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An Easy Guide to Import Your Car from NZ to Australia

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I recently moved to Canberra from Wellington for a job at the Australian National University and had to import my trusty Toyota Corolla Wagon that they do not sell in Australia and that would have been twice the price if I were to sell it in NZ and buy a replacement similar age car in Australia. The process was super easy despite much scare mongering online! Here is what you need to do. *NB!* This assumes that you are importing a family car as part of your move to Australia. :-) 1. Go to the Australian ROVER system, create a simple account and pay around $2 to apply and obtain (takes about a week) a permission to import the vehicle into Australia: https://rover.infrastructure.gov.au/ 2. Go to AutoHub and nobody else as they are by far the easiest and most experienced car mover I got a quote from: https://autohub.co.nz/ - follow their instructions and it costs around $3K including all fees for the valuer etc to ship the car the fast way directly from NZ to Australia and it takes ar
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Comparison of Different Nitrate Leaching Sensors

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In this post, I will deviate from my usual programming languages research topic and look at using sensors to detect concentration of N in either surface or ground water in NZ. This is in part related to my other project trying to create a marketplace of economic incentives for NZ farmers when it comes to optimising their environmental impact versus the long term economic cost (aka AgriDataTrade). There are the following four options commercially available in NZ as of late 2020. I am not going to cover very very cheap conductivity based sensors available en masse on Ali Express and similar sites as these are not able technologically to gauge the actual presence of N in either soil or water despite what is advertised. The major four options are: Hach HL4 is using pH light bulb, some pellets, conductivity sensor, and Nitrate sensor attachment. It is designed to be placed in running water - such as streams or rivers. It requires weekly calibration to ensure reliable Nitrate read
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Breaking Dotty (Scala 3) and Java 16 Decidability

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As I was preparing my talk for the upcoming IFIP WG 2.4, I reflected on trying to explain the foundational work done by my recently graduated PhD student Julian Mackay as published in our POPL 2020 paper and APLAS 2020 paper ) last year. For this example, I used the latest release of Dotty (a.k.a. Scala 3) and the latest release of Java 16 : Imagine you want to have an interface or trait allowing you to compare items called Eq with parameter E . Here is both Java and Scala code alongside each other: Now imagine a Set that insists on containing the elements that are comparable with other Set instances using Eq and themselves contain elements that are comparable with Eq with both Java and Scala code alongside each other as follows: Finally, lets create a useful class Tree that implements such Set : If you are to ask either Dotty or Java a simple looking question: "is Tree a subtype of Eq<? super Tree> in Java or a subtype of Eq {type E >: Tree} in Sc
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Reflections on Organising Virtual SPLASH 2020

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Introduction In November 2020, I was the Virtualisation Co-Chair of SPLASH 2020 ( https://2020.splashcon.org/ ) that had a number of important innovations that I would like to share here so that future SIGPLAN conference and others can reflect upon and hopefully follow suit. Firstly, I'd like to acknowledge that the SPLASH 2020 was a massive effort on the behalf of Hridesh Rajan as GC, Jan Vitek, Steve Blackburn, and myself as Virtualisation Co-Chairs, and very importantly Benjamin Chung (Northeastern), Wenyu Zhao (ANU), and Zixian Cai (ANU) as Video Co-Chairs. Note that on purpose we had Hridesh and Benjamin in the US, Jan Vitek in the EU, Steve, Wenyu, Zixian, and myself in Australasia to make the "timezone independent" SPLASH 2020 model work. We had a great support from Ed Nutting from CLOWDR team and Elmer van Chastelet from Conf.Researchr team who both provided their services to help SPLASH 2020 experiment with a lot of cool innovations. When we started virtuali
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Tutorial: Simple Ionic 5 App with React Context (using React Hooks) as well as Local Storage

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Introduction My name is Alex and I teach SWEN 325 course at Victoria University of Wellington that is called "Software Development for Mobile Platforms": https://www.wgtn.ac.nz/courses/swen/325/2019/offering?crn=30041 While preparing for the 2020 iteration of the course I could not easily find a self-contained tutorial describing a simple Ionic 5 App with React backend that would use both local storage and hooks to utilise contexts to maintain state between different components. The closest I found was easy to follow "Your First Ionic App: React" tutorial that covers storage but not hooks or contexts: https://ionicframework.com/docs/react/your-first-app And separate and somewhat more abstract and thus a little harder to follow blog post that covers hooks for contexts but not storage: https://ionicframework.com/blog/a-state-management-pattern-for-ionic-react-with-react-hooks/ Thus, all this tutorial does is make a simple App which will make use of the l
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APLAS 2018

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Registrations are now open for the 16th Asian Symposium on Programming Languages and Systems (APLAS) 2018 that I have the pleasure of organising: http://aplas2018.org/ . This year we invite the industry attendees to either attend the Sydney Area Programming Languages Interest Group (SAPLING) meeting on Thursday 6th of December 2018 for free or join with our keynotes and lunches as well as welcome and posters reception for a $200 NZD Industry Registration fee.
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New Object-Oriented Languages (NOOL)

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Anyone has a favourite object-oriented programming language (or technique?) they recently created? What to talk about it with a 1 page unpublished abstract? Share around! 27th of October 2015 at SPLASH 2015! Wyvern? Grace? Pony? Pyret? Newspeak? Scala? Racket? L42? Whiley? Rust? Thorn? X10? Probably left a whole lot off this list! Sorry - just add in comments below (emphasis on *new*). :-) See: http://homepages.ecs.vuw.ac.nz/~alex/NOOL/
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