I've just found the first sexy cousin primes!

(7, 11), (13, 17)
(7, 13), (11, 17)

The first are cousin primes, and the second are sexy primes.

Surprisingly there has been no work on this field in the past.

I've got some really good news. My research paper that I quickly developed and submitted for WISE 08 in Auckland (Sept 1-4) has been accepted! I'm really delighted that it's been accepted, especially since it is an international conference (France, China, New York), it's in a key conference in my field, and the acceptance rate was fairly low (28%)!!

My presentation at Vic went OK. I started off fairly badly - serves me right for adding a slide the day before. But I had some great discussions afterwards. The consensus was that my PhD may be a little too broad in scope, so over the next week I will try and work out what key areas I want to focus on.

As mentioned about a month ago, tomorrow I am giving a seminar at Vic about my work. It's been pretty rushed since the last two weeks I spent down south at the NZCSRSC 08 student conference. I am looking forward to next week when I may actually resume my research! (At 45 minutes, it's also the longest presentation I have given; my confirmation seminar ended up being around 30 minutes.)

Over the last week I have been developing and implementing a benchmark application for interactive web applications. The benchmark combines social networking features with e-commerce functionality, and aims to provide a standard Web 2.0-like example application. Currently I am implementing the initial application in the Symfony framework for PHP for a few reasons:

1. The implementation will be a proof-of-concept, showing what a perfectly reasonable web application is, and that it works as desired.
2. Any differences between the implementation of Symfony and existing modelling languages (WebML, UWE) can be clearly labelled as missing functionality and expressibility.
3. It will allow me to define and prototype some of the weirder parts of the application, such as credit-card billing (through DPS), sending text messages (through e-mail), defining APIs (ICal), visual effects and design (script.aculo.us), application structure, and so on.
4. I chose Symfony in particular because is the development framework I am most experienced in.

I have submitted details on this benchmarking application to the WISE 08 conference in Auckland later this year, and will wait for notification before publishing the details of this application online.

One of the most unexpected parts of this implementation is the diverse range of challenges such an application provides. Since we have found that no existing web application fully uses all of the new technology provided by the web, this application specifically includes every requirement, making every page a new discovery into implementation details. It's spectacularly fun.