Food at Zurich

Last week were TOOLS EUROPE and ICMT and they were held at ETH Zurich. While we most ate at the conferences, we went to try some "local" cuisine when possible... here are some photos of the food we have had...

One of the lunches "I" have had at ETH was SUSHI!!

One of the meals we have tried outside conference is the traditional fondue and rabbit raclette... I have to say though the waiters in the restaurant we went to called Swiss Chuchi had very very very BAD ATTITUDE!!!

Sausages (veal, beef, pork, chicken...) are the local food we have also tried... the way is to dip into loads of mustard and ketchup hahahaha....
Although not a Swiss cuisine, kebap (kebab) is also a fairly local dish. Again there are veal, beef, pork and chicken as meat... I actually found them to be better than the ones back at home...

Acceptance!!

Dear Authors,

We are pleased to inform you that your paper .... has been accepted for both presentation ... and publication in the conference proceedings.

Hurray!! Yeah!! No rejection for this one!! I am relieved now!

BCTCS at Durham University

It was a week of attending presentations and giving one... Also I had the chance to meet up with Steve and Sara who taught me back at Warwick ^_^. Incidentally according to some Formal Methods is not quite Theoretical Computer Science. Below is a photo taken from the bedroom I stayed at Grey College, overlooking the cathedral.

BBC NEWS | Health | Scientists probe meditation secrets

An article from BBC titled Scientists probe meditation secrets
describes how meditation can affect states of mentality "scientifically", here a quote from the article

"... compared the brains of these experienced practitioners with people who had never meditated and found that there were differences in the thickness of certain areas of the brain's cortex, including areas involved in the processing of emotion."

Professor Williams from Oxford said: "All of these things are just thoughts. And, they will come up in meditation and learning to recognize what they are as thoughts, and let them go, can be enormously empowering for anybody."

I say science is still quite immature when used for reasoning about the human mind... so for the time being the best way for anyone in doubt is to try to understand it by getting some first hand experiences...

Royal Society Meeting

I went down to London last Monday and Tuesday to participate in the Royal Society Discussion Meeting on "From computers to ubiquitous computing, by 2020". I was there as an audience and as a "microphone helper". Below are two photos I have taken at the venue as I arrived too early on Tuesday (it did not start until 9:45am)

A display of a photo of Alan Turing and his certificate of royal society fellowship!!

Process Algebras: What's the point?

A thread from Lambda the Ultimate titled "Process Algebras: What's the point?" .... umm....

Mark's Graduation Celebration

We went to Zizzi in Leamington for Mark's graduation celebration!! The food was not terribly good and the overal it was a good dinner ^_^ Congratulation Mark!!

A weekend of nothing

Ha! After a busy week of conference (and subsequent nights out)... I finally made all the correction for my report and have actually had it printed off on last Friday!! Ye!! Now I am waiting for some "forming filling" to be done by my department and my college. So this weekend has been a bit of a slacker really... not been doing much at all!! However, I watched Live Earth on Saturday night and found KT Tunstall a very good singer and indeed although I was quite familiar with the music she played but I did not know they were hers!! (I could not find any good recordings of her at Live Earth from youtube and so I used this music video instead.)

Anyhow... back to work this coming week... no more slacking!!

Punting

An excerpt from Wikipedia

"Rather different traditions have grown up in Oxford and Cambridge: in Cambridge they stand on the till and punt with the open end forward, while in Oxford they stand inside the boat and punt with the till forward. The Oxford position is closer to the orthodox except that nearly everyone in Oxford punts left-handed. Since the rivers in both cities are narrow and often crowded, there is little opportunity for punting "at full pressure", so these variations in stance are of little importance. Nevertheless the traditions are often strongly held; students at Oxford and Cambridge frequently believe that theirs is the only correct style."

Anyhow umm... will need to see the difference for myself.

BPM 2.0

A recent launch of BPM 2.0 saw the shift from marketing BPM from business analysts to process analysts. According to IT|Redux here is how to identify a process analyst.

"...who is a process analyst? A simple test is to ask a candidate if she understands the differences between a do-while, a while-do, and a for-each loop. If she does—and can explain it to a business analyst who could not explain what a loop is at the first place—you found the person you were looking for. You will find her among the 8 million Visual Basic programmers, the 3 million PHP fans, the million PL/SQL folks, and the half a million or so ABAP guys and gals...."

Usual route

Piled Higher and Deeper

So right haha

Thesis title ^_^

This sounds pretty right hahahahaha.... source from phdcomics.com

Gosto Superior

I went to a fairly decent veggie place in Braga on Saturday night. The place is called Gosto Superior. I only paid around 6 euros for all the food shown below plus FREE HERBAL TEA!! (The apple pie was VERY NICE)

Rejection!!

