A Few Thoughts…

I’ve been struggling with this problem from my recent homework set: Prove that the number of triangles t in any triangulation of a fixed point set s is constant. This is something that after trying a few examples and thinking about it makes perfect sense to me. And indeed it is provable. However, everyone who references this says it is obvious and can be proven by induction - yet no one has actually shown the proof.

This is where I have a problem: I’m not so good at writing proofs, which is why I was terrible at algorithms 1. So while something seems obvious to me (at least now that I’ve thought about the problem for a while), and everyone else seems to be able to put down “it’s obvious, go prove it yourself” in their publications, I’m still stuck on getting this proven. Perhaps when I finally get the answer, I’ll post it here so that future me can find it…not that I’ll probably have much use for it in the future.

It’s been a while since I’ve had to pull an all-nighter. And last night was probably the most difficult of them all, since all previous ones had been working in groups. Last night - it was just me. Sure the music and coffee helped to keep me awake for a while. But come 0345 (after having been up since 0600 the previous day), I was more than jouez au poker gratuitementjeu poker tourfrancaise des jeuxyahoo france jeuxjouer au poker virtueljeu de poker internetjeu de streap pokersalles de poker en lignejouer au poker francaisvente de jeu de pokerpoker gratuites hors lignejouer au poker texaspoker fr onlineregle de jeu de pokercomment télécharger jeu pokerjouer online poker touroù jouer au poker en lignele poker online françaisvente jeu de pokerpoker gratuites compoker tour gratuitesjeu poker holdem gratuitespoker 770jeu gratuites poker holdtelecharger poker en ligne gratuitesjouer texas holdem gratuitespro poker tourjeux poker a telechargerjeux gratuitsstud poker casinojeu poker tour en ligneworld poker compoker a jouer gratuitementpoker on line gratuitesjeux tour de pokerpoker gratuites sur macpoker en ligne mac ospai gow poker paginas internetpoker casinono deposit bonus pokerfichas poquerdouble bonus poker downloadpoker paginas webjoker pokerpoquer de dadosjuegos strep pokerpoquer comwww poli poquerpai gow poker onlinejuego omaha poker ready for a little nap to help rejuvenate. No luck - the lab floor was quite cold, and worse my mind was racing along from all the aforementioned coffee. So after 2 hours, with only 30 minutes of real sleep, it’s time to get up, change into some clean clothes, and see what can be made of the day.

On the plus side, the majority of the code is working - just not correctly. I’m supposed to be writing/reading to/from the Real Time Clock (RTC) over the I²C bus on the board we have. And It seems to be responding correctly with the right ACKs and everything - but the data comes back as zeros…even if I manually set the clock to something other than zero (which it ACKs). Oh well, the code has some impressive sloccount stats for a 1-night code session I suppose: 1 person for 3 weeks. Not bad for 12-hours start-to-finish! At least I know how it’s supposed to work!

I need coffee….and nothing it open on campus yet….

So my class for this quarter is called ‘Silicon Programming’ which is basically a grandfathered name for a class which is turning into an embedded systems/FPGA class. So far it’s required me to dig back into the shadows of memory for all of the digital systems design and computer organization stuff I haven’t used for about 6 to 7 years. It’s been fun remembering how to build adders, and how to use flip-flops to build memory and stuff like that, but it’s been a challenge.

So now that the review portion of the class is over, we’re moving on to using VHDL to build our circuit designs. Except, they’re not really ‘circuit designs’ in the traditional sense of having a schematic. (At this point, if you already know a bit about VHDL, you can probably sit back and be amused at my ignorance. Hey - I’m still learning and this is still new to me!) THe VHDL language is interesting. There are several styles of which you can describe the hardware. The styles range from describing a circuit-like implementation, to describing what the behavior of the circuit is (letting the compiler do the work of figuring out the best way to implement it.

The interesting, and pretty cool thing about VHDL is that it is inherently parallel in nature. Think about some of the circuit designs you’ve done (or seen). As a simple example: How many wires were tying a single input to multiple gates? And remember all of the latches/flip-flops that used their own output as an input. There’s lot of weird things that happen in real systems when compared to software systems. Oh sure, there’s interprocess communication that has to happen, especially when handling mutli-threaded apps. But that seems fairly trivial when trying to describe the behavioral actions of parallel circuit paths!

It’s fun, but it’s also a struggle….hopefully I figure it out!

