Since the days of dial-up modems I’ve been filling my brain with all sorts of information from the Internet, so this blog is an attempt to give something back to the online community. Hopefully you find something interesting!
I’m currently employed by Monash University in Melbourne, having recently graduated from the Software Engineering Honours degree. The project I am involved with aims to make learning about computing (both in nature and in computers) more fun and accessible to students of high-school age and eventually undergraduates. It does so by allowing students to create computer programs that control a variety of things (robots, simulated agents, video and sound to name a few) using a simple and intuitive drag and drop interface.
Prior to studying at Monash, I had the great privilege of working at NASA’s Deep Space Tracking Station near Canberra, where my role was a combination of satellite and spacecraft communications and software development. The excitement of being a part of (in my opinion) one of human kinds greatest examples of team work was balanced by long and sometimes tedious shifts of downlinking data from Voyager 2, at the blistering speed of 160 bits per second.
Music has been an important part of my life since my early teens, although it has somewhat taken a back seat to my software development interests in recent years. I play drums in The Dub Captains (who recently sold-out the Cherry Bar for our CD launch – woohoo!), and also in the occasional music theatre production under the musical direction of my partner Christine Munro, who is a professional violin player and educator. Some tunes from an electronic outfit called Alien Digit that my friend Trav Harvey and I used to perform in can be downloaded here.
Thanks for dropping by!
Jonathan Mullins
3 Comments
Jonathan – congratulations for a great site. Please state what steps you are taking to protect the personal details of those who submitted statements to this website. Do you delete submitted statements after the site has generated a report? It might be a good idea to include a section on the website describing your strategy to protect people’s personal data. If no strategy exists, perhaps a warning to that effect would be useful so that people know their statement details are not protected.
Thanks, Tom Palaskas
Hi Tom,
Thanks for the feedback, I intend on adding a more detailed privacy policy to the site tomorrow…
Once the PDF statement is submitted to the site, the travel data (only) is extracted from it into a plain text file. The PDF is then immediately deleted. The actual travel data is stored permanently, without any reference to the user or PDF that it came from. Storing the travel data is necessary for me to be able to audit the statement assessments (ie. check mykileaks for errors), and also for providing statistics.
When I post example overcharges to the facebook group, the station names are blurred for an added level of anonymity.
Jonathan
Apologies for the previous post Jonathan. A more careful look at the website indicates that all the concerns expressed in my previous post have been addressed already.
Tom