Monthly Archives: August 2009

Class Impressions: Fall09

Posted on 2009-08-27 by pappp

I’m taking two (rumored to be extremely time consuming, hence only two) courses this semester, and in keeping with the before and after impressions from last semester, I’m going to state my impressions and expectations after the first meeting of each, so I have it stored for comparison at the end of the semester. It is interesting to think that I have taken the undergraduate versions of these courses (EE480 and CS450 respectively), so it should be interesting to see how much the graduate versions are enriched (or not).

EE685: Digital Computer Structure/Heath
This is rumored to be the most time consuming class offered by the ECE department at UK, and 1/3 of the grade is derived from a single project. I’ve only had one class with the instructor, and didn’t have a terribly positive experience with him. The biggest day-to-day issue is he has a number of mannerisms that drive me slowly insane (”favorite” example: “In this case” is NOT a flavoring particle). There are few enough English-speaking instructors in this field it would be really wonderful if the native English speakers actually did so. I also find some of his grading policies grating, I once had a concrete example where more points were awarded for syntactically correct, algorithmically incorrect solutions than algorithmically correct syntactically flawed solutions on an exam. This is what highlighting editors are for. The other snag is that the tools we will be using for the big project (Xilinx’s ISE and MentorGraphic’s ModelSim) are both big, hateful pieces of software, which are incredibly ponderous to use, and will do all manner of unpredictable things with your input, sometimes changing behavior after simply restarting the program. I am not looking forward to spending more time with them. Gripes aside, it IS a topic I really, really love, and the opportunity to play with it in depth is highly desirable, and further instruction on the underlying theory should be useful for my research.

CS655: Programming Languages/ Finkel
I took CS450 (same basic course) from the same instructor (who is a VERY interesting person and a fairly notable figure in computing) a few years ago. It was quite a bit of work(program in a new language every 2 weeks on top of the theory!), but it was the CS prefixed class I feel I gained the most from as an undergraduate, so I have very high hopes that this will prove invaluable as well. It appears to be structured the same way: language theory supplanted by rudimentary forays into various examples, which should be fascinating, I just hope the theory is a little more in depth and implementation-focused for the graduate version.

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Birthday Music

Posted on 2009-08-18 by pappp

The world coincidently provided me with a couple of musical birthday presents: Third Eye Blind’s new effort, Ursa Major came out for my birthday (a day earlier than was announced…), and Electric Valentine’s first full length Automatic the next day.

On first listen Ursa Major is… kind of disappointing. It’s not BAD; understand I’ve loved 3eb as long as I’ve been listening to music; the first album I bought when I got my first portable CD player in middle school was Blue, and they have been a standby for me ever since. All of their albums have had something that really moved me: The selftitle was cut with crystallized adolescent angst, Blue was the sound of a burgeoning broadening and discovery of the world, Out of the Vein was pure passion… and in comparison Ursa Major just sounds kind of douchey and self involved. The music itself also seems a little less sophisticated, or at least less polished (they called it “more acoustic” but it’s more than that), especially in the meter of the lyrics. Judged against rock albums in general it really is a good album, but it doesn’t seem quite up to their previous efforts. Maybe it’ll grow on me.

As for Automatic… real bands don’t only release on iTunes. I don’t want AACs, I can’t install iTunes on my (Linux) machine, and I wouldn’t install Apple’s memory-eating crapware even if it were an option. Their previous releases are all on Amazon, this should be too. That said, I ordered a physical copy, and already have a digital copy (I’m not 100% sure the tracks on said copy are the album versions, some of it sounds a little lo-fi). Purchasing complaints aside, its wildly catchy electropop, with rich instrumentation, dark lyrics and adorable delivery. The album sounds a little less energetic than their earlier EP, but it still has that infectious quality that makes me keep catching myself dancing to it. I found their previous project (A Kiss Could Be Deadly) more compelling than Electric Valentine, but it really is great stuff and deserves all the attention it can get, and I’ll be listening to it for some time to come.

Yay music.

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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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Woodland Arts Fair Peoplewatching

Posted on 2009-08-16 by pappp

The Woodland Arts Fair has been running this weekend, about a block from my house, and I’ve been wandering down to peoplewatch (I really want to know the etymology for that term) whenever I get bored. The art itself was…the same honestly pretty awful crap as every year. Lots of trinket-y crap, some classic caught-in-the-moment scams (”Buy a little square of this painting” seems cool until you get home with an expensive 1×1” paint-splattered canvas square to …throw in a drawer or something). There were of course some genuine artisan pieces out, which were naturally out of the price range of any normal human being. That said I did spot Lee Todd and some other people who really might buy that kind of thing wandering around, so I suppose it isn’t a waste.
Art festivals are excellent places for peoplewatching, they have everything from sugar-wired little kids (best: alpha-child caused every kid in one of the playgrounds to start screaming) to crazy old people trundling around with walkers (best: I missed it, but I am told there was an old woman best described as “Shoe leather in a bikini top” browsing around), and every sort of weirdo in between. Another fun phenomena is that my Hawaiian shirt habit is in no way out of place there, although I’m about 20 years to young to fit in with the expected demographic for it. One worrying detail is that I’m totally losing my ability to guess ages; I’m not sure if it’s that I’m getting older, or that I’m out of practice or what, but I was reliably taking first impressions that were grossly incorrect: the “16-year-old” that set off a mental jailbait alarm…who on second inspection holding a beer. The “Probably about a college freshman”… who’s mate is pushing a stroller with a relatively old child in it. I’m sort of curious if there is some way to recalibrate that.

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Thinking~>Writing

Posted on 2009-08-12 by pappp

Some reading and writing that started as thoughts from going shooting a few times with some firearm enthusiast friends has evolved into something of a Writing Project about various exploratory examples looking at human competency, polarization in politics, statistics and sampling in human populations, and other things healthy normal people like myself like think about in our spare time. I’m enjoying writing it, I’m enjoying researching it, I’m really enjoying thinking about it; I’m going to put up at least three parts of it as I finish and polish them (which might be a while, y’all know how back burner projects go). Hopefully someone will enjoy reading it. I even have clever titles for some parts, like “Dangerous Hobbies, Competent Humans”, and “(Gun) Politics: Loud Liars From the Fringes.” …Yeah, I’m such an academic that when I get intrigued by something I go off and write what is effectively a research paper about it… for fun. I figure other people might find it interesting, and maybe, just maybe, I’ll manage to start some fun arguments.

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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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