So, for our final paper for Advanced OS, we have to come up with a topic within the realm of advanced operating systems, and write an 8-page single-spaced paper. Of course, I have a lot of interests in operating systems - though not a lot of them were covered in the course (we focused mostly on file systems and P2P systems). So, I managed to narrow my topic list to two pretty quickly:

• Scheduling & Locking in Real-Time Operating Systems
• Methods of Reconfigurable Computing (software based of course)

After looking through literature for a while, I think I have decided on the later. Reconfigurable computing has been a fairly prevalent topic in the supercomputing literature in the last few years, so there were a lot of papers to choose from. So, stay tuned - by next wednesday, I’ll have a paper posted here for all (two) of you who take a look here…

So my lecture on DSM will be on Wednesday, and staying true to the academic form, below is a link to the presentation. It’s a summary of an article by Pete Keleher, et. al. (from 1994) and we’re presenting them in a manner akin to a conference presentation (so there are no citations given). This is the first draft, so there may be mistakes - please let me know about them if you find them!

The paper: TreadMarks: Distributed Shared Memory on Standard Workstations and Operating Systems

My Presentation: Interactive Quicktime (I’ll probably put the keynote version up here eventually)

So the end of the quarter is approaching - and I seem to be busier than I think I ever have been before in my life! So many papers to read, and so many to write! I do my lecture on Wednesday on a paper written in 1994 on a distributed shared memory system. Yeah, you may think it’s old and outdated in the speed at which computer systems go, but you’d be wrong. There’s a lot of landmark papers written many years ago which maintain their relevance even today.

Anyway, I need to spend a lot of time preparing this lecture, but I have another paper to write for monday - on the longest paper we have been assigned. It’s 40 pages long, and not a whole lot of diagrams - at least, not yet! I’m about 1/4 of the way through it, so maybe it will pick up. It’s just really hard to focus on the paper when I known I really need to be focusing on mine!

It’s also becomming increasingly difficult to find a good place to study. I feel like I spend 90% of my time outside of work at either Panera or Barnes & Noble. Don’t get me wrong - both fine establishments. Panera is certainly the better place to study since it’s much quieter and has free internet access. However, they close at 8:30, which is a rough time to stop studying! Luckily B&N is just across the street, and they stay open later - though no free internet access means no wikipedia! And don’t even get me started on their technical material anymore - it was never huge, but now it’s downright minimalistic!

Okay, I think a 13 hour day of HTG work and studying is enough for me. I’m gonna go home, and relax for a little while before going to bed. Luckily I just have to bring snack for Sunday School tomorrow! Hopefully it will be a very productive day and I can get my presentation pretty much completed.

I need to test the display with my laptop - it will be the first time I’ve done a presentation on a mac, and I have to say, I’m really liking Keynote. It seems like things are MUCH easier than powerpoint. File saves take a little bit of time, but that may just be the images I’m putting into it. Sure, sure, call me a mac fanboy, but when it comes to useability, they’ve got their ducks in a row.

[Backdated since B&N doesn't have the wifi]

It seems like that’s been the story of my life for the past few weeks. Good decisions and bad, whatever got me so far behind on everything in my life is now in the process of being brought back up to speed. Work was very busy, but also very productive this week. School has finally handed me a large heaping of work to start on (I’m taking a short break from writing a summary paper to write this). HTG work has been coming along, though I still don’t get to contribute as much as I would like.

My house has finally seen some of the piles of papers start to disappear - slowly, but surely I’ll make them all go away. I have quite a few pieces of artwork to hang on the walls still - hopefully I’ll find some time this week to work on that! I got an interesting piece of mail this week asking if I would be interested in selling my home. I have decided that I don’t really enjoy all of the offerings the condo has for me (like the extra HOA fees for things I don’t really participate in), but that I’m not ready to get a house just yet. Life is a little too busy right this moment to add extra time to the commute, and take care of a home. Though I look forward to the day when I can slow down a bit, have my few acres, a couple of dogs, and a little garden to get fresh food from! Not to mention being able to grill out again!

I’m glad that I’m working on my masters, but there’s a long road ahead before I can finish it up. I’m hoping to find some project at work that I can use to do research on for my degree. That would kill two birds with one stone! Three if you count the fact that I’ve been wanting to see some of the other work that my company does!

