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!

Read full article

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.

Read full article

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.

Read full article