Dear Peter Wong,

I'm sorry to inform you that your paper ... has not been accepted for presentation at ... the comments of the reviewers are ...

Crap!! Although a few comments are genuine, most of the comments were like

"...there are too many detailed formulas for a conference paper..."
"I found the paper dense and hard to read and unravel."

Bloody HELL!!!

Badminton

Quite unprecedented since my doctorate that I actually took some time out of what could be my "relaxing" Sunday to do some badminton!! I must be insane... anyhow I had the opportunity to visit DMU sports centre and I thought why not?... After a "gruelling" two hours of HARD WORK (not the whole two hours mind you, that would be considered as suicidal in my circle of acquaintance haha) I am now absolutely knackered ... still I have got a correction to make for one of my papers (especially this one because of its venue ^_^) Oh well... better get back to work...

To err is human

"To err is human; to really foul things up you need a computer." -- Paul Ehrlich

Pipes: Rewire the web

The Yahoo! Pipes is a information aggregator to produce a feed that is customed by the construction of pipes. Each pipe consists of modules and connectors, each module takes some textual input and produces some textual output (functions umm), inputs and outputs of each module is communicated via pipes... (this looks like a data flow diagram or so-called data-oriented scientific workflow).... Need more thoughts on this one....

Sir Gareth Roberts

Record I have made a post about Sir Gareth, the college's president earlier. Well sadly he has just passed away this morning... umm

Two things

Two things really... first... I think I will be able to go to Portugal next month!! HAHAHAHAHA!!
second ... 原來劍橋係個城市喎!!

Acknowledgement

source from 研究生不死，只是生不如死漫畫

I highly recommend these comic strips for all those research students out there!! Or try this one below...

source from http://www.phdcomics.com

Software Engineering?!

source from http://shemesh.larc.nasa.gov/fm/fm-humor.html

持碩士 、博士學位在就業市場反而輸蝕!!

"有人力資源機構坦言，持碩士、博士學位等高學歷人士，在就業市場反而輸蝕，他們較學士畢業生更難找工作。" -- source from 蘋果日報

Oh Bollocks!!

第一次

Today for the first time I have received a written comment "Your submission for this assignment was perfect..." umm... now I am relieved a little bit because this means I am on the right track... 孤火ing again and again!!

New college website

Haha I could not believe but finally the college has come up with a new web site !! Surely this one looks better!! Having said I am having trouble in finding the college minibus timetable and the link to the lovely barco web site!!

Just received this email...

Congratulations. Your abstract "Towards A Unified Model For Workflow" is accepted as an oral presentation in the PRG-student conference 06

Well actually I did not expect to be accepted... I guess I am a PRS and get priority in this hahaha...

On the other hand... this was received earlier this month...

We regret to inform you that your submission to the research track of 4th International conference on... "A Process Algebraic Approach to Workflow Verification" was not accepted for publication.

And apparently it is pretty competitive this year.

The review process was highly selective as in the preceding years, admitting only 34 papers from the 200+ papers submitted.

So now I am not going to Chicago but only next door to Keble umm....

Well hopefully I can make my OWN way to a cool conference next time (through a good paper obviously) ....

Keynote - All Hands, East Midland Conference Centre

A keynote session in at the beginning of the e-science meeting. Very glam indeed!!.... Only to find the meeting does not attract industries umm.... Overall it was a good day at All Hands today... ^_^

Keynote - All Hands, East Midland Conference Centre, originally uploaded by peterwong1228.

Ancaster Hall, Nottingham Uni

Got up real early for breakfast today... still very tired.... breakfast is not too bad at all (I suspect all English breakfast tastes the same!!... Let's see if there are any insights to be gained from today ^_^

Ancaster Hall, Nottingham Uni, originally uploaded by peterwong1228.

East Midland Conference Centre

I attended the first day of All Hands today. It was not too bad... seeing some familiar faces including Ligang who used to be a phd at Warwick HPSG and now at Cambridge e-Science (apparently he is going back to Warwick to teach). The OMII people demonstrated the use of BPEL in clinical trial (specifically in orchestrating services for clinical randomisation) however I felt there was clearly not enough time given for the demo and hence the setting up of the BPEL instance using Eclipse looked very laborious....

East Midland Conference Centre, originally uploaded by peterwong1228.

Pass into All Hands, Nottingham

Finally at All Hands, now only an hour before the first session commences.... well Nottingham Uni looks pretty good (a very campus uni... a bit like Warwick hahaha) hopefully I can get some insight for my work in the next couple of days ^_^.

Pass into All Hands, Nottingham, originally uploaded by peterwong1228.

GLOBAN 2006

A recent release of the group photo of GLOBAN 2006 at DTU, Denmark. Now we should see if people can spot me hahaha....(click on the photo to find out)