Category Archives: Announcements

PhD Qualified

Posted on 2020-11-28 by pappp

As of about a week ago, I’ve apparently passed my Qualifying Exam research proposal, which was my last hurdle to PhD candidacy.

My PhD project is on TDCI (Time Domain Continuous Imaging) – an alternative imaging technology that folks in the research group I’ve been working with for almost 15 years now have been building, with my help, for the last 6 years. The basic premise is that digital sensors are not, in fact, re-settable film, and we should leverage them accordingly. By rough concept, TDCI capture is like recording the waveform of incident light from each sensel of the sensor, then computationally exposing that data into an image after the fact, to maximize information capture and so that the sensor and shutter behavior can be tweaked after the fact.

The specific deliverables I carved out as a PhD project were building a high-quality capture device (By hacking a mirrorless body), adding non-uniform exposure behavior to TDCI integration (specifying functions and regions for integration), and building a decent user-facing tool for rendering TDCI images from TDCI captures (A DSL + a GUI to specify common options) – because these were some fun tool-building to carve out of the larger research needs.

The deck with notes that I used are uploaded here. Some of the notes are …not entirely proper… because they were second-screen things for my consumption.

It’s a slightly odd situation because I’ve been working things that feed into this project for 6 years (and 11 papers), and technically started UK’s CS PhD program in 2012 (admittedly, I just signed up so I could keep taking classes while I finished my MS work, finishing the degree is a little “eh, might as well”), but it looks like I’m getting away with it. Also because, thanks to the COVID-19 situation, it was done via zoom, in pajama pants.

The only points in the presentation I did things I was immediately not happy about were:

  • I was asked about doing spatially continuous models, and spent some time babbling about sensor spatial quantization and fill factors instead of just saying “diffraction” and shutting it down.
  • I didn’t include anything for the “TDCI makes exposure time and shutter angle independent” concepts in the slides, and it came up twice.


Plus I have the concern that Rafi (my Co-Chair) soft-balled the hell out of me and pitched a bunch of questions I’m reasonably sure he knew I had prepared spiels for from my materials. That’s not his usual behavior by reputation or observation, and it makes me slightly paranoid.

Now to finish out the deliverables and actually become Dr.

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Masters in Electrical Engineering (Finally) Collected

Posted on 2019-05-16 by pappp

That MSEE that I was going to finish in 2011, 2013, and 2015? I blew a couple months in the last year to get all the ducks in a row and actually collected it before the credits expired.  Huge thanks to Dr. Aaron Cramer, the current DGS for UK’s ECE department who went to great lengths to deal with the bureaucratic issues my lackadaisical attitude about credentials created.

Thesis is “A Compiler Target Model for Line Associative Registers” document and defense slides with notes linked.

The LARs design is fundamentally interesting, but the compilation work the MS is based on is not my favorite work I’ve done.  The core initial assumption (that LAR allocation and register allocation were more-or-less the same problem) turned out to be very, very wrong, and the implications of that wrong assumption turned out to be far reaching, turning a 2-year MS into a decade-long ramble. It’s not as depressing as I thought it would be when I tried to finish in 2015 (and was blocked by bureaucratic fuckery) because I did eventually determine that LARs aren’t subject to the “you can’t statically schedule around dynamic memory behavior” thing that doomed VLIWs, and in fact LAR allocation can be done greedily in ways that register allocation cannot.

The thesis is more or less assembled from three false starts plus the final effort; my initial research start with the wrong assumptions, my “oh, we’re wrong, but it’s OK” pass, and my “oh shit, we’re screwed, this won’t work and there his historical evidence to show it” pass, plus the final “I’ve figured out how this is tractable and possibly even desirable, but I’m out of time and fucks, so here’s the rough solution” pass.

I formatted the thesis in LaTeX (of course), using the ukthesis.cls class I found on the UK Math site that Eric Stokes, a former student, made a decade and change ago since UK is too chickenshit to provide a valid one of their own.  I did have to hack it a little bit, turn off some features, tweak the front matter, etc. to make it acceptable to the graduate school, and update a few things (eg. adjusted to use biber for references).  There are a few things in the document that should be in the class, and things in the class that should be in the document, but the easy-to-fix stuff is fixed.  Minimal example pulled from the accepted version with makefile and such here to save future students the extra annoyance.

The presentation is in beamer using the Owl theme, which was a delightful recent discovery – someone has made a beamer color scheme with a dark background and colors that actually look good on a projector. I (much to one of my committee member’s disappointment) went with the bullets-to-keep-me-on-track-while-I-talk style slides instead of my usual “amusing semi-relevant pictures to key off of” scheme.

It’s nice to be done and only have one, significantly less depressing, long-term academic project people are grumpy about my progress on.

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Self-Hosting News Sharing and Discussion

Posted on 2019-01-29 by pappp

Back in 2013 when google killed Reader I mused about self-hosting my communal news shit-talking.  With the imminent death of G+, which I moved to despite knowing better, I’m looking into it again.  This process might (will) cause some spurious content to appear in the main feed while I try things. I’m still on (and pretty committed to) tt-rss on the news-consumption side, I’m poking around ways of rigging the published feed from that into a comment-able format.  Hopefully with a minimum of work and maintenance overhead on my part, and without hooking myself to yet another platform that won’t monetize well and will thus die.

Success!: The news tab in the nav-bar now takes you to a page that shows the things I publish from my Tiny Tiny RSS instance, complete with a place to yell at me for my hot takes, or share your own thoughts. It’s rigged up with FeedWordPress and a little bit of theme hacking, and can itself be subscribed as an RSS feed. There is a little bit of jank with nested feeds, but at least it’s in house.
A less lazy me would probably do this with a static site generator, a comment system (like isso or something) and some scripts, but I all sorts of don’t have time for that.

