Miscellaneous-B http://lawley.id.au/blog Whatever was I thinking... Fri, 07 Nov 2008 05:44:37 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 en hourly 1 Miscellaneous-Bhttp://lawley.id.au/bloghttp://www.lawley.id.au/images/headshot.jpg Movember again http://lawley.id.au/blog/2008/11/07/movember-again/ http://lawley.id.au/blog/2008/11/07/movember-again/#comments Fri, 07 Nov 2008 05:43:06 +0000 lawley http://lawley.id.au/blog/?p=232 So it’s Movember again and I can’t believe how little I’ve blogged since this time last year (must finish all those draft blog entries :-)

Anyway, sponsor me, it’s easy, just follow the link and fill out the form:
http://au.movember.com/mospace/2010991

]]> http://lawley.id.au/blog/2008/11/07/movember-again/feed/ 0 Micro-modelling http://lawley.id.au/blog/2008/06/14/micro-modelling/ http://lawley.id.au/blog/2008/06/14/micro-modelling/#comments Sat, 14 Jun 2008 01:15:56 +0000 lawley http://lawley.id.au/blog/?p=230 It occurs to me that just as there is value in micro-formats (structured data embedded in HTML using existing HTML syntax and well-known conventions), there is also value in micro-models: models embedded in code (e.g., Java) using existing Java syntax (e.g., annotations).

The key advantages are model and code are in a single place and are therefore maintained simultaneously (avoiding RTE problems keeping code and model synchronised), a single familiar syntax, and works with existing coding tools.

Of course, for large/complex models this is likely to start to break down.

An existing (although somewhat trivial) example of this can be seen in the @model etc javadoc annotations used by EMF.

]]> http://lawley.id.au/blog/2008/06/14/micro-modelling/feed/ 0 Wireless again http://lawley.id.au/blog/2008/03/09/wireless-again/ http://lawley.id.au/blog/2008/03/09/wireless-again/#comments Sun, 09 Mar 2008 13:23:24 +0000 lawley http://www.lawley.id.au/blog/2008/03/09/wireless-again/ A while back I lost wireless access in the home. In a happy accident I was wandering through Harvey Norman at Indooroopilly today when I noticed they were selling Linksys WAG54GP2s for $93.01 – that’s ADSL2+, 802.11G, and VOIP in the one (discontinued) box at a very sweet price (hurry – they only have two left).

]]> http://lawley.id.au/blog/2008/03/09/wireless-again/feed/ 0 Crisis in Ragan http://lawley.id.au/blog/2007/12/05/crisis-in-ragan/ http://lawley.id.au/blog/2007/12/05/crisis-in-ragan/#comments Wed, 05 Dec 2007 09:18:11 +0000 lawley http://www.lawley.id.au/blog/2007/12/05/crisis-in-ragan/ Circa 1998, and tired of giving the demo live (usually with little notice), we filmed Crisis in Ragan (sic). This is the short version for CSCW ‘98.

]]> http://lawley.id.au/blog/2007/12/05/crisis-in-ragan/feed/ 0 Vale Movember 2007 http://lawley.id.au/blog/2007/12/04/vale-movember-2007/ http://lawley.id.au/blog/2007/12/04/vale-movember-2007/#comments Tue, 04 Dec 2007 04:24:48 +0000 lawley http://www.lawley.id.au/blog/2007/12/04/vale-movember-2007/ Many thanks to all my generous Movember sponsors who contributed a total of $499! As of Dec 3 our team of seven raised a total of $2,099.00 (late donations can still be made).

]]> http://lawley.id.au/blog/2007/12/04/vale-movember-2007/feed/ 0 Movember 30 http://lawley.id.au/blog/2007/11/30/movember-30/ http://lawley.id.au/blog/2007/11/30/movember-30/#comments Fri, 30 Nov 2007 02:25:14 +0000 lawley http://www.lawley.id.au/blog/2007/11/30/movember-30/ The last of Movember :-(
Movember 30

The Mo Bros
MoBros

To donate to Movember (Prostate Cancer Foundation of Australia & BeyondBlue) follow this link: https://www.movember.com/au/donate/donate-details.php?action=showrego&rego=70707&country=au

A plan for tomorrow…
Mov-end-ber

]]> http://lawley.id.au/blog/2007/11/30/movember-30/feed/ 0 Movember 29 http://lawley.id.au/blog/2007/11/30/movember-29/ http://lawley.id.au/blog/2007/11/30/movember-29/#comments Fri, 30 Nov 2007 02:17:15 +0000 lawley http://www.lawley.id.au/blog/2007/11/30/movember-29/ Movember 29

To donate to Movember (Prostate Cancer Foundation of Australia & BeyondBlue) follow this link: https://www.movember.com/au/donate/donate-details.php?action=showrego&rego=70707&country=au

]]> http://lawley.id.au/blog/2007/11/30/movember-29/feed/ 0 Movember 28 http://lawley.id.au/blog/2007/11/28/movember-28/ http://lawley.id.au/blog/2007/11/28/movember-28/#comments Wed, 28 Nov 2007 08:31:42 +0000 lawley http://www.lawley.id.au/blog/2007/11/28/movember-28/ Derek Smalls — Mo-hero: Derek Smalls, Spinal Tap: Mo hero

To donate to Movember (Prostate Cancer Foundation of Australia & BeyondBlue) follow this link: https://www.movember.com/au/donate/donate-details.php?action=showrego&rego=70707&country=au

]]> http://lawley.id.au/blog/2007/11/28/movember-28/feed/ 0 Debugging lessons http://lawley.id.au/blog/2007/11/27/debugging-lessons/ http://lawley.id.au/blog/2007/11/27/debugging-lessons/#comments Tue, 27 Nov 2007 08:30:33 +0000 lawley http://www.lawley.id.au/blog/2007/11/27/debugging-lessons/ For the past 6 weeks or so I’ve been trying to track down an elusive bug in my SNOMED classifier. The difficulty has been that it only manifest with very large input sets (I only managed to reduce it down to about 350,000 concept definitions). This meant lots of large data-structures and long chains of inferences needed to be traced backwards; tedious and time-consuming work.

Today I found the problem. As I had begun to suspect, there was a simple error in an underlying data-structure.

The lesson? Write unit tests carefully! It turns out that although I had written a test for the faulty method, the particular data-set I used in the test special-cased around the bug. What I should have done was use multiple data-sets (pretty obvious) and made sure they were more realistic (in this case I had used a single contiguous set of bits). If I had done this originally, then I would have found the problem much much earlier.

[Update: Ironically, I originally used java.util.BitSet instead of my hand-rolled data-structure but was running into memory usage problems so I replaced a bunch of Maps and Sets with my own versions optimised for their particular usage in the algorithm. It turns out that for this particular case, the java.util version is entirely adequate. There's another lesson here :-)]

]]> http://lawley.id.au/blog/2007/11/27/debugging-lessons/feed/ 0 Movember 27 http://lawley.id.au/blog/2007/11/27/movember-27/ http://lawley.id.au/blog/2007/11/27/movember-27/#comments Tue, 27 Nov 2007 07:55:00 +0000 lawley http://www.lawley.id.au/blog/2007/11/27/movember-27/ Movember 27
Time’s nearly up

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