A Field Guide to the University of Kentucky Graduate School

Having now collected two graduate degrees myself, and been related many stories by friends and acquaintances doing grad school at UK, some advice for those behind me.

UK’s graduate school is the absolute archetype of the rule of thumb that, at UK, every individual you deal with will be nice and helpful, but as an organization they’re the most useless, obstructive motherfuckers you’ll ever have the displeasure of dealing with. You will never find an individual to punch in the face when something deserving happens, because responsibility has been diluted sufficiently that there isn’t usually an individual bad actor responsible for whatever bullshit is going on; the problem is that there are half a dozen overpaid people with inflated titles not dealing with the thing, and an assortment of folks in lower-titled, public-facing positions having to scramble to make things work around the administrative dysfunction.
The fact that UK just went into administrative bloat overdrive by dissolving the faculty senate with no concrete plans to replace their functions, then started hiring random assholes who don’t even have the context to know how things have to work to take over matters the senate used to handle has made it even worse this year than usual.

Detailed Notes Below

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PhD Complete!

It took another round of “longer than expected” because, while I passed my defense at the end of July, I had some requests to make significant changes to the dissertation before submitting my final copy, and that didn’t get wrapped up until early September with my advisor paying meaningful attention to what I was doing for the first time in years.
I ended up having to include a lot of the modern academic hype-spewing, stake-claiming bullshit I’ve developed a deep distaste for, but even with that I’ll admit it’s a much better document overall after the rewrite. It looks less negative than the earlier drafts, because they were largely written before my last “I give up, I’ll try one more stupid thing” experiment finally turned up something reasonably compelling.

The copy of record of the dissertation is published, here are local PDF copies of the deck from my defense and my dissertation. More information below.

Then I had several weeks of catch-up for all the many things in my life I’ve been shorting time to get done, while I was having the apparently requisite back-and-forth with the graduate school about petty formatting matters, but it is done.

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Finally wrapping up my PhD!

The largest reason I’ve been starving every one of my other interests, like posting here, for the last several years is finally wrapping up, and looks like it will get me a PhD in Computer Science.

Wednesday July 24, 2024. 1:00PM. 101 Davis Marksbury Building.

Title: Post-Capture Synthesis of Images Using Manipulable Integration Functions
Abstract:
Traditional photographic practice, as dictated by the properties of photochemical emulsion film, mechanical apparatus, and human operators, largely treats the sensitivity (gain) and integration interval as coarsely parameterized constants for the entire scene, set no later than the time of exposure. This frame-at-a-time capture and processing model permeates digital cameras and computer image processing.

Emerging imaging technologies, such as time domain continuous imaging (TDCI), quanta image sensors (QIS), event cameras, and conventional sensors augmented with computational processing and control, provide opportunities to break out of the frame-oriented paradigm and capture a stream of data describing changes to scene appearance over the capture interval with high temporal precision. Captured scene data can then be computationally post-processed to render images with user control over the time interval being sampled and the gain of integration, not just for each image rendered but for every site in each rendered image, allowing the user to ideally expose each portion of the scene. For example, in a scene that contains a mixture of moving elements some of which are more brightly lit, it becomes possible to render dark and light portions with different gains and potentially overlapping intervals, such that both have good contrast, neither one suffers motion blur, and little to no artifacting occurs at the interfaces.

This thesis represents a preliminary exploration of the properties, application, and tooling required to capture TDCI streams and render images from them in a paradigm that supports functional post-capture manipulation of time and gain.


So excited to be rid of this thing. It’s a genuinely nifty idea, and sort-of the idea I started out with, but I’m very tired of looking at it.

If any internet friends want to come watch me talk shit about it for ~1 hour, you’re welcome.
I’ll post my thesis and slides after it’s done.

