Updated (Belated)

In an effort to make good on my new, new-year's resolution, I will be making more frequent updates to the good ol' blog.

This last semester has been a living nightmare.

It began, I suppose, with the worst class schedule ever. The problem wasn't the schedule itself, but, rather, the frequency in which the schedule changed as the semester got underway. My Physics II class was canceled, due to low enrollment, on the first day of classes; this was a huge problem, as the other section of Physics II was being offered during two of my other scheduled classes. I set about the painstaking process of adjusting what I could, and hoping for the best. Once I had successfully made all of the adjustments, however, the Physics class had been re-listed. Geez.

The final roster ended up like this:
Physics II (Lecture, and Lab)
Discrete Mathematics
Linear Algebra
Computer Networking (Theoretical, rather than practical)

It doesn't seem like a lot of classes, but it sure kicked my ass.

Maybe not surprisingly, it was the Discrete math class which gave me the most trouble. The professor is a very smart individual. I say this, not because I fear that he will find this blog, but to impress upon my audience (all two of you) that this man means business. In the final analysis, I can say with certainty that the homework for this class, both in terms of volume and difficulty, was ever so much harder than the exams which were given. I spent nearly an entire week studying this one subject before final exams.

The class itself was a touch too theoretical for my needs, but it was very interesting. I wish we could have spent a little more time on some of the more Computer Science oriented chapters in the book, but I can always look at them on my own later.

The Linear Algebra class was nice. The professor moved through the material like a Saturn 5 moves through the atmosphere. The work, however, ended up being done in fits and spurts, due to the shear volume of work required daily for the Discrete Math class.

The Physics class was a real treat. The professor spent a lot of time on the complex derivations, but really broke down the concepts for us in a straight-forward manner. Since, in the end, there were only 3 students in the class, the professor was able to spend a little more time on some of the more interesting parts; we even got a couple of cool demos (which were not strictly part of the lab session). Speaking of the lab, it was fun. Well, OK, the discharging capacitor lab was a bit boring, but the majority of the labs were cool enough. I was able to goof around a little bit when it came to the lab reports -- I did some of the statistical analysis in Python and made some nice charts using Pylab. Fun times. It was far different from the Physics I lab, where I spent most of my time making nice graphics in Inkscape (a free SVG editor).

The most surprising class I took this semester, however, was Computer Networking. I am usually content with knowing the software-side of things. My eyes tend to glaze over when one starts talking about things that happen in the physical world. I'm not sure why, but I anticipated two things from this class: first, that I would have to play some serious catch-up, seeing as I knew only some basic networking; and second, that the class would be a lot of memorization of protocols, and OSI layers, etc. Fortunately, I was quite wrong on both counts. The professor was one of the best I have ever had. He showed up for lecture every day and told us, with confidence, exactly what we needed to know. His notes were clear, concise, and incredibly easy to study from; in fact, he told us that we didn't even need to get the textbook, because he would give us everything on the board. The best part of the networking class was the fact that it was given in a completely general-purpose sort of way. We were not taught, for example, anything that would lock us into some vendor-specific realm.

So, now that I have your attention, I can tell you that I managed to eek out an A from each of my classes this semester. This brings my cumulative GPA to about 3.968 (Damn and blast! Why did I have to get a B in Physics I?!?). I'm really not trying to brag or anything -- it was just a particularly great accomplishment toward my personal goals. I'm really quite proud.

Well, I am tired. Sleep beacons. My alarm is set for 3:00 AM EST. One of these days I will be able to quit Whole Foods...

Until next time, very truly yours,

Das Bitmanipulationstopher!

Fun times...

I would like to formally apologize to my vast audience (all two of you) for the recent lack of updates.

Anyway, I've been up to a lot in the last few weeks.

I am currently working on three internships at the University. Hopefully this means I will be paid well for the summer. The most interesting of these internships is the one that I am doing with Dr. Yu, our chairperson in the CS dept.; actually, I am technically working for Dr. Behera in the Civil Engineering dept., but it makes little difference. The project revolves around mapping the uncertainty in position of moving objects. If an object is moving, and providing updates for its position at discrete intervals, it can sometimes be useful to know where that object could be between those updates. I'll provide some more info later.

