Dave's Archives

AI-generated (stable diffusion) ge of "cyclon writing with a pen".

The sporadic blog of David J A Cooper. I write sci-fi, teach software engineering, and occasionally say related (or not related) things.

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  • The arrogance

    I took a good opportunity today to feel smug and superior on my bike. My regular “scenic route” to uni takes me down a bike path right next to the Kwinana Freeway. With a slight headwind and managing 25-27km/h, I was overtaking the peak hour traffic for the whole 6-7km distance. Normally I can only…

  • The university of technology

    All Curtin students and staff know about OASIS. OASIS purportedly stands for “Online Access to Student Information Service” . Is that the best they could do, you ask? Evidentially, that full name is now such an embarrassment that it doesn’t seem to appear anywhere on the official OASIS website. However, I’m still not sure which…

  • Blog politics

    I used to think that left-vs-right was an ideological battle that consumed American thinking far more than Australian thinking. However, having indulged in glimpses of Andrew Bolt’s blog and his adversaries at Pure Poison, I’m not sure that we’re really any better. Theoretically, “left” and “right” define a spectrum of economic policy: left for socialism,…

  • Theoretical frameworks, part 2

    Carrying on from my [intlink id=”225″ type=”post”]last research-related rant[/intlink], my other problem of late lies in the writing process. The framework is supposed to assist the detection of defects in software, in a very round-about fashion. Why is this important? Well, hands up who hasn’t lost work as a result of software screwing up. Some…

  • Stimulated by Kevin

    It appears that, in the coming weeks, most of us will be receiving $900 from The Man, with which we must do our patriotic duty as consumers and… well, consume. I suppose we should all be buying Australian goods and services as much as possible, though that line always sounds a little parochial to me.…

  • Conroy’s train wreck

    The Federal Government’s proposed mandatory Internet filtering scheme has been battered and bruised from all corners of the technical community. Yet Senator Stephen Conroy valiantly battles on. Last year I wrote to the Senator to express my views, and also to the Greens and to my local member, Steve Irons. Conroy eventually replied with a…

  • Theoretical frameworks

    One of the chapters of my much-delayed thesis describes (or rather will describe) a theoretical framework, which is academic-speak for “a way of understanding stuff” in a given field. In my case, stuff = software inspections, and my way of understanding them is a mixture of abstractions of abstractions of abstractions and some slightly crazy…

  • Ash Saturday

    The fires burning in Victoria are now considered worse than those of Ash Wednesday (16 February 1983). I don’t have any particular personal connection to it, but it seems remiss to leave this event unmarked. Meanwhile, fires are also burning in New South Wales, and the floods continue unabated in Queensland. Perth isn’t such a…

  • The wrath of the plebiscites

    A friend once told me that he opposed a referendum on Australia becoming a republic. If it were held he would vote “yes”, but he opposed holding it. I look back fondly to that nuanced political position, which many without thinking would probably dismiss as a contradiction. Today I’m not a staunch republican – I…

  • I’ve been assimilated… a bit

    I am reluctantly on Facebook. For the record, I’ve never really liked Facebook as a concept. Networking is great, but such online social networking ventures seem like a way to pool vast amounts of sensitive personal information in the hands of private entities that aren’t really accountable to anyone. Something is bound to go wrong…