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A buddy of mine dropped me a link to TI’s new brushed DC motor driver with sensorless speed control, the DRV8214. I spent a few minutes trying to hunt down the mechanism they use to derive speed from back EMF because it’s such an intriguing idea, and the datasheet proper is slightly cagey abut it… but it looks like they’ve fundamentally figured out how to build in the sensing and control loop from the filtered ripple counter mechanism (PDF) they previously published a guide for doing with discrete H-bridge/current sense/op amp/comparitor ICs and an MSP430 microcontroller directly into a $3-in-single-quantity I2C addressable chip.
It even has stall detection that looks good enough to potentially use for sensor-less homing.
Interfacing to a host micro is fairly pin-and-peripheral intensive, but this seems like good magic.

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Firefox has a facility to use native file pickers via xdg-portals, which most of the internet will tell you is set in a key in about:config called widget.use-xdg-desktop-portal. Quite some time ago, that was split into more granular keys so those instructions aren’t useful anymore.

I finally got irritated enough to look into it this morning, turns out now switching your file picker is now via the key widget.use-xdg-desktop-portal.file-picker with values “0” (never), “1” (always), “2” (auto, apparently meaning “when run from a Flatpack”). There are similar keys for open-uri, mime-handler, etc. Most of the documentation on the internet is still the old version, though (of course) the Arch Wiki page on the topic is correct and up to date, and I should have looked there instead of googling.

You have to have a suitable xdg-desktop-portal package installed to plumb the picker, which varies a bit from distribution-to-distribution and environment-to-environment, on Arch+KDE it’s xdg-desktop-portal-kde.

I find the whole portals arrangement architecturally ugly, but important thing is that I can get rid of that obnoxious buttons-on-the-top GTK filepicker dialog, which is both ugly and upside down from the rest of the universe.

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Recent Intermittent Outages

There have been some intermittent issues with this site for the last few days because some shitheel has been hammering the server that hosts web-facing things for me with automated script-kiddy bullshit that my existing hardening didn’t automatically catch.

Roughly 10GB of it in the last week.
With user agents set to around 500,000 different Chrome versions.

I noticed because the (small) box has been OOM killing processes any time the stats tools look at the logs of this behavior.

Most of it came from one address (in the AliCloud IP allocation, as always. I’ll continue to half-pretend it’s just a compromised VM) so I cleaned up the worst of it by adding an nftables rule to drop anything from that saddr, and did a little filtering to the logs to fix the OOM situation.

I’ve also turned on some rate-limiting features in nginx, and rigged fail2ban to block repeated violators of the rate limit, so hopefully things are more permanently taken care of.

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Plasma Wayland Today

I was having Vulkan/Wine interaction issues when I had a minute to play a game the other night and flipped my big laptop (which has Intel/AMD Polaris12 dual graphics, both running the Mesa stack since AMD dropped Polaris support in amdvlk in the 2023.Q4 release) into a Plasma Wayland session (v5.27) to see if it helped. It did – making it the very first thing I’ve encountered that worked in Wayland and not X – so I’m rolling with the Plasma Wayland session for a couple days to see how things are. I have a little machine I’ve been playing with Hyprland on to check out the Wayland situation, and it’s been closing from “Linux 20 years ago” to “Linux 5 years ago” in terms of brokenness, so it seems plausible that one of the big two would be tolerable now.

I’m totally onboard that xf86->xorg is an unmaintainable mess for both legacy-codebase and design from a different era reasons, and it would be nice to start with something built on assumptions that match modern reality, but uh… over a decade in, Wayland is just getting to be less of a “almost a tech demo” and more of an “almost there.” If the devs can shut up about some bikeshedding that obstructs common use cases now over concerns about theoretical security issues or compatibility with yet-unimagined future interface models and implement widely-accepted solutions to the last few basic-fucking-features, it might actually matter before it too starts to exhibit wrong ancient assumptions and gets replaced, but it looks like they’ve missed the bus on a couple of those necessary standardizations.

