Category Archives: Announcements

David Shippy Talk

Posted on 2009-09-26 by pappp

The David Shippy talk in my last post was quite good; it featured a solid mix of business politics, and computer architecture, which drew a room-filling audience. That said, a LARGE portion of the audience was made up of EE280 students, who were apparently there in place of class. This is not a bad thing; conditioning the underclassmen to pay attention to seminars is an worthy goal. It also means the level of the talk was very well suited, if the audience had been a bunch of specialists on the topic (and a non-trivial portion of it was) it would have been inappropriately general, but for the spectrum of people in the room I would say it was pretty spot on.
I hung around afterwards, both to ask a question and because there were some very interesting conversations going on among the stragglers. As for the question, I wanted to know about the relationship of the PPC based Cell PPE and Xenon cores, to the things Nintendo uses…He was also in charge of the Gecko and Broadway chips that IBM makes for Nintendo to use in the GameCube and Wii respectively as well; and they share a common lineage but not a common design. Some of the straggler conversation was the expected material about computer architecture (especially historical stuff) which was informative, but there was one about engineering education that I found VERY interesting. I’m not sure that I should be quoting it, but suffice to say there are apparently solid numbers that confirm the suspicion that a high GPA (in high school or college) or SAT/ACT scores are not strongly correlated with success in EE/ECE programs at UK.
All in all, a cool talk, with lots of encouraging side factors.

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Decent Seminars!

Posted on 2009-09-24 by pappp

UK (and the college of engineering in particular) is surprising me with the quality of seminar speakers this semester, Bruce Schneier last week, and tomorrow David Shippy , chief architect for of IBM’s microprocessor team for games (the people who designed the Broadway, Cell, and Xenon processors inside all three of the major game consoles at the moment), and co-author of The Race for a New Game Machine: Creating the Chips Inside the XBox 360 and the Playstation 3 will be speaking. His hand is on so much of the buzz in the tech news it should be really interesting to hear from him first hand, especially if we get a seminar-appropriate highly technical version. I’ve seen reviews of the book that gripe about lack of technical detail (and writing style); hopefully an in-person presentation to a known technical audience will take care of both problems and get things up to good material + good presentation.

The seminar is at 1:00PM in CRMS (I forget the room number) which brings me to the other thought…
folks need to work on their seminar announcement system. No email (to the seminars list). No updated websites (there is a seminars link on the department website …which is about 6mo out of date), just some posters hanging on the walls around Engineering. There were regular, highly visible announcements for the uninspiring dreck last year, why isn’t there publicity for the good stuff now?

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Foodblogging

Posted on 2009-09-22 by pappp

Foodblogging has always straddled the line between awesome and pretentious in my mind, but I’ve been feeling the urge to try of late. I tossed up one meal picture not too long ago, and I’m going to go ahead and add a category for food-related blogging to the primitive little tagging system Flatpress supports. I’m really not sure if it’s going to be an occasional “Look what I did!” picture or something more diverse and/or useful, but I fully intend to do whatever I feel like with it and find out. Food post to follow.

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Dorkbotlex #6 – Results

Posted on 2009-09-20 by pappp

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It was, as always, a great show, with lots of inspiring local projects and an engaged audience. Hopefully sometime in the not TOO distant future I’ll actually get one of the hobby projects (the ones that are not so technical as to make non-engineers’ eye’s glaze over) done enough to show.

The usual, photos from the event are up on my flickr stream.

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Bruce Schneier Lecture at UK

Posted on 2009-09-16 by pappp

To quote the announcement that went out to the mailing lists:
September 17th, 2009 at 5:30p.m
W.T. Young Library Auditorium

“Reconceptualizing Security”
Bruce Schneier
Chief Security Technology Officer, BT.

In a startling change of pace from the usual uninspiring speakers UK tends to bring in, Bruce Schneier, one of the world’s foremost security experts, will be giving a lecture tomorrow night. It sounds like it will be about the perceived security/actual security idea (this is the person who coined the phrase “Security Theater”) he often talks about, and it should should be VERY cool.

I’m definitely going to be there, and there is some talk that it will fill up quickly, so I would suggest showing up early if you plan to come.

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22!

Posted on 2009-08-17 by pappp

I turn 22 years old today, and it occurs to me that if I follow the obvious path of least resistance, or anything like it, I may never have to do anything I don’t feel like again. Obviously not on the day-to-day scale, but on the macro scale of career and lifestyle and the like, it has passed conceivable and headed off toward likely that I can continue to learn about and play with things that interest me (which certainly includes education itself, and, based on conversations with faculty that have done this sort of thing, can also include deciding I’d really like to do other quasi-related things that interest me like HCI or demographic-scale computational sociology), and make a comfortably self-supporting life in the kind of environment I enjoy out of it.
I think this means I’m doing it right. I feel very lucky.

