Moving

This blog is defunct. It's content, along with that of my other blogs, is now hosted at thomas-sutton.id.au.

Little Women

Just watched Little Women. Beth recovered (after a fashion, and for a while), but I wonder what happened to the baby (which introduced the scarlet fever)?

Given that, in Little Men, Alcott describes Jo as being not at all handsome, but [having] a merry sort of face..., I can't quite understand what possessed them to cast Winona Ryder to play her ("not at all handsome" being probably the least apt description of Ryder as is both conceivable and not "exceedingly ugly" or some such). In any case, she played the role very well indeed in-spite of being rather more "handsome" than the character.

"Do you REALLY want to be a NPC?"

In a recent rant, Fred Gallagher (a.k.a. Piro) wrote:

Don't just blow voting off like its a game you just aren't interested in playing. You are in the game, whether you like it or not. Not voting makes you an Non Player Character. Do you REALLY want to be a NPC, letting others decide what happens in the game?

Adding to the Wikipedia

I've just added my first real contribution to the Wikipedia: Image:Airfield_traffic_pattern.svg, a vectorisation of Image:Airport_traffic_pattern.jpg.

Lucas

Chickenfeed have been flogging some cheep DVDs lately and every time I'm in one of their shops, I have a look at what they have in stock. The last time I did so, I got a copy of Lucas — Winona Ryders' first feature film. I just got around to watching it tonight and, while it's really cliched in places, it does have a few redeeming features.

The fairly drawn-out love-triangle (or, square, or even pentagon, depending on how you count) could have been resolved a lot quicker. It would have been nice to see a resolution to the Rina-Lucas sub-plot, though doing so would have interfered with that time honoured '80s feel-good film tradition: the closing freeze frame of the hero triumphant. My view can quite easily be summed up as: O.K., but more Winona Ryder would have been nice (as though it needs to be said).

Undead and Unwed

I've just finished reading Undead and Unwed by MaryJanice Davidson (who has a blog) and published by Piatkus Books, the first in her Undead series. It was a good read and it is certainly an interesting departure from the other books in this genre I've read (though Betsy did remind me of Charlaine Harris' Sookie Stackhouse).

I'm not sure if the next book will continue the theme (judging by the excerpt, I think not), but Betsy brought to mind David Eddings' description of his hero, Garion, as a "Sir Perceval":

Sir Perceval [...] is dumb — at least right at first... A dumb hero is the perfect hero, because he hasn't the faintest idea of what's going on, and in explaining things to him, the writer explains them to his reader.

In any case, I'll definitely have a look at the rest of Davidson's books.

Tags: Vampire, Supernatural, Romance, Novels, Books, Recommended, Reading

Megatokyo volume four

My copy of Megatokyo volume 4 (buy) finally came in and I bought it yesterday. It's good to see another Megatokyo book out and it's fantastic that it took so long to come in (having sold out, etc.).

The presentation is essentially the same as the first three volumes by Dark Horse. The only shortcoming I can see in the book is the binding — for some reason CMX couldn't manage to glue the pages level. It's no worse than the last book from Dark Horse and it is a fairly minor flaw, but it would have been nice if they'd put that little bit extra into the book's construction.

Tags: Books Manga

Long time no blog

It's been quite a while since last I posted (here, or anywhere else), so I think it's about time for an update. Things are going adequately on the school front — it was a little touch and go, but I managed not to fail anything last semester — and I'm about to start a support job with a research project which will bring a welcome injection of funds (which have been rather tight lately).

On the "reading" front, I purchased my copy of Advanced Topics in Types and Programming Languages (companion and somewhat successor to TAPL) this morning. I've had a bit of a flick through it and it looks really, really interesting. Hopefully having spent almost $200 on the two books will provide an added incentive to not only start, but finish, reading them and hopefully even work through the problems.