I’ve been doing a lot of work with the STL libraries at work. I went in yesterday and discovered that I had implemented a few container classes incorrectly - or at least sub-optimally. It required a brief redesign of some of my code (which it has not completely recovered from yet - I hate checking in code that doesn’t compile - even into a branch!), which will end up being for the better. Though I did wake up in the middle of the night dreaming about boost::shared_ptrs, and how to properly use them in STL hashed container classes! There’s a great book called “Effective STL” which is stocked full of good info on STL topics - though read it before you start on a project, not when you’re half-way through it!

Okay, I think that’s all for now on this brief foray out of the academic world. If there’s one thing to be said about my experiences post-undergrad work, I can read through technical papers like lightning and crank out reports almost as fast

So, there’s a lot of papers out there we need to look up for Advanced OS. Since I move around to different systems a lot, I figure I’ll post them here. That, and it’ll help my friends find them too
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A more precise title would be 7 down, 23 to go - referring to credit hours, not actual classes. But it’s close! Anyway, Compiler Theory (and lab) are now done. Kelly and I got a great score in lab, and the grades aren’t in for lecture yet, but I felt pretty good about the final. I can honestly say that compilers aren’t my thing. I learned a lot about them, and I think about different things when coding now that I know more about what is going on when I run the compiler - but we didn’t get to code gen or optimizations, so I can’t say I have the full scope of what’s happening - I have to take advanced compiler for that, and I’ll think about that one later.

For next quarter though, it’s time for ECES 847 - Advanced Operating Systems. I went to look up the textbook information tonight, and we’re just going to be referencing “Selected papers from conferences and journals.” Hint #1 that this will be a different class than I’m used to. Hint #2 - no tests, just a midterm project and a final project or research paper or 8-12 pages. I’m not sure if I should be worried or excited about the prospects of no tests! It will be interesting to say the least. I’m definitely looking forward to the topics of the class.

I’ll probably post more about the class once it actually starts - for now though, it’s spring break….which for me pretty much means catching up on all the things I’ve been putting off around the house for the past 3+ months. There are lots of papers to be filed, lots of cleaning (I think I may need to borrow a vacuum :), and general relaxification to be had. I will be speaking on Wednesday to the Look to Clermont class from the Clermont 20/20 organization at the former SDRC headquarters, which is now UGS, but will soon be changing names again (for the 3rd time in 7 years).

There’s a couple more server migrations for web hosting to get everyone onto the new servers. We’re up to about 8 clients now, and I have 2 more to move and a couple of prospects for new clients. HTG has a few jobs on the possible horizon, including one which would definitely give us a start we could not have imagined even 6 months ago. I can’t say much about it yet since we aren’t in any sort of contract to do the work yet, and I wouldn’t want to be giving away job prospects to others now! Let’s just say that it would hold us over for a while - and we could potentially hire a person or two to work part-time to get us to the delivery date so we don’t kill ourselves.

Well, that’s all for now - time for bed for me, there’s puppets and Sunday School in the morning. And I’ll actually be able to get to a Sunday Evening service for the first time in a while!

So I’m reading Appendix A of the Computer Architecture book, which is all about pipelining.  Dr. Wilsey told us in no uncertain terms that if we couldn’t wrap our heads around the material in this chapter we would not understand anything the rest of the quarter.  The material: pipelining - some really cool stuff, but some really deep stuff at the same time (no pun intended for those who get it - for those who don’t, a deep pipeline is one that is very long and can take a lot of time to get through).

Anyway, Chapter 3 of the book is about more advanced concepts in pipelining - different dynamic scheduling techniques and the like, and we were told to read Appendix A before chapter three.  So I am most of the way through the appendix, and it says to read the first few pages of chapter three for some background information on the dynamic scheduling concept.  Flipping back ~900 pages, I get to chapter 3 and start reading the introduction - which promptly tells me to read appendix A before continuing with chapters 3 and 4!  This is where I cry circular dependences!

I briefly go forward to see what chapter 4 is about, and find that chapter 3 is ~100 pages.  At this point I say “Joe, what have you gotten yourself into?!?”  I reach for the pot of coffee, and decide to take a mental break to write this and fold my laundry. Luckily, chapters 3 and 4 are not on the first midterm…

Yes, dependences is a real word - though I think it is some English (that would be British English, not American English) extension of the word dependence.  Miriam Webster and Dictionary.com do not mention this form of the word directly, but bring up the entry for dependence.  I still have my doubts, but Kelly insists it’s the “cool” word to use…