PhD a vulcano of feelings

Well this post is being written during my flight from Milan to Heathrow. I spent the last 3 days in Sicily/Italy talking with Giampaolo Bella and his students in University of Catania.

I can say they were really nice to me. Specially Giampaolo that in the beginning was a bit unsure about my ideas for the PhD, but in the end he told me that it could be nice to implement this as an extension of the inductive method. It was a relief, since I believe that Larry doesn't understand fully what I want, but he did. He also did something I was not used any more: he took me by hand and made me see good things and bad things I have been doing lately. In reality I felt that he was expecting a genius, and found just a mortal guy.

Either way, I gave a talk over there in Italian, and it is here:


Talk given in Catania from Jean Martina on Vimeo.

Cambridge Bike Ride Series

Well as promised, this morning I generated more two videos of the Cambridge Bike Ride Series. This one is not so good (but better than the first), since I did in a hurry. The camera was not in the best position in my helmet and the path was really bumpy.

The things I modified was that I actually edited this one. Instead of putting the video in RAW mode I added some advertisement for my blog and a sound track. The original sound is horrible. I also tried to fit on the desires of people who commented my first video in you tube: Soundtrack (the same I was listening while cycling), cars, people, busy areas, and doing bad things on transit :)

I am publishing just one video today, because they need some editing, and this takes time. This video shows this route:


Show Full Map

Hope you like:

Talk for the Authomated Reasoning Group

Today I gave a talk to Automated reasoning group here in Cambridge, trying to explain my PhD research. The video bellow shows the talk in full. Basically I explained the method I will be using and delimited the problem I plan to cover in my PhD. For those not in computer science, it just another bullshit :)



Well maybe not that bullshit, because it should be at least good enough to earn the PhD degree. Basically is a form to give assurance to secure communication protocols by proving (in mathematical style) that the protocol has the properties expected.

After filming the video, I started another quest: Upload to someplace and make usable in my blog. I uploaded it (just a bit more that 110Mb, and made with my mobile) to youtube, but they just allow films with no more than 10 mins (mine has 28). I did some research and actually found viemo, which according with the reviews has the best post processing codec and allow people to upload more that just 10 mins.

It may look idiot, but because incapacity of youtube engineers in creating an engine to search for proprietary content, and to avoid people uploading entire movies (as if they would no spilt in small chunks) the created this ridiculous constraint.

Next week I will post the same talk in Italian, since I will be presenting it in Universita di Catania, in the mWSF07 - The 2007 miniWorkshop on Security Frameworks I hope you all like the distraction.

じゃん えべるそん

Well this post is to show other things that I did last Saturday: I was writing my name and training Japanese calligraphy at some friends house. Well じゃん　えべるそん means Jean Everson, and for those who are not used with Japanese characters it is hiragana, the basic Japanese writing.

They also wave another two alphabets. One that is phonetic base called katakana and a second that is Chinese based ideograms.

Here is the Video:




The coolest thing is that within one our of me sending the video to youtube I got a comment in it :)

Foto Updates from Hackintosh

As I promised, here are the picture of my HP DV 2000 running Mac OSX. After more than 5 days with it in my hard-drive, I decide not to keep it, because some essential things doesn't run in it, like power management, wifi and the computer heats a lot.

Hackintosh Odissey

Well, now I can state that I have a fully functioning hackintosh :) I finished installing my HP laptop with MacOS 2 days ago. It works very well, eve faster than a macbook I bought 3 months ago for a friend in Brazil.

Lessons learned :

• EFI is something really important, and there is no reason for us to stick in BIOS except that Microsoft does not support nativeEFI .
• Don expect to make your hackintosh work 100%, because device drivers are still a pain.
• Although I liked a lot I will be uninstalling it soon, because my wifi wave not worked, the microphone and the power management also.

I will post later some pictures of my HP Laptop running MacOS X

Sleeping in Airports

Today I received a very nice feed from a site I signed up. It called my attention because it is something I am a bit used to: Sleep in Airports. The guys are Professional ins this matter, and I am just a beginner.

This reminded me the day me and Giseli arrived from Italy in Stansted, we got a 3 hours delay in passport control, and lost the last bus to Cambridge. This time Giseli had the great idea to rent a car, since I had to be back in Stansted at 6:00 to fly to Germany.

The bad thing was that we had to sleep the when coming back from Germany because the passport control again. I also already slept in Lutons twice :)

WIFI Hacks

Well, today I was revising some strategies for my XBOX project, and I was looking for something really good to put mine wireless.

I bought a wifi bridge to connect my xbox, but it didn't worked with my router at home. As I payed £140 on the router, which does almost everything you could imagine (VPN, VOIP, WIFI, Print Server, etc), I decide to change the bridge.

But this bridge I have, has a very very small aerial, and I was intrigue in how to make it more powerful, then I found the following:




The site where it came from is: http://www.viddler.com/explore/babblin5/videos/7/

Mac OS X Odissey

Well, it is quite a long time without posting anything here. Today I decided to post something about my weekend. Except a trip to Bedford to buy stuff in Primark, and finishing an article to an important conference in the US, I dedicated my time to try to install the new MAC OS X in my HP laptop. Because of this I call this post Mac OS X Odissey.

The basic idea is that MAC OS X is designed to run just on Apple computers, but since they use an Intel Microprocessor, it is perfectly viable to use it in any new computer that has an Intel like microprocessor.

I have`t being able to boot my machine yet running MAC OS X, but I found very interesting ideas on how to build your own Hackintoh:

http://lifehacker.com/software/hack-attack/build-a-hackintosh-mac-for-under-800-321913.php

This is the basic post. From there you can follow links and grab all the information.

Disclaimer: Although illegal to use MAC OS X in a generic PC, it is a very nice DIY project for computer scientists like me :)

Updates...

Well, I missed two days without posting, so I will try to post more than once in these days.
First things were really busy, since my italian friend Michele (reads Mikele) came. We have been around Cambridge showing things to him.

Other problem I had is that I am packed with supervisions. I had 3 yesterday and I don't know why, I accepted more one group in the last minute, so I am with 9 groups at this moment. The only good thing is that I am repeating the work from last year so it doesn't take that much time as it used to take last year.

Today arrived a 160GB 2.5" external hard drive I bought last week. It is really nice because now I can free an 80GB one 3.5" I had to use in my Xbox experiments, meaning that I will be able to download ans store even more.

Also arrived the WIFI adapter I bought to connect the Xbox to my home network, this was really disappointing. I bought a WGA11B (remeber this to not make the same mistake), and this damn WIFI bridge refuses to talk with my Draytek all in one router. Probably I will sell it in ebay and buy another one, since Giseli will start to complain about the taped ethernet cable I fixed in the walls at our flat :)

Tip of the Day: If you need some business cards, rubbers stamp, personalised post its, etc go to this website: http://www.vistaprint.co.uk/pix3 . There you can order this things (limited but fine) just paying £3 for the delivery.