Things I use regularly that are currently broken in KDE’s Plasma Wayland session in Nov. 2023:

  • The mere fact that I have to specify it’s a KDE Plasma session for all these details because every compositor is having to reinvent a bunch of wheels in differently-broken ways – input plumbing, session management, etc. They could have at least spun some reference libraries and treated anyone who didn’t use them when building desktop-like interfaces as a second class citizen to paper over the necessary parts to build a desktop they didn’t want in the core protocol (and for some of them someone else did it; see PipeWire). Wayland’s entire development process is built around former X devs being exceptionally gunshy about maintenance and attempting to avoid having any meaningful implementation under their auspices, and it’s causing a lot of goofy decisions. wlroots was too little too late.
  • KeepassXC can’t do its autotype into last active window thing.
    • Relevant Bug
    • Because Wayland completely abdicated on input plumbing and programmatic window selection. It even sort-of works between xwayland windows because X is a feature-complete desktop protocol and Wayland isn’t.
    • I use this ALL THE TIME and it drives me CRAZY. Browser extensions are not a comparable solution, I auto-type credentials into all kinds of windows.
    • They finally accepted ext-foreign-toplevel-list so the plumbing for window selection is theoretically there… but I don’t think any compositors implement it yet.
    • The pipe-input-to-a-specifc-window shit is still being bikeshedded over mostly-irrelevant security concerns. Maybe maybe the ever-contended global hotkeys stuff in xdg-destop-portal will make it possible, but since every compositor has sprung a bespoke portal variant, even that may not comprise a global solution, and it’s not entirely clear it’ll work for piping arbitrary strings anyway.
  • Everything restores to a random virtual desktop, if it restores at all.
    • KDE Bug for sessionrestore and also xwayland session restore
    • I think only the xwayland windows are restoring because, refrain, X11+extensions is actually a complete desktop protocol and Wayland still isn’t.
    • There’s no generic solution, and gnome spun their own internal bullshit which seems to be further sandbagging a general solution.
    • KDE is thus also spinning their own internal bullshit, so everything will be broken forever.
    • This is like basic 90s shit being fundamentally bobbled.
  • Firefox PiP windows
  • The “Move to Screen” context menu item in the task switcher seems to have vanished? I can still do “Move” and scoot a program to the desired monitor and it seems to snap correctly, but sometimes fullscreen windows relocated that way jump back to the first display. Apparently it has never been available from the task manager, only the title bar right-click menu and my memory is faulty.
  • I don’t know if it’s Wayland related, but baloo has started acting up again. I’m regularly seeing baloo_file_extractor eating a whole core when it hits things like openembedded trees. It’s possible I just disabled it in my saved X session and it’s being started again because the session management carryover between X and Wayland Plasma sessions is half-working.

The whole situation is silly. It’s a gigantic shell-game of trying to outsource the solutions to problems everyone already knew needed to be solved consistently because the ICCM and EWMH stuff for X represented decades of effort to do so, by the people best situated to actually solve the problems at the time when they could be solved in a general way.

I sometimes get the feeling reading the bug trackers that many of the Wayland people are building a display layer suitable for infotainment systems, kiosks, signage, and that sort of thing, and desktop functionality is an unfortunate extra thing some people are trying to force on them – which, financially, may be the case.

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Look at this time crystal on shopgoodwill. A pristine Antec SX1030 case (or chieftech dragon or one of the other clones), painted metallic green with a window installed. Every commercial or DIY gaming PC in the first few years of the 2000s was in one of these. It even has a case badge from an unreliable (but I repeat myself) Chaintech nforce2 motherboard installed, and a visible QC stamp from 2000.

It’s probably pristine because it exists permanently in 2001 and we’re just perceiving it in the present. If you built a sleeper in it, when you were done installing the OS there would be a cracked copy of Halo already installed. Wherever the buyer puts it, a half empty bottle of Bawls will phase into existence somewhere in a 6ft radius.

