Category Archives: personal

now part-time!

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Many people already knew this was happening, but for those that don’t — I am now officially a part-time university academic.

Now this does not mean I’m going to be a part-time academic, quite the opposite.  The reason for moving to working part-time at the University is to give me freedom to do the things I’d like to do as an academic, but never have time.  Including writing more, reading, and probably cutting some code!

Reading especially, and I don’t mean novels (although that would be nice), but journal papers and academic books.  Like most academics I know, for years I have only read things that I needed to review, assess, or comment on — or sometimes in a fretful rush, the day before a paper is due, scurried to find additional related literature that I should have known about anyway.  That is I’d like some time for scholarship!

I guess many people would find this odd: working full time for what sounds like doing your job anyway, but most academics will understand perfectly!

Practically, I will work at Lancaster in spurts of a few weeks, travel for meetings and things, sometimes from Lancs and sometimes direct from home, and when I am at home do a day a week on ‘normal’ academic things.

This does NOT mean I have more time to review, work on papers, or other academic things, but actually the opposite — this sort of thing needs to fit in my 50% paid time … so please don’t be offended or surprised if I say ‘no’ a little more.  The 50% of time that is not paid will be for special things I choose to do only — I have another employer — me 🙂

Watch my calendar to see what I am doing, but for periods marked @home, I may only pick up mail once a week on my ‘office day’.

Really doing this and keeping my normal academic things down to a manageable amount is going to be tough.  I have not managed to keep it to 100% of a sensible working week for years (usually more like 200%!).  However, I am hoping that the sight of the first few half pay cheques may strengthen my resolve 😉

In the immediate future, I am travelling or in Lancs for most of February and March with only about 2 weeks at home in between, however, April and first half of May I intend to be in Tiree watching the waves, and mainly writing about Physicality for the new Touch IT book.

Apple’s Model-View-Controller is Seeheim

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Just reading the iPhone Cocoa developer docs and its description of Model-View-Controller. However, if you look at the diagram rather than the model component directly notifying the view of changes as in classic MVC, in Cocoa the controller acts as mediator, more like the Dialogue component in the Seeheim architecture1 or the Control component in PAC.

MVC from Mac Cocoa development docs

The docs describing the Cocoa MVC design pattern in more detail in fact do a detailed comparison with the Smalltalk MVC, but do not refer to Seeheim or PAC, I guess because they are less well known now-a-days.  Only a few weeks ago when discussing architecture with my students, I described Seeheim as being more a conceptual architecture and not used in actual implementations now.  I will have to update my lectures – Seeheim lives!

  1. Shocked to find no real web documentation for Seeheim, not even on Wikipedia; looks like CS memory is short.  However, it is described in chapter 8 of the HCI book and in the chapter 8 slides[back]

First blog from iPhone

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Just downloaded WordPress app and doing first iPhone blog. Can imagine doing short blogs this way, but typing longer ones will be a pain. I hope Apple will listen to their users and allow bluetooth keyboards soon, then this might become really useful rather than expensive toy.

Paris and the redemption of the French restaurant

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I have been in Paris for a review meeting for the VisMaster project. I arrived the afternoon before the meeting started and so unusually had half a day to wander around, mainly to check out the location of the meeting places, but also to see Notre Dame, which was really just outside my hotel window. The hotel “Hotel Les Rives De Notre Dame Paris” was somewhat higher budget than I intended, but there was clearly some big meeting on this week as everything seemed booked solidly for the days I needed. However, given its location and it was a double room, it would be an ideal location for a couple visiting Paris: wonderful views, furnishing that made you believe you were in Paris and breakfast in a cellar that had clearly been there since the days of Victor Hugo.

I mention Hugo as one of the highlights of my half-day wander is the Shakespeare and Co bookshop just opposite Notre Dame. The books are all English but there is a special section of English translations of French authors and here I bought a copy of Hugo’s “Notre Dame de Paris“, the fateful tale of Quasimodo and Esmarelda and inspiration for the “Hunchback of Notre Dame” films. As well as Hugo I also bought a copy of one of Montaigne’s essays, which strangely haven’t yet found their way to Hollywood.

Having bought two books to load my already overburdened suitcase destined for its 15 kilo Ryanair weight limit I was drawn back and this time looked through the second hand section. It was fascinating to see what the English speaker in Paris reads, and I was again tempted and came away with Edna O’Brien’s “Mother Ireland” and also an old psychology book “Thinking and Reasoning”. It is an overused title (a bit like “Human Computer Interaction”) and I almost passed it by as it was clearly an old book and so obviously “out dated”. However just in time I noticed the editors, Wason and Johnson-Laird, and realised this was a collection of classic papers from the late 1950s and early 1960s, a real treasure capturing the period when cognitive psychology flowered.

