January 2009
2 posts
Releasing Code
About the rest of my work: We have made a submission to an important conference (not a part of my thesis). I have bid on papers for reviewing for the same conference. The term has started, and I’m trying to do my best so that the students learn and approve, both. I should have release the software I’ve done for my thesis some months ago. This is done, so I’ll do that in case any...
Ten short papers about simple rules to keep in...
Ten Simple Rules for Doing Your Best Research, According to Hamming Ten Simple Rules for Selecting a Postdoctoral Position Ten Simple Rules for a Successful Collaboration Ten Simple Rules for Making Good Oral Presentations Ten Simple Rules for Getting Published Ten Simple Rules for Getting Grants Ten Simple Rules for Reviewers Ten Simple Rules for a Good Poster Presentation Ten...
December 2008
4 posts
Pulling yourself
Draft of chapter 1 finished. By finished I mean that it seems to have almost what I want to be in there. Let’s not talk about well said and so. Working on next chapter, definition of the problem, is being harder. I decided to finish the part I know better: syntax, semantics, etc. Then attack the approaches I have to review for sure. Finally, I’ll put everything in perspective....
Offline and Online
I’m online while writing this. Coming back to the IVIC library to start working on thesis again. Being offline is good for finishing thesis, unless you need to find a reference, of course. Now that we’ve got a car, it took me 15m to arrive here. (Well, leaving home at 10.30 really helped). The mountains are on my left side, the journals on my right. The main distraction, being...
Offline and Online
I’m online while writing this. Coming back to the IVIC library to start working on thesis again. Being offline is good for finishing thesis, unless you need to find a reference, of course. Now that we’ve got a car, it took me 15m to arrive here. (Well, leaving home at 10.30 really helped). The montains are on my left side, the journals on my right. The main distraction, being...
Good-Old-Fashioned Artificial Intelligence vs New...
All started with this tweet from Eduardo Izquierdo, who also has a blog: BBC’s Horizon “Where’s my robot?” focused far too much on Good-Old-Fashioned-AI, and not enough on Evolutionary Ro botics. Shame. cerca de 8 horas ago from web Then we discussed about it on Twitter. It’s a little bit messy, as are conversations over twitter. Even worst, 140c make it even...
November 2008
1 post
Pain, Fear, Hope
It’s been almost a month since last post. That density is proportional to the amount of work done. I feel almost stuck, with some episodes of awareness. Episodes that have been sign of hope, but that have cause no real change so far.
I’ve been complaining about the daily traffic jump, and the hours invested on preparing to teach the Logic course. These are not the final reasons. That...
October 2008
4 posts
New post: Overwhelmed
I guess it has to happen. I though it was going to be different this time. Anyway, I feel deeply and widely overwhelmed by the situation. I’ve started to convert my articles into chapters, and writing introductory material for everything. It’s like being on a building that just blew up and you have never seen. Getting some readable and convincing sounds like creating a building...
New post: Not really
Did I said we set a deadline for the 1st draft? Well, I didn’t do almost anything yesterday, the same today. Why? Well… It was difficult to start, so I got into reading some stuff I need for a proof. Today I lost the whole morning buying groceries. Actually, waiting for buying meat was kind of similar to a traffic jump, including the fact that I took the chance to read in my palm TX....
Deadline for a first draft
November 2nd is our deadline for having a first full draft. I’m totally scared. I need to find a balance between a self-contained thesis, more readable but with more text to be brushed, and a just-my-contributions thesis, more sharp for people who knows about the field. The straight way is to put all the publications in the form on chapters and fill up some pending gaps as proofs, etc. For...
New Post: Moving back to Venezuela
I moved back to Caracas two weeks ago. That means packing things up, throwing away, and saying goodbye to the tons of incredible friends we have found during these wonderful years. Living in Caracas means four hours a day spend in going to and coming from the university where I work. Adding up the time spent on filling up forms and setting up my office, there has been so much time left for real...
