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.

Tuesday, October 07, 2008

coursing along

Well, I managed to survive the first two days of class, and I think I'll be able to manage for a few weeks at least.

The schedule this term (that means until December) is a pretty solid 10-5 with a one-hour lunch break from Monday to Thursday (we have Friday off completely). Of course, add onto that the group projects and research papers and course work and exam study time (well, exams aren't actually until March, so I've got some time for that) and it turns into a much more demanding task.

Right now, things aren't too bad. So far, it's been pretty introductory; we've had a quick review of basic concurrency concepts (e.g., processes, threads, context switching) and a brief overview of the impetus for computer security along with a discussion about why middleware exists. Also, we've received our first individual project assignment (due in 6 weeks) and were told to start picking groups for a data communications research project, which is made more interesting in that very few of us know anything at all about the topics we'll be covering in class.

Still, it seems like it'll be a rewarding course, even if it is somewhat difficult. My course-mates seem engaged (not too hard on the second day) and competent and generally come across as being almost exactly as intimidated as I feel, which is good. If they were more intimidated I'd feel as though I were missing something, and if they were less I'd feel like an idiot.

I spent some time looking through past projects and dissertations, and many of them seem to involve ad hoc wireless networks, with the more recent ones have to do with mobility (basically, trying to connect a device to an access point while one or both are moving through the coverage). That doesn't mean that's going to be something we have to do, but it seems as though that's where the faculty are steering us (not too surprising, really, given the sorts of projects the Distributed Systems Group at TCD works on)

In any case, I suppose my task now is to figure out exactly what it is I want to get out of this course and start working toward it. I already have some ideas of what I would like to know more about, but these are sort of a mess of potentially unrelated general concepts, like small-world and scale-free networks, models that utilize Bayesian inference such as the Hierarchical Temporal Memory model, self-organizing systems, and even emergence in general.

I think what I'm ultimately after (although I'm not sure how fervently I'll pursue it just yet) is some sort of answer as to what mechanism(s) give rise to complex systems from simple components. That's a pretty tough question, though, so I think I might be satisfied by figuring out some abstract patterns that apply to such systems. I do think that learning more about the structure and properties of communication networks will be very useful in that, and that learning how to produce a distributed application will give me insight into how simple nodes are treated when purposefully constructing a complex system on top of them (although that approach might be a bit to teleological to help in understanding self-organization...)

Anyway, now I'm just sort of blathering so I think this post is over. The main point is that courses have gone well so far, seem likely to go well in the future, and I'm already starting to shift toward academic mode again.

Saturday, October 04, 2008

getting classy

After all this time, my extended vacation is finally coming to a close. Classes start on Monday, so I might actually have to do stuff most of the day again. That's fine, though, given that that was pretty much the entire point of my trip over here.

We had an orientation thing for the computer science postgrads yesterday, so I got to meet everyone and hear a bit about the course itself. It sounds like it'll be pretty intense; teaching runs from 10ish to 6ish every Monday through Thursday, but we have Friday off entirely. That will be the case from now until March, and in March we have exams to qualify us to actually do the dissertation to get the degree. Apparently, students over here usually get a couple of chances to pass their qualifying exams, but in our case we have to pass them the first time or we can't get the degree. It makes sense to me that I'd have to pass all my tests, but to the Europeans in the group (which basically includes everyone else, since I'm the only American in the course this year) that came as a bit of a surprise.

Still, my classmates seem like they'll be good people to be working with, and they're generally a lot of fun. There was a little reception after the orientation sessions today, and after that a bunch of us went to the "Pav" (the Pavilion Bar, which is on Trinity's campus) and had a few beers before taking off for a pub called the Globe on Dame Street. It was pretty packed, given that it was a Friday night and Trinity was just starting classes back up. I guess my actual student experience is starting back up again.

Some other notes from Ireland:
  • It's getting cold here. Yesterday, the high was around 9º C (48º F), and today it's raining (again).

  • After we were done at the pub, we went to Dublin's answer to Lazzari's in Lincoln, a little pizza joint that serves up fresh-cooked slices late into the night. I don't remember the name, but it's just off the Temple Bar area and I imagine I could find it again if I looked.

So, anyway, that's all I've got for now. More updates later!