I've been thinking about typography and book design lately which has suggested, amongst other things, that I see if it'd be possible to get my copy of ATTAPL rebound with some extra pages. It would be nice, for example, to insert the extended version of chapter 10 - the essence of ML type inference and to "fix" any errata with updated pages. I imagine, though I haven't bothered to investigate at all, that this'd be quite a difficult and expensive thing to do for a single copy, so it'll probably be a long while before I do it, if ever.

Before that though, I've been focussed on getting through Logic by Greg Restall. I'm almost half way through and while I'd have preferred a slightly difference syntax (I prefer ∧ as conjunction, rather than &), it's easy to read and is much more accessible than most other books I've seen with titles like "Logic."

Tags: Books TAPL ATTAPL Logic

Maria-sama ga Miteru

I just got caught up on my reading of the Maria-sama ga Miteru translated by Lililicious. Revisiting marimite brings back my wish that the books (other than the first) were available in English.

Tags: Watching Anime Marimite

Resources for Teaching Pythagoras' Theorem

As I mentioned on my other blog: I've posted the plans I used to teach a unit on Pythagoras' Theorem last semester. You can get them at my Google Pages site.

Tags: Education Plans Mathematics

Mizuiro Jidai

I've just finished watching the first episode of Mizuiro Jidai. If the first episode and the AnimeNFO entry are anything to go by, it seems like one of those slice of life/high-school school/drama/romance shows. It was OK (for something drawn in 1996), but I'm not sure I'm willing to download the next 46 episodes (forty-seven!).

Animesuki | BT Tracker

Tags: Watching Anime

Interactive and Media Programming

As I've mentioned a few times, I'm hoping to work on some materials for computer science education this semester. The gist of my current plans is a core of basic computer science material (very basic data structures and algorithms) backed up by a range of individual and small group projects. I hope to provide a wide enough range of projects to ensure that most students will find something engaging enough that they learn (even in spite of their wanting only to use the Internet).

I'm currently anticipate designing projects using some, if not all, of the following pieces of software:

Haskore

A computer music system based on Haskell.

Pan (or Pan# or one of the several variations on the theme)

A functional graphical processing language similar to Haskell.

Pivotal

A document centred presentation of Haskell.

FunWorlds

An interactive 3D animation package in, you guessed it, Haskell.

You may have noticed a trend in the projects above: they all use, or are closely related to, the Haskell programming language. This is for a number of reasons:

1. I like functional programming, in general, and Haskell, in particular.
2. I don't like the languages usually taught to students (Java, VisualBasic, etc.)
3. I think that a different, more fundamental, approach might help (supported, I think, by the experiences of teachers using SICP in high schools in the U.S.).

We'll see how things pan out. If possible, I'd like to integrate some of the above packages into a single whole. Haskore and one of the portable Haskell variants of Pan, for example, might be integrated with Pivotal to give a relatively simple environment for interactive, multi-media Haskell programming. Haskore, in particular, could benefit extraordinarily from such an integration: the student be able to "code", visualise and listen to their musical compositions from the same program.

Tags: Teaching Programming Projects

Buffy the Vampire Slayer - Once More, With Feeling

Still on a musical note (sorry), I just bought Once More, With Feeling the cast album of the musical episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It really demonstrates the versatility of the Buffy cast -- most of the tracks would, in my opinion, be releasable as commercial music. They sing really well for a bunch of actors and Josh Whedon did a really good job on the songs. If you're at all fond of Buffy the Vampire Slayer I recommend you get it.

Tags: Listening Buffy Sountrack Music

Classical-y Music

I've been looking around on iTunes Music Store today and managed to spend more than $20, mainly on classical-y songs.

I started off looking for a good recording of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat, my favourite Andrew Loyd Webber musical. A few track from the musical, and another also by Linzi Hateley (who sings the part of the narrator in the London Palladium cast), I moved on to that other staple of the musical genre (or, at least, my taste in musicals): Gilbert & Sullivan. After a few track from a number of renditions of The Pirates of Penzance (The Mastersingers track The Pirates of Penzance is particularly good, I'll have to look at more of their music), I moved on to classical music proper.

