothing to the actual film.

I'm sorry that film makers I respect, such as Tim Burton, have been sucked into the 3D hype, and I dread the coming wave of 3D productions and devices (3D television?? shudder).

Okay, it's not me that needs your money, it's people living with multiple sclerosis (MS).

After we survived last year's swim, we're again swimming in the Fitzroy 24 Hour Mega Swim, a 24 hour relay. My contribution will be somewhere between two and three hours of swimming over the 24 hours (plus hours of counting other people swimming up and down). Rachel will do a couple of hours too.

The aim of the swim is to raise funds for people affected by multiple sclerosis, the most common disease of the central nervous system. MS strikes young adults (the average age of diagnosis is 30) and over 20,000 Australians are affected. The ratio of women to men is 2:1. It's a crappy disease to get.

I don't ask for money often, and never for myself. If you feel so inclined, please take a moment to visit my fundraising page and consider giving a secure donation (there's a donation button on the right hand side of the page).

A tax deductible receipt will be emailed to you when the transaction has been completed. That's good in Australia, does anyone know if it counts overseas as well?

I just signed up for Amie Street after a recommendation from Owen (a recommendation he gave months ago), and the site looked really promising. Lots of my favourite artists were represented, with links to promising sounding stuff I didn't know.

I happened to be chatting about music with Andy C while signing up, recommending The Kills to him (he reciprocated with Brakes). I had a quick look to see if Amie Street had any stuff by The Kills that I don't have yet.

However, I'm in Australia. That means I'm not in the US. And that means, all those little "N/A" flags on most of the music that I was interested in.

I know it's the fault of the record companies rather than the music sites, but for fuck's sake, can't we get past this shit? I'm so sick of not having access to stuff because I'm in Australia. I would have bought a couple of albums right then and there, but instead I have annoyance and a growing sense of hatred aimed at arseholes in suits.

After a short while trying to find music it quickly became obvious that the amount of music marked as unavailable in my region makes Amie Street frustrating and unusable for me.

[Update: I should be absolutely clear that I don't blame Amie Street. I also sent them a note, and they gave a lengthy and reasonable response. Yes, it's the content providers, Amie Street are trying to get more liberal licensing, in the meantime they're working at hiding the content that's not available.]

Damien Katz of CouchDB:

We don't want people who tend to ask "How can I contribute? What should I do?". We want people who identify for themselves what needs to be done and how they can contribute, and then do it. Our employees want to contribute to make things better, not for a paycheck, not for validation from a manager or even the community. They do it because they think it will make things better.

Damien Katz: Thoughts on an Open Source Company

He's talking about running a company based on an open source project, but the sentiment is valid for any project. There's a flip side too though; open source projects need to provide a structure where it's clear how people can contribute, make it clear that if you start on X or Y you're not going to tread on someone's toes.

It takes good communication on both sides, project and newcomer.