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Apparently a WordPress update caused some subtle breakage here a while back. The site has been spewing, among other things, a bunch of “&raquo” escapes in places that end up encoded as XML (thus breaking, among other things, RSS feeds). … Continue reading →

Posted on 2016-02-28 by pappp | 1 Comment

New Data Integrity Tools

Posted on 2014-04-04 by pappp

I’ve recently added a couple tools to my standard set, and have at least a 4x improvement in the safety of my data by doing so.

The process was complicated a bit because I’ve become very sensitive about only depending on FOSS tools (ex:As much as I like SublimeText2, I stopped using it because it once demanded to be updated before it would run.), but frankly I think that constraint produced better results than I would have reached without it. Because it was something of a hunt, I’d like to recommend the particular tools I settled on, in particular are KeepassX, Attic, and Seafile, described individually below.
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Spring 2014 Impressions

Posted on 2014-01-30 by pappp

I’ve been terrible about writing things up lately, but want to at least put my semester impressions on the head of the chain of such posts.

One of my overall experiences is that teaching (and also, taking classes outside my typical discipline) has made me much more talky in class.

CS541: Compiler Design/Finkel
It’s a core class in the CS program, but I’m taking it this semester because Dr. Finkel is teaching it, and his classes are always excellent. I believe this leaves only one compilers/programming languages class offered at UK I haven’t taken, and that one is in the math department and entirely not my thing. I’m just shy of qualified to teach this material, so there’s a slightly odd dynamic in which I wait before delivering answers, and Raphi is frequently imposing a cooldown on my responding in class anyway.

We’re building a compiler for a cleaned up, stripped down C-Like language in Java, basically following Crafting A Compiler. I’ve used an old version of Fischer LeBlanc as reference for compiler material and like it better than the others I’ve used, so I figure this should work out well. Thus far, I’m having more trouble getting myself back into the Java mindset (So OOP. Much Type System. Wow.) than with the Compilers material. High expectations based on experience.

CS621: Parallel and Distributed Computing/Zhang
It’s basically a class in MPI. I’m hopeful that having some nice assigned MPI projects to work on will be good for me. There are two problems though: first, I’m afraid it’s going to turn into a linear algebra class that just happens to take place on parallel supercomputers. Worse, the lectures are terrible. The organization is bad. The slide decks are bad. The Englishrish is bad. The quality of response to questions is bad. It may actually be worse than the terrible Differential Equations with Jar Jar Xin class I took as a freshman. However, it is of the form “CS6xx,” and the content is at least in principle something I want, so as long as the projects and grades turn out, I’m happy. Kind of pissed that the crap lecture overlaps the Friday CS BoF and associated conversation.

GS630: Instructional Technology/Rice
I’m having so much fun in here. It basically consists of a bunch of jaded grad students discussing instructional technology for college teaching, largely from experience, lead by a specialist in the area from CELT. Some of the discussions basically go like this. I’m afraid I’m becoming “that guy” in here because I talk disproportionately and occasionally convivially argue with or reference outside material to the instructor, but again, I’m having a ton of fun, and it counts toward my PFF certificate.

GS610: College Teaching Seminar/Worley
I typically don’t post up my beginning of semester impressions post until all my classes have met, but this one doesn’t start until well into February. At some level, I’m pleased that it’s a general college teaching course instead of a department-specific one, I have trouble imagining a full semester in-discipline teaching class that didn’t turn into a myopia reinforcement program. It should be fun, all the GS classes thus far have been.

I’m not teaching this semester, and hopefully will be getting to more research projects with the freed up time.

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Hosting Move

Posted on 2013-12-24 by pappp

I’ve just completed a move of this site to a new host, it should be transparent to everyone else – modulo a few brief intervals during the move – so please let me know if anything appears broken. There is also an exciting new feature in that (almost) everything should now be accessible via SSL. Notes on vendors and selections below the fold.

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SC13

Posted on 2013-11-15 by pappp

I will be at SC’13 November 16-21 with the aggregate.org/University of Kentucky research exhibit again this year in booth 629. Media and impressions should appear somewhere in my ‘net presence during and after the conference, it is always a good show.
Edit:Pushing photos from the show floor into this album.

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Fall 2013 Impressions

Posted on 2013-09-09 by pappp

Following my habit of posting Before/After notes on my semesters, some impressions for Fall 2013 now that every class has met. I’m getting to the point where the bulk of coursework I can and would sign up for tends to be special topics courses, which is a very interesting, if sometimes strange, phenomenon.
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Replicating Reader Sharing with TTRSS and WordPress

Posted on 2013-05-22 by pappp

I was shit-talking Google Plus’ utility as a replacement for Reader’s social features, and realized I think I actually can do at least as well with my existing infrastructure. I’m not immediately planning to switch, because Plus offers convenience and discovery for others, but I wanted to try it, so there will likely be some spurious posts appearing [and disappearing] shortly. I suspect most of my readership consumes their internet through a feed reader, so this post exists as documentation.

For the interested: TTRSS has a publish mechanism, which creates a custom RSS feed of any article you mark published, along with whatever note you have attached to it with the built in annotation system. It even allows for non-feed content to be shared. There are various WordPress plugins that can embed an RSS feed (HungryFeed,EmbedRSS) or import an RSS feed as a post type (FeedWordPress).
Embedding as custom posts gives both distinction and a comment system, and it is a universal interfaces (can read from web, subscribe via RSS ,etc.). There is even social discovery support built in should such a thing take off.

If this experiment works really well, I might even talk myself into using it before Google gives me another reason.

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