I only wound up buying a couple of tracks from the album Enchantment by Charlotte Church (of whom I'll have to buy more) and Ode II Joy (From Symphony No. 9) by OperaBabes (whom I'm also going to have to get more of).

For some reason, I've also been interested in Russian music lately — probably as an outgrowth of the interest in choral works — so I also bought Kalinka from the Alexandrov Red Army Choir.

If anyone has any suggestions of good music in similar vein to the above mentioned track and artists, please leave a comment so that I can chase them up!

Tags: Opera Classical Music Musicals

Suzuka

I've been watching fansubs of the anime series Suzuka lately. Suzuka is about a boy (Yamato Akitsuki), a girl (Suzuka Asahina), their friends and the track team of an athletics oriented high school in Tokyo. It's been a while, but Suzuka reminds me a little of Kimi ga Nozomu Eien (another sport-related dramatic romance).

Hopefully, I'll get around to downloading and watching the rest of the series (I've watched 12 of 26) soon.

Animesuki | A.N.N.

Tags: Watching Anime

David and Leigh Eddings

I've just begun rereading that masterpiece of epic fantasy, David and Leigh Eddings' series: The Belgariad. I was given The Pawn of Prophecy as a gift one birthday and it became my "gateway drug" to the realm of fantasy. I've since read it so many times that it has quite literally fallen to pieces (annoyingly as that cover is no longer in print). Even after these ten or so years and probably near three or four times that many readings, it is still able to capture me more completely than nearly any other book I've read.

If you haven't read the Eddings' work yet, you don't know what you're missing. Get thee to a bookshop and grab The Pawn of Prophecy or The Diamond Throne (book one in the Eddings' other great pair of series: The Elenium and The Tamuli).

Tags: Reading Epic Fantasy Novels Books

Any Dream Will Do...

Just finished watching Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. Mum has had a tape of the soundtrack for many, many years and often played it in the car. As a result I was able (read: compelled) to sing along to each and every song.

Tags: Watching Musicals

Transactional memory with data invariants

Transactional memory with data invariants by Tim Harris and Simon Peyton Jones. To appear in TRANSACT '06 (PDF).

I comment previously on a draft version of this paper. In this 'final' version the authors have removed the wrapper function which converted predicates (:: STM a -> STM Bool) into actions that raise exceptions when the invariant doesn't hold (:: STM a -> STM ()) leaving the interface a little more consistent.

They have extended the STM monad to use phantom types to restrict the operations an STM action can perform (ReadOnly or Full) to help restrict the side effects of invariants. Another addition is support for invariants over pairs of states: the state before the transaction began, and the state about to be committed. This is accomplished with a new primitive: old :: STM a -> STM a which executes an STM action in the state as it was when the current transaction began. Finally, there is some new discussion of drawing on the work in databases where a distinction is made between assertions, which detect error conditions, and triggers, which are part of the programmes logic.

A good paper made even better!

LtU | Del.icio.us

Tags: CS Papers Haskell

Fundamental Constructs in Mathematics Education

Fundamental Constructs in Mathematics Education. John Mason and Sue Johnston-Wilder (Eds.). (buy)

After an introduction to the beingness of the thinghood of constructs (named, described phenomena as far as I can tell), this book launches straight into extracts describing some of the most important and influential experiments in mathematics education. I've read the first chapter which describes a number of experiments that have been used to investigate the way children learn mathematical concepts. So far it has been a good deal more readable than I was expecting.

Tags: Mathematics Education Books

Eurovision 2006

I've just watched the semi-finals of the Eurovision Song Contest for 2006 on SBS. The only comment that springs to mind is that it is a travesty that Poland's entry Ich Troje didn't get a place in the finals.

Tags: Music Listening Eurovision