Advogato blog for macricht

22 Jan 2005

Sat, 22 Jan 2005 01:19:12 GMT

I didn't defend in August. It was November.

Now I use my brain making motor oil work. That stuff is more complex than people realize.

5 Jul 2004

Mon, 5 Jul 2004 15:41:57 GMT

So a year has passed...

...two more papers published, another in the submission queue. Advisor claims I'll be defending in August. Guess I will be, then. Downside is that I have nothing lined up for afterwards, and the prospects aren't looking too good. Of course, still waiting for the Federal Gov't to become less glacial and let me know about my application(s) I've sent in for positions at the National Labs.

It does raise a good question for people out there. I've been looking at a postdoc position in the UK (Univ. of Sheffield and Leeds), but the one thing I lack is a good handle on the old cost of living overseas, and Google hasn't been much help. Anyone out there have a good idea on cost of living in the north of England?

ObSoftware
Trying to beat the Mono JIT into submission on the Ultra 2 running Linux. Something is slightly different with how CPUs and exceptions are handled compared to Solaris (e.g. sysinfo calls to get the ISA of the machine. Solaris has it, Linux doesn't seem to). Worse, something bizzare showed up with the Vorbis# stuff...something is dead slow. I'll figure out what's wrong someday, but for now, it works well enough to be useful, but it's not perfect.

18 Mar 2003

Tue, 18 Mar 2003 04:32:09 GMT

Blargh.

Busy. Rewriting paper. Moved pretty much completely to my other site

Other than that, watched some great college hockey over the past few months. It's (nearly) over now...

31 Oct 2002

Thu, 31 Oct 2002 13:33:57 GMT

Today is a red letter day.

My Macromolecules paper has FINALLY been submitted.

Also, decided to play with some blogging software. Yes, I never thought I'd fall to those depths, but I have. If anyone cares, it is located here. Should spruce up the pages a bit...it's kinda fugly.

However, the "toy" to note is the "FishySidebar" link. That baby is the bomb (IMHO) if you have Mozilla. It converts the index.rdf into a Mozilla sidebar on the fly using libxslt. I have XSLT for rss 1.0, and 0.91. Should write one up for 0.90. The tough part was trying to get to XHTML 1.0 Strict compliance.

See, the problem is the following. The target attribute is not valid for XHTML 1.0 Strict. So, my current XSLT stylesheet has an ugly JS hack I found somewhere that pokes the DOM to add the target attribute. I don't like it. Anyone have a better suggestion?

22 Aug 2002

Thu, 22 Aug 2002 20:40:29 GMT

Wow. Two months. I'm a lazy bastard.

Hackery

OSCON went well from what I've heard. My Vorbis# code seemed to survive...at least that is what people told me. So, I've moved onto another Mono task.

See, I just acquired a Sun Ultra2 with dual 300MHz UltraSPARC 2 CPUs. The Mono runtime didn't like SPARC too much. After reading some docs, learning a bit of SPARC assembly, and some hackery, mint (the Mono interpreter) can now do "Hello World". However, there is something busted somewhere...it can't do anything more complex than that...

Research

It's moving. Finished a talk and paper for the Venice conference. I leave tomorrow for that one...and my slides are still not printed out. Said Macromolecules paper still in limbo, but I think I have enough stuff to add to it now. Yea.

28 Jun 2002

Fri, 28 Jun 2002 21:54:50 GMT

Well, lot of things kinda happened.

My Macromolecules paper is now in my advisor's court. She needs to finish her part, and then it's to submission.

The USANS experiments went well. Now to make sense of them. One thing I have noticed is that scattering analysis siftware is usually open scripts, but the plotting program (Igor Pro) isn't.

Maybe I should work on a nice bit of software to do this. Now if I could just find some interest in this... I know people who might want to see something like this done...however, getting people interested might not be as simple.

Oh, also at OLS. Some of the talks have been good, but the after-hour parties have been great.

7 May 2002

Tue, 7 May 2002 02:27:22 GMT

Hmm, entries getting slimmer and slimmer. Sigh.

Well, my csvorbis code was featured (kinda) on the Mono web site. Now with the Gtk# getting mature, a player is possible...

Macromolecules paper is now back in my advisor's court, and I'm about to slam another revision her way.

Also got a grant to go to a conference. Hotel is paid for, as well as the conference fee. I'm stoked, only downside is my talk better kick some major ass.

Hopefully something I should have done a long time ago gets realized soon...depending on the breaks.

25 Apr 2002

Thu, 25 Apr 2002 05:16:54 GMT

I still have a Macromolecules paper sitting on my desk. This time, with more corrections...

Also ported JOrbis to C#. Does not run on Mono yet. Hopefully will soon.

I think the above strongly hints that I need to find a girlfriend or something else that resembles a Real Life(tm).

19 Feb 2002

Tue, 19 Feb 2002 05:42:41 GMT

More paper writing. This thing is getting longer and longer...

Also been mucking with Mono. For some reason (I blame Imlib1), I've decided to implement some of the missing Cryptography classes.

My office now has a small music server setup, which is nice. I previously used SFS over my cable modem to access my ogg collection. Now I just need to setup rsync to keep the collection in sync, as well as getting Samba to behave (it's name munging leaves a lot to be desired...my r.e.m. directory is empty, even though I have ~400ish megs in it!). Suggestions are welcome.

Got grubby paws on the freedomserver code. Now if the client would only compile. Guess I'll have to clean that code up (the C++ bits seem to have rotted).

9 Feb 2002

Sat, 9 Feb 2002 02:07:21 GMT

Still working on paper. No motivation to write.

RMAed new motherboard, didn't work. Getting another one shipped with a new power supply. Also been playing Uplink. Addictive game it is, and from an independent! Doubleplusgood!

Should get back to playing Terminus as well. Another excellent game by an independent game house, and it runs under Linux as well.

Makes me think, is Linux, the Red Book, some programming foo, and a wild idea a good basis for independent game programming?

Something to think about...