September 2008
3 posts
New post: verifying complex properties by software
Proving all the theorems lead us to assume that our problems satisfy a
consistency property. That is a nasty part of the paper, in the second
appendix. I’ve coded a verification procedure that shouldn’t be that
complicated. The problem is that the answer is true/false. Consistent
or inconsistent. How you get sure that your code is right or,
even worst, that there are more subtle...
New post: Working at home
We are spending a week in Madrid to say goodbye to my brother-in-law
and a few other friends. My nephew came with us.
I was suppose to work also. Except for the exams I had to grade, I took
the weekend for me, doing stuff we never do at home like playing with a
Playstation. We are not going to have one anyway.
Today, being Monday, I’m catching things up. After going around,
looking for a...
Moving mode
It’s less than one month to flight back to Venezuela. We are getting
into moving mode, trying to distinguish documents from trash. I’m kind
of scared because so many things are changing in one shoot, and I still
need to finish the thesis. For example, I’ll have to buy a car as I
arrive. For different reasons it has be a new one. I expect that 50% of
my salary will end up on...
August 2008
10 posts
Proofs in a PhD thesis
Should I put the proof after each theorem, proposition?
Or should I put them in an appendix of the chapter, or of the whole
thesis?
I think it depends on the style of the thesis, and the number of
proofs. I looked around on the work of people working in similar
topics, or just near me for some other reason.
On the very theoretical side of the spectrum is the thesis of Hubie
Chen, who I share...
Vivid tables of experimental results in Latex (2)
In the discussion about tables in Latex, Eduardo’s and Mico’s suggested some improvement over the tables. Here you can see an updated version of the same part of the table. (I know, I change a number. There was a mistake before). PS: I tried to add this to the same post doing some tricks. The editor of
posterous does not allow to add pictures. So a did a new post (through
email as...
Music/Video at Festa Major de Gracia
First, I put some pictures, sent by email in a zip. I like the gallery,
but the navigation can be improve. This is the prev http://conformant-thesis.posterous.com/pictures-of-the-festa-major-de
Now I uploaded first the videos to Youtube. I wanted to try sending
them by email. But my camera make huge uncompressed AVI. It’s
impossible to send 34Mb by email. Posted by email from Conformant...
Pictures of the Festa Major de Gracia - 2008
It’s amazing. A huge party on the streets, as it were an small town. Concerts on different places: Jazz, Ska, Rumba, Hard core rock, etc. That’s it. I won’t go the rest of the days… But it was really awesome.
See and download the full gallery on posterousPosted by email from Conformant thesis (posterous) | Comment »
Festa Major de Gracia
The HUGE program of the Gracia Fest in Barcelona / Festa Major de Gracia. PS: The official site http://www.festamajordegracia.cat is being very slow
Download now or preview on posterous programa-fm-2008.pdf (2776 KB) Posted by email from Conformant thesis (posterous) | Comment »
Vivid tables of experimental results in Latex
I’ve discussed with my advisor about how to show results in the
tables for our eternal journal paper. We are comparing the
performance of different algorithm/software. Should we bold the best
times of each one? best time over similar problems?
I said the data is in the tables. So, bold should be use only for
giving a suggestion of a fast impression. We finally agreed on using
bold face for...
Testing voice/mp3/podcast/whatever
As you can see, I haven’t started working.
It took me a few minutes to understand how to import pictures into my
Ubuntu/Linux laptop using a cable. Is not an USB folder. GThumb
did the work for both pictures and audio. The audio is recorded using
our small camera. PowerShot A570 IS. I haven’t manage to make work the
mic in this laptop. I’m posting a wav file to see if posterous...
Let's start with the status of the thesis
The situation is the following, I’m still filling gaps of a journal version of a paper that should have been submitted months ago. Almost a year, in fact. Things has become increasingly confusing for me. Fortunately, this is going to be the main result of the dissertation, so it’s ok to invest time on it.
Here it is. The draft of the table of content. The ideas organized themselves...
HTML posting from thunderbird
I’ve removed the HTML from my thunderbird eons ago. Now I wanted it
back for posting