I'm off on holiday at the moment, up in not-so-sunny Brisbane, where the weather's been cloud, rain, cloud, rain and more rain for the last few days. Fortunately, the weather cleared up today, and I went out with a couple of friends to take some photos up around the Scarborough and Redcliffe area, north of Brisbane. More photographs to come once I get home, and am able to process them properly, but a few photos of rockpools and random objects have been uploaded in the interim.

Yes, it's all over and done with, at last. After 4 years of coursework, and a couple of years of a working detour, I've finally graduated. It's bloody good to have it all finalised, as the culmination of the last few years, but it's been quite a fun ride along the way.

I've been working on a number of projects lately that deal with the concept of directed and undirected graphs, to be specific, my social network analysis toolkit, and a system to perform absolute ranking based on a set of ordered pairs of nodes. The latter is being used to order my photos, along with quite a few upcoming ideas that have arisen as of late.

I went to a seminar presented by a postgraduate student today at Melbourne Uni along with Boney, describing a couple of algorithms relating to clustering graphs, and feedback arc sets. More details to come later, but the concepts described regarding ranking have given me a few ideas to pursue better heuristics in my photo ordering project.

I've been steadily running out of space on my root volume on one of my servers, so I decided to hack up a quick script to perform on Debian packages what du does for files.

I call it (unoriginally).. dpkg-du. Released under the BSD license. Never mind that it's only 2 lines of code.

And it's about time for another not-a-blog update. At the moment, I'm up in sunny Brisbane. The past three weeks have brought the commencement of the student project at uni, which is going surprisingly well.

One day later...

Went and did the laser thing last night.. bloody good fun, even if I was melting at the end of it. Anyways, photos to take tomorrow, and with any luck, they'll turn out as well as the shoot I did last time I was up here.

It's been a good 3 months or so since I updated the front page of the site, so I thought it'd be about time to highlight a few of the recent changes.

Firstly, if you've ran into the same problem as me with your photos - you've just hit the 10,000 mark, and you need to add a prefix to the digits, take a look at the photo renaming script that I uploaded a little while ago. It's in (perpetual) beta, use at your own risk etc., but it does the job for me.

As for photography.. quite a few shots have been taken around the place. In the past, most of my photos went onto Dan's Melbourne Photos forum site, but it's closed quite recently. Do take a look around at the archives though - there's some bloody good stuff in there. Nowadays, I'm updating my CMS to be more search engine- (and user-) friendly, so take a look around in the photography area of the site. The main focus as of late is on Melbourne's inner city and CBD, along with a few shots from Queensland of both Lamington National Park, and the Glass House Mountains.

Just went for a weekend camping trip out past Sale. Photos to come soon!

Update: So much for posting said photos. Having some utterly weird network issues, so Photoshop isn't really an option at present.

Update 2: Network issues resolved.. by swapping the ends of the cable. Weird.

Just the kind of thing I love to see when writing code:

Finally got around to processing a few photos. The thumbnails really don't do them justice. These ones were taken in the city around Princes Bridge.. enjoy.

Finally, I can post! A friend of mine at uni's released darkstat3, a web-accessible network statistics tool - it's like a version of ntop that doesn't suck.

Full disclosure: I did the interface design for version 3, so I'm a little biased.