I am a Professor of Computer Science and systems researcher at St Andrews University.
My research interests include: cloud computing, distributed systems, operating systems, file systems, persistent systems, ubiquitous systems, object-oriented middleware, p2p systems, programming languages, sensornets, component deployment.
I enjoy sailing, diving, keep milawi cichlids and growing hoyas.
If like me you are a Mac user and need to open Windows lnk files that contain links to shared volumes and web pages you might like this free program: WinShortcutter. It allows you to double click a windows link file on a Mac. Very handy.
Craig Paul has won the Scottish Real Time Systems Award for his project entitled NaviSim. The aim of NaviSim is to provide a tool for teaching beginners to sail. The final system simulates a standard Laser dingy and provides visual feedback on what the dingy is doing in response to user input from both the keyboard and (if you have the hardware) a tiller and main sheet.
See more information at this earlier post.
Our B2Evolution Blog installation is getting a bit creaky. Spurred on by the desire to create some blogs for interacting with the students (such as our CS1002 Blog) have created a WordPress Mu site on blogs.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk on which this page now rests. I have attempted to use various scripts written in weird languages to port my old Blog entries to the WordPress installation. In the end it was easier to do it by hand. How you ask – well I used LiveWriter on a Windows box. Why you ask – aren’t you a Machead now. Indeed I am but the Blog software on the Mac is a long way behind LiveWriter which is pretty slick. Anyhow, it only took a couple of hours to move my Blog and here we are up and running on WordPress Mu. If only I could get rid of the stray backslash in the Blog title! Onward forward.
Following success of my student Angus MacDonald in the YSE competition a few years ago (see here), another of my students’ Craig Paul has been nominated as a finalist in the 2009 competition.
Craig has created a simulator (called NaviSim) for teaching people how to sail. Details of the project can be found here. The NaviSim Dinghy Sailing Simulator is a senior honours project that builds an accurate representation of a small sailing boat in Java.
The motivation for the project was that although sailing is one of Britain’s oldest and most successful sports, there are a number of problems faced by newcomers:
Whilst a sailing simulator will not offer to teach everything there is to know about sailing, it can help to teach the basics to those interested in learning more.
The simulator provides the learner with a safe learning environment and provides multiple views (3D and 2D) of a dingy along with visual feedback of the dinghy’s performance. The system may be controlled with a sheet and a tiller connected to USB inputs via a mechanism built by our technicians Davie Lethem and Jim Park.
Here are some photos of Principal Louise Richardson using the NaviSim system.
Note the tiller and sheet in this photo -
Here is a photo from Graduation 2009 kindly sent to me by Bob Douglas from the Dundee Courier.
Pictured left to right are: myself, Craig Paul, Paul McKay, Davie Clark, David Ironside, Andrew Phillips Colin Allison and Kevin Hammond
full sized version is here
Much has been made of what might be called the Warehouse approach to cloud computing. Using this approach some big provider – Microsoft, Google, Amazon fills a warehouse full of machines and offers software as a service, platform as a service or something else as a service.
At St Andrews we have been thinking about ad-hoc clouds – providing cloud functionality with the machines that are available in house. This seems a much greener approach to Clouds than the warehouse approach.
A supporting article has recently appeared in the Register: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/08/08/microsoft_azure_migration/ which supports this view. In the article they claim that warehouses are soon to create a financial drag on cloud providers. They suggest that the claimed economic advantages of warehouse clouds (all revolving around scale) will be short lived.
Back to creating ad-hoc clouds for us…
People keep asking me what the cloud is. Recently I was reading Duncan Johnston Watt’s blog from Cloudsoft Corp at: http://www.cloudsoftcorp.com/.
He has the answer -
Of course like everything on the Internet, he stole this picture from someone else…
After the coming 4th in the Good University Guide league table, Computer Science at St Andrews has come second in the 2010 Guardian league table, as shown here:
Read all about it here
The University also did well overall coming third in the country:
Details may be found here.
The School of Computer Science has done extremely well in this year’s good University guide coming 4th in the country. Here is the ranking taken from http://tables.thecompleteuniversityguide.co.uk/2010/subject_tables.php?selected_table=comp
The University as a whole also did well coming 7th in the UK. Not too bad for a wee place on the edge of Scotland 
Read all about it at: http://www.thecompleteuniversityguide.co.uk/single.htm?ipg=8726.
I have just taken delivery of a shiny new Honda CRV. To my delight it has a PCM/CIA adapter in the dashboard to allow you to play MP3s (or M4As) whilst in the car. Now this does raise the issue as to why Honda should choose such an old format for the card. However, that aside, it would seem that many people (including me) cannot get the cards to play. The CRV driver’s dilemma is described in the humorously named Hodge Blog:
http://www.nickhodge.co.uk/blog/?p=1825#comment-2541
OK, so you don’t want to read that – in a nutshell the problem is that people cannot get their cards to work – they either get – MEDIA ERROR" or "NO MUSIC" errors.
The source of this problem is, of course, Honda who despite being an excellent company who make very nice cars seem to be incapable of telling their users how their cars work.
I believe that after quite a bit of time I have sorted out the problem – it is all about the file system on the cards. I now have 2 cards working perfectly: a 4Gb Transcend and an 8 Gb Kingston card. Both are CF cards and both are working in a generic PCM/CIA adapter. I now don’t think it matters what kind or card you have or what kind of adaper. I could get neither card to work originally getting both errors discussed above – "CARD – MEDIA ERROR" and "NO MUSIC". The secret is to format the cards with a FAT32 filesystem. Unfortunately cards often do not come with a FAT32 filesystem on them so you will need to put an appropriate filesystem on the card. Unfortunately you cannot easily do this with XP or Vista. In Vista or XP you have to run a command from a command window. To get a command window do the following:
Start >>Select Run>> in Run Dialog Box Type Cmd
Once you have done this you need to run the format command. If your card is called X: you type the following:
format /FS:FAT32 X:
Please be very careful with this – it will nuke any file systems so make sure you choose the right drive letter (it will probably be called E:, F:, G: etc. rather than X:)
On a Mac you can do the following: open Disk Utility select Erase and choose MS-DOS FAT as your preferred format. This will format the disk. Again please be careful.
I hope this helps others, if it does, please consider sending a fiver to Oxfam!
al