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SC’23 Notes

The entryway to the SC23 conference at the Colorado Convention Center

I got talked into going to SC again this year, as I have almost every year since 2009.
It’s not really my area of focus, but it’s always interesting.

UK's booth at SC'23, featuring the KES PBP demo.


UK’s presence featured a mixture of IT/CCS types and researchers, the research end of the booth was mostly focused on ongoing Parallel Bit Pattern Computing work, featuring a new demo/visualization thing that I built much of the hardware and some of the software for in the 3 weeks before we left for the conference (the rest came from Hank modelling some printable parts, pulling the compute engine from an older demo he wrote, and building some adapter code). It was more exhausting than the conference itself, but a really fun prototyping/micomanufacturing flex. Fancy 3D printed parts, 2020 extrusion, some laser cut bits, piles of addressable LEDs, a bit of embedded electronics. There is also a partially-functional prototype backplane to link 4 EBAZ425 FPGA boards through an Aggregate Function Network as a PBP substrate that …I designed. There’s a lot of not-my-job work I did on display; I should probably start throwing more of a fit about that.

Some notes about the stuff we were showing and interesting(?) industry observations below.

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A Staggeringly Clever Input Conditioning Circuit

Input conditioning is one of those things that snares novice designers, causes late-process changes that overrun expectations on cost and board area, and traditionally isn’t terribly well taught to EE/CPE students.

It’s on my mind because next week is the point in the semester where I drag UK’s current crop of EE/CPE sophomores through a lab exercise I designed about 5 years ago to drive home gate delays, static hazards, switch bounce, etc.

While I was thinking about it, an upperclassman who regularly digs up neat stuff sent me the cleverest input conditioning circuit I’ve ever encountered.

The circuit comes from the late, great Don Lancaster of TV Typewriter fame, who in addition to his published designs, wrote and self-published a number of instructional/reference books. He had a well-deserved reputation for clever, cheap, robust circuit designs, and this particular trick is the highest wizardry.

Here’s the whole circuit diagram from the text:

The design comes from his CMOS Cookbook (PDF, link to his own hosted copy of the 2nd ED), on p.317 amid a discussion of Flip-Flops and Clocks. It is presented as “An Alternate-Action Push Button” which is entirely correct but really undersells how clever it is, and has apparently been in there since the 1st edition in 1977.

Here’s a link to it pre-built in the CircuitJS simulator so you can manipulate it and see it work. I had to play with it for a few minutes before I really understood the genius.

The fundamental trick is that it’s a master-slave Flip-Flop where the capacitor is the master storage element, and the pair of feedback-coupled inverters is the slave. The cap tanks the next state based on the output of the first inverter when the switch is open, and induces it on the inverters on switch close. This means, in addition to latching/toggling, it de-bounces, because the capacitor sets the time constant for hysteresis. It conditions, because the load sees the output of the second inverter. No race conditions or potential oscillations, because the cap can’t charge/discharge while the switch is held. No charge is moving inside the mechanism at steady state, so it’s not leaking power. It’s brilliant.

It is only suitable for relatively slow human-scale edges, so probably not a good method for encoders or the like. You can manipulate the time constant for the de-bounce by changing the value of the capacitor, but only down to a few 10s of nF (depending on what kind of inverter you use) before it gets marginal because it doesn’t have the charge to reliably throw the input of the first inverter.

Not only is it ridiculously cheap and simple as presented, which I think intends a 4067 or 74HC04, you can built it out of anything. Any inverting CMOS gate will work. Any inverting TTL gate will work. Ridiculous old RTL or DTL inverters work. A pair of N-Channel FETs (another CircuitJS link, has an extra transistor on the output for integrity reasons) with pullups to build your own cruddy NMOS inverters works. As would P-channels with pull-downs, or BJTs with resistors for constructed RTL (though doing it that way is leaky), or various other assemblages of tiny mass produced minimum cost components to make it even more minimal (though maybe not cheaper in a modern context).

I appreciate a clever domain-crossing design, and this is the highest form.

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