The real cool part of that work, for me, is the real-time message delivery aspect. I wrote a custom SMTP email server, using a Python networking framework called Twisted, and have it talking, in an asynchronous way, with a custom HTTP web server. The net result is that when a message is received from the object, the client web pages are updated automatically -- no user interaction is necessary. This is a really good thing, because it will allow someone to open a page, and have that page show real-time information. Nice. I'll post a link when the site becomes active...

In other news, I have finally started buying games for our wii. Mario Galaxy is quite fun, if a bit disorienting. Actually, I suspect the disorienting effect is more prominent for the people watching the game, not the one playing it. My only complaint is that the jumping seems somewhat unresponsive; I tried using a different wiimote, but I think the problem is in the game itself. It could simply be that I'm running the wii through a VCR, and from there through a TV Tuner card in my computer. One of these days, we'll buy a real TV -- but only for movies and games. Honest.

OK, time to crawl back into my hole.
Later,
T

2008 ADMI Conference...

Once again, I am letting this blog slip my mind...

...and, once again, I will attempt to rectify this situation!

I was invited by several of my professors to attend the 2008 ADMI Conference this last weekend. ADMI is a group which deals with minority institutions, such as UDC, that deal in the STEM disciplines (Science, Technology, Engineering, & Mathematics). I will give a more complete, in depth account of my experience in the next few days, but I wanted to go ahead and give some of the highlights now:

The backbone of the conference this year was Information Assurance; all of the faculty presentations had an underpinning related to the subject, and so did many of the student presentations. Perhaps I've been living under a rock for a while (if you've seen my apartment, you'll agree), but I've never heard the term used before last weekend. One would think, given that the entire focus of the conference was on the subject, that Information Assurance was the only Computer Science/Information Technology job out there! Personally, I am not convinced. The Internet -- no, the entire networking infrastructure -- needs to be completely overhauled. There are far too many exploits, bugs, issues, etc. with the systems that we have in place today, and these problems will only increase in the future. I'm ranting now, but this issue really bugs me. Why put so much emphasis on Information Assurance, when the problems that it tries to correct (read: cover for) are so deeply rooted.

Ok, I'm done (for now...).

Oh, yes. The ADMI conference...

Anyway, the student presentations were quite good. There were about ten or so oral presentations, and at least twice as many posters. Most of the students were quite knowledgeable about their topics, which is quite different than some of the other conferences that I have attended in the recent past.

OK, I promise a longer, more detailed assessment next time...
-Ravi

Run Linux Seemlessly Inside Windows

Interesting...

I saw this on Digg, and had to share (with my vast fan base of, oh, two readers): Check out the andLinux distribution. It promises to allow a user running Windows to run a full-featured Linux distribution (an Ubuntu variant) inside Windows -- without modifying native Linux code!

Nice. Well, not nice -- it's never nice to be stuck with Windows -- but it's better than getting kicked in the face with a golf shoe.

Enjoy,

Das Bitmanipulationstopher!

Yeah, I promised I wouldn't let this thing languish. Well, I lied a little bit.

To rectify the situation, I will now attempt to tell you what I have been up to for the last several weeks -- all in one sentence:

I have been up-to-my-freakin'-eyeballs in homework.

There, that sums everything up quite nicely.

Seriously, I have been working hard. The robotics lab at UDC is finally starting to look like something.
Hopefully I can score some posters for those walls...

In other news, the computer graphics class is quite interesting. As usual, I underestimated the amount of work that the class would require -- I actually assumed that the content would be more about using the existing 3D graphical frameworks in Java (JOGL and Java3d), but it turns out that we are really focusing more on the theory. We started slow, writing line-drawing algorithms (vis. Bresenham's line drawing algorithm) and circle-drawing algorithms; eventually, we will be writing code to perform complex translations and transformations on arbitrary 2D polygons. Fun.

On the tutoring front, I have also been busy! I have been assigned Dr. Chen's CSII lab this semester. Normally, this wouldn't be a big deal, but this is a very large class. So far, things have been somewhat quiet -- the students have not been asking too many questions -- but that will change very soon as midterms roll around.

So, the words I have been living by are busy, busy, & busy.

Until next time...
...Yours Truly: Slugs Inside Vast Airport Runway Terminals