Wednesday, October 29, 2008

distributing posts

I've been very bad about keeping people informed on what I'm up to, so here's a brief update for you all before I dive back into the mountain of work I need to do for school.

Let's start with some general information about Dublin.

Also, here's a picture of the Liffey.

I'm still enjoying my place, and my real flatmate came back (so far so good on that score, too). Once you get going, it's really not that much different than my life was in the USA, just a bit more local since I don't have a car or anything. The trash goes out on Tuesdays, I applied for the Tesco Clubcard the other day, stamps cost 82c to send things to the USA, Guinness costs EU 3.90/pint at Dec Gallagher's (just down the street) but can be as much as EU 5 around Temple Bar, I still have no idea where to pick up a pencil sharpener...these are the concerns I'm dealing with here. It's a bit odd sometimes to realize that I'm many thousands of miles away from where I was living just a few months ago.

As far as school goes, it's definitely picking up in terms of coursework. Starting from this coming Friday and running through November 14, we have the following things due, in order of impending deadlines: a group research proposal for data communications (my group is going to do something with a sensor network simulator), a general security-related suggestion for Intel (to be fleshed out later), a review of a research paper, an initial stab at a Facebook application (we're doing a way to rate events), a confirmed topic and supervisor for our thesis project (I'm meeting about mine on Friday), and a prototype of a socket-based system that allows booking and cancellation of train tickets across multiple stops and multiple companies (which has to scale up to millions of users and dozens of companies). Anyway, there's a lot to be done.

Luckily, the others in the course are generally reliable, intelligent, and easy to get along with. We've already started a sort of course tradition of hitting the Pav (the Pavilion Bar, the student bar on campus) immediately after class on Thursdays (no class on Friday) to complain about our course load, discuss thesis and project topics, and throw back a collectively vast quantity of cheap, generally horrible beer. That usually turns into a more serious night out and a hangover on Friday, but that's why we wait until Thursday to do it.

The classes themselves aren't too bad, either. In software engineering, we've been talking lately about some of the problems with designing concurrent systems, specifically those that arise from attempting to access shared data and how to avoid things like deadlocks and inconsistency within the system. Network security has been focused on cryptography the last few days, with lectures about encryption algorithms and authentication schemes. Network applications has been focused on the implications of using social networks as a development platform (ala Facebook), and network management has been about various management protocols such as SNMP. Even our formal methods course is interesting (at least to me, with my logic background). I'm sure I'll be posting more about that later, especially once I get into my actual thesis project (which will probably be about inserting causal and temporal reasoning into a knowledge-based event broker network).

In other recent news, I had a very lovely visit from a very lovely visitor a couple weeks ago and went out to Galway for a few days, even down the Cliffs of Moher (which are pretty impressive, as evinced below).

See, I'm so impressed I can't even take my eyes off them!

If you, dear reader, ever do get a chance to go to Galway, I have some things to recommend:
  • First off, we stayed at the Adare Guesthouse (sorry, no website, so no link), which was conveniently close to the city center, clean and comfortable, had a good breakfast (especially the salmon stuff), but was maybe a bit pricey. Still, a fine place to stay, especially on the short notice we gave them.

  • There are a number of really cool pubs in the center of Galway city, including the likes of Taaffes Pub (which is great for traditional music), Coel Tigh Neachtain (with a rather segmented, intimate interior), and Roisin Dubh (which I'd say was the college bar).

  • Go to McDonough's and get the fish and chips. Specifically the smoked fish. That's less of a suggestion and more of a demand.

Ok, so that's all I've got time for right now. Time for some food, and some furious programming on a train ticket booking system.

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