I just got back from a conference in Big Sky, Montana. The conference hotel was up in the mountains at a ski resort, and although they were starting to get their first snow of the season, the slopes weren’t quite ready yet. The scenery was quit breathtaking (especially for someone from New Jersey), but unfortunately I only got to walk around and take pictures during one of the cloudy days. The conference itself was quite interesting. It was much busier than any of the others I’ve been to. I met a number of new interesting people, and got to see a few other familiar faces which was nice.

I did one sort of proposal earlier this spring, but on July 1st I defended my thesis proposal.

I won’t bore you with the details, but you can all imagine it as collection of groundbreaking work exploring how virtualization can be used to make computers more efficient, improve reliability, and generally save the world from all sorts of evil.

It’s pretty exciting, and having finished that after 4 years puts me in a good position to finish my PhD well ahead of the average in my department…

Note: this post is another technical one, so if you are a member of my immediate family, you probably won’t find it of much interest.  If “ports” make you think of boats (rather than the numbers 80 and 22), then why don’t you mosey on over to my christmas photos?

I frequently have trouble communicating between systems which are separated by different private LANs. This often happens when you have your computer on a home wireless network which is separated from the rest of the internet via a router and firewall.  Fortunately, SSH tunnels can be used to link these machines together, provided you know which ports need to be interfaced and you have a common server which both machines can reach. Here is how. Read more »

I am pleased to annouce the grand opening of the Popcornfarmer.com Learning Center. There isn’t too much in there right now, and mostly it is just notes for myself.  In any case, some of it might be useful to somebody, so rather than just keeping it hidden away I figure I will share it.

Most of the information is pretty technical, so unless you are interested in doing some Bash shell scripting or need to make some regression plots in R, it may not be of much use.

The CRA (Computing Research Association) runs the Taulbee Survey which studies trends in computer science education and employment.  There are some pretty interesting numbers in the reports which came out earlier this year.

BS and PhD Production

I was first surprised to see just how many PhDs are being awarded. Almost 1800 new PhDs were produced last year, and the growth compared to the 90s and early 2000s is pretty staggering. The report suggests that the numbers will be even higher in the coming year, although the rate of increase is expected to drop.

On the other hand, undergraduate CS enrollment is doing terribly right now. I’d blame this partly on bad stereotypes about computer science, but mainly on most undergraduates having no real logical basis for why they choose a major.  Sadly, I’m not sure if that will ever change.

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I’ve been trying out CakePHP, a framework for creating DB driven PHP based websites using the MVC design pattern.

Warning: In case the above sentence didn’t make this clear, this post is largely technical gibberish. If that’s not your thing, then you can move along and look at the pretty pictures from a hiking trip up Mt. Monadnock from back in September.

My feelings with CakePHP so far are mixed. As with many open source projects, the documentation for getting started is a little rough.  To help with that, here is the list of resources I’ve found most useful so far.

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About a month ago I spent a lot of money on a Canon Xti Digital SLR camera. It has been fun learning about photography and how all this stuff works. While I’m still taking lots of pictures of people with telephone poles and such coming out of their heads, I’m gradually getting a bit better. I have learned a great deal about the technical aspects of photography such as apertures and shutter speeds which didn’t apply to point and shoot cameras. Here are my notes and some useful resources.

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I just heard of Lecturefox, a site which provides listings of publicly available courses from not only MIT’s Open Courseware, but a number of other schools ranging from UC Berkeley and Kent State to Oxford. It is great to see so much information being made available freely online, I just wish I had a bit more time to actually go through some of the videos. Lecturefox primarily emphasizes courses from scientific fields (it is run by a pair of self-trained German computer scientists), but they also have listings from other fields like economics and philosophy. Some of the offerings are full blown courses with video or audio and lecture notes, while others are recorded lectures from visiting speakers.

I don’t have any sense of the quality of the different offerings–there are certainly some courses I’ve taken in the past which would be extremely boring to watch on video, so it’s not clear to me how useful many of these full lecture series courses would really be. On the other hand, some of the shorter “guest lecture” style talks might be more self contained and accessible.

A few that sounded interesting:

• Human Beings and the Machines of Sunshine – Rice
• Alan Turing: Codebreaker and Pioneer – MIT
• Death – Yale
• The Rise of The Creative Class – George Mason
• Cyber Humor: The End of Humor as We Know it? – Oxford
• Castiglione: The Art of Being a Renaisance Man – Syracuse

There are three keys to keeping an organized research project:

1. A good research notebook for informal notes and plans
2. A collaborative place to keep track of your results and general strategy
3. A way to keep track of your todos, meetings, and deadlines

Each of these has its own use, and none can completely cover for another. Here are my suggestions for each… Read more »