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LLVM FTW

Posted on 2009-08-05 by pappp

I’ve settled the direction for the next step in my master’s project this summer: I will be using the LLVM Compiler Infrastructure as the backbone of my LARs compiler.
The decision to work with an existing compiler rather than going off and writing tools from scratch carries some pretty significant advantages. The biggest is that some of the dark corners of the C specification make writing a complete, useful C fronted a very, very daunting task, so in order to not be compiling a “toy” language (or cheating with CIL or something) it is nearly the only choice(C, or C-like, is the obvious and preferred choice for input language, but pretty much all languages have similar concerns). Using an existing compiler also saves writing a whole bunch of ancillary code: in addition to the fronted, features for manipulating DAGs and performing optimizations and such are all there to be used and modified. Unfortunately, using LLVM also binds me to some design decisions made by other LLVM developers, and potentially exposes me to upstream weirdness. Thus far, I have found no serious cases of either, but suspect later in the process some interesting thorns will appear in my side as I more fully understand LLVM’s innards.
LLVM is a compiler infrastructure, rather than merely a complier because of it’s modular design. This modular design is also what makes it most attractive (among existing free, open source compilers) for my purposes, for a huge variety of reasons. The three big ones are:
First, the modular codebase helps with accessability. In many traditional full-scale compilers, the learning curve is nearly unsurmountable. In particular, the dominant free open source compiler suite, GCC, has a learning period measured in months or years before one can make substantial modifications, and requires mathematical concepts like the delta function to accurately express the learning curve.
Secondly, modularity allows me to, in a relatively straightforward way, drop in a new back end that emits code suitable for (but not complete, it’s going to take one HELL of a fancy assembler to be useful) for the proposed LARs design.
Third, the modularity extends unusually high into the structure of LLVM, which allows me to simply turn off, replace, or modify optimizations and features which are inappropriate for an architecture with LARs’ peculiar features.
My start on applying the (fairly thorough) manual for porting LLVM to a new architecture has already shaken out some new ambiguities, concerns, and omissions (some intentional) in the LARs design. This has lead to several sessions on one of the more exciting (in my twisted mind) parts of working with compilers and architectures: making and studying high-level decisions that affect both the hardware and software in a system, in potentially complex ways. Onward to more exciting adventures in computing and academia!

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Family Visit

Posted on 2009-05-30 by pappp

I’m up in Madison, WI joining a gathering of my mother’s extended family for the week. My mother’s side of the family is great fun for me; almost the entire family is over-educated, hyperfunctional, and a little bit snarky, just like the people I associate with when left to my own devices.
I’m currently spending the afternoon/evening holding down the fort; keeping the doors open and track of the whereabouts of the family, and setting up for dinner with ingredients as they appear, which means we will be having a boneless leg of lamb, slit and packed with garlic wedges and fresh rosemary (baked), fresh green beans with portabellini, and long grain white rice. I spent alot of yesterday helping with a proper (fussy, tedious) country ham and scalloped potatoes, but there were more cooks yesterday. I don’t often get to do large meal for large group type cooking, so I’m enjoying myself.
I’m also continuing my reading spree; I finished Outliers on the way down (the part of the trip not spent driving through disaster-grade construction+wide object transport). It had a very disappointing ending, the earlier part of the book had interesting observations… the last chapter was dedicated to trite, weak conclusions based on anectdotes. I enjoyed the useful part.
Now I’m on to Lolita. I’m finding it unusually intense to read because I vastly prefer hearing (or at least reading under my breath) Nabakov’s prose. I might consider an audiobook of it, even though I usually find them frusterating, just to save my throat. I tend toward short stories for the tight prose that even most excellent authors can’t maintain over any substantal length; Lolita isn’t quite the same, but it is really excellent stylized writing. I also started the Consciousness Very Short Introduction since it’s a PDF on the n810, and thusalways on hand.
I also found a used copy of GEB (and some other desirables) walking through UW Madison’s bookstore… which is indeed the kind of place I go for fun.

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DorkbotLex #3

Posted on 2009-05-17 by pappp

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I made it to the third Dorkbot event in Lexington yesterday, and it was again a great show. This time there were four excellent presentations of the kind of artistically tenological projects dorkbot is meant to showcase. The first presentation was Clint Davis, showing a spatially aware music controller, built from an arduino, some infrared range finders, and Pure Data. The second presentation was of a solder-free LED hula-hoop by Lauren Sherrow (pictured above). There was then a showing of Aaron Miller’s Day of Defeat-based machinima piece I, Bots, about variously self-aware bots on a DoD public server. Finally, Jordan Munson showed off his work on a new generation of electronic music interfaces, including an OpenSoundControl controller on an iPod touch, and using a wiimote as a gestural interface. At the end there was a lot of discussion about organizing social/cultural events for geeks and hackers, I wish more of the Collexion folks had been there to participate.
The better of the pictures I took are up in a flickr set.

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Civil Disobedience Kickball

Posted on 2009-04-24 by pappp

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Some guys in Lexington arranged for a Kickball game in the centerpointe unsightly hole earlier today. This is a very cool idea for voicing public displeasure at the empty hole in our downtown, and there was a pretty good turnout.
The organizers however made one fatal mistake; they announced the event on facebook. All the cool kids may be on facebook, but you know who else is on facebook? — the cops. They were waiting for the event to start. I walked up about 5 minutes late just as the participants were being kicked off the field; thankfully the cops were reasonably cool about the whole thing and just told everyone to leave.

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