So I started my thesis 'officially' yesterday, after being told we all were allowed to proceed to masters following the exam board meeting. No actual results posted up yet, but hopefully I did well!

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In preparation for writing a master thesis we have to write a 3000 word dissertation plan, with at least 8 relevant papers for the literature review. My 4^th your honours project didn't really involve much of a literature review, so the prospect of organising papers and knowing which bits are important is a bit of a daunting task. I spent a long time going through Wikipedia's list of reference managament software hoping to find something useful. Most of them are either not free, for Linux or Mac only or are rather shoddy.  A couple looked promising but ended up just being a sort of address book for PDFs where you had to manually enter in all the data. I was all ready to give up - until I found Mendeley.

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I asked one of my lecturers about doing text visualisation as my masters thesis and he said it sounded great, even emailed me a paper to read! I don't have an exact question yet, but it'll be something along the lines of visualising web browser history. I'm quite excited about it weeee! I'll have to find out from actual forensic investigators how they use browser history and what they search for to see what is best visualised. Might be able to extend it to general log files, depends on what I find out! The result would hopefully be to produce a program (probably a web app with fancy ajax) that visualises the output of Pasco/WebHistorian etc effectively.

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Sorry for not blogging recently, I have been writing a ridiculously long piece of coursework (7,441 words at 18 pages) on malware and virtual machines which was due in today.

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When I first looked at my timetable I thought I'd be in from 10am to 5pm every day, rarely having breaks other than for lunch.  All my classes were in 2 hour blocks with some labs scheduled for 3 hours. It looked like a tough schedule, with little time for private study and coursework – especially since 4 out of 5 of the courses this term are 100% coursework based.

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Strathclyde have adopted an attendance register for every class and students may get penalised for not attending enough classes. My fellow classmates tell me this also happened in their undergrad universities. Is this normal? Is Edinburgh University weird to allow students completely free choice whether they attend lectures?

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Number of CSI mentions: 1

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I have redesigned lowmanio.co.uk to be more bloggy, and hopefully I shall actually keep up with my blog this time. I got a little over enthusiastic with blog posts as you can see...I've already blogged 6 times! The topics I will blog about are in the categories to your right. I am starting a masters in Forensics Informatics in September, so will post anything interesting I learn here. I'm also really interested in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and general art and design, and computers in general! Hobbies wise, I own two rabbits called Pixel and Nybble and I love to cook. Both of these will get mentions - hopefully not at the same time (although rabbit meat is delicious). I have also moved my bunny blog which used to live at http://rabbits.lowmanio.co.uk to here.

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