However, the high spot for me1 was the first evening when I ate on my own in a small restaurant, next door to the bookshop. In the past I have been critical if not dismissive of French cooking. Not French food — cheese and bread from even the most basic supermarket is an epicurean joy, but the food you get in French restaurants.

Now by French restaurant I think I mean self-consciously “French” restaurants and in particular Parisian restaurants, as I have mainly been in Paris and in Toulouse twice. The regional food in Toulouse was wonderful (once you get over the fat), but even there “French” restaurants were a disappointment. It was not that I have only been to the Parisian tourist haunts, where the contempt of the non-Parisian can be apparent and where they serve the kind of lump of meat and pile of potatoes meal that I last saw in the UK thirty years ago, with the sole exception of some highly flavoured sauce instead of the customary British gravy. On many occasions I have been with French and Parisian natives who have selected carefully and taken us to well-classed restaurants, but they have still left me disappointed. In Italian restaurants, even the most basic Formica-tabled trattoria, the food itself is not treated with the reverence of the French, but as a more homely pleasure. Not unlike the everyday Catholicism of Italy compared to the more austere cathederals of France. In Italy, like the restaurants I find today in the UK (not 30 years ago), the appreciation is of the food; the food is the focus; the food is what you eat and what you enjoy. In contrast, in French restaurants it is always the chef that is king, the centre stage, the impresario.

That is I would have always said this until now.

Opposite the Notre Dame, set back from the busy Seine-side, in thoroughfare by small jardin, is “Le Petit Châtelet“. It is crushed on one side beside the brash tourist restaurants that cluster round Notre Dame like flies once did round the fetid sewers of mediaeval city rivers. On the other side it flanks Shakespeare and Co., which feels a closer bedfellow.  The service was impeccable and friendly and the food divine including sorbet in unexpected flavours such as lavender.  Out of the dirty mire that had been my previous experience of Paris, like Notre Dame itself rising from the foetid streets in Hugo’s account of 15th century Paris, Le Petet Châtelot has redeemed French cuisine in my eyes.

  1. That is of course apart from the review meeting, which was very productive – and those of you who have been at an EU project review might not believe me, but really it was![back]

Justice and mercy: al-Megrahi

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I’ve been away most of the last two weeks with just a few days at home in between.  However, just before I was first away I heard the Scottish Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill announce the release of al-Megrahi.  The decision was clearly hard and arbitrating the balance between justice and compassion is an unenviable task.

Whether the final decision was right or wrong, hearing MacAskill’s explanation of his decisions made me proud to be living in Scotland. Rather than bowing to the clear political pressure he was under, instead he kept his focus on what justice means in a land where compassion is at the heart of who we are.  In a world often ravaged by war and terror, suffering under human cruelty, and governed by the twins of aggression and revenge, MacAskill put himself under a  higher order and demonstrated the clear difference between a country still under the influence of its Christian past and those, from all sides, who besmirch the names of their own countries and religions by terror and violence.

Since then the grubby world of UK deals over oil and US deals over billions of dollars of compensation payments have both been aired, but it appears that MacAskill’s decision stood against pressure from all sides.

It was perhaps inevitable that the release would provoke some controversy, but disappointing nonetheless; one always hopes that integrity will triumph over knee-jerk reactions.  However, it has been especially galling to hear US voices raised in protest, a country which for so many years acted as safe haven for IRA fund raising; bankrolling the London bombings of the 1970s and beyond.  While Gaddafi supplied the weapons, the US public supplied the dollars1.  I was only young at the time, but these were vicious attacks in crowded tube trains and on the streets of London and elsewhere, designed specifically to cause maximum death and injury; and all the while, in the US, the IRA were allowed to operate freely due to political support in high places.

Obama came to power with the promise of a new attitude and a principled approach to politics, so it is doubly disappointing that he has failed this early test of principle over public opinion.  If the current White House staff cannot accept the independence of the Scottish justice system over politics, what hope in other parts of the world.

  1. Of course, while the Libyan involvement in the Lockerbie bombing and al-Megrahi’s guilt have been a matter of debate, the involvement of Libya in IRA terrorism was indisputable.   Since those days the IRA have become part of the Northern Ireland political process and Libya itself has been welcomed into the allied camp of the ‘war on terror’.  Whether in India, Israel or Ireland, yesterday’s terrorists become today’s politicians.  This makes the focus on al-Megrahi seem even more like that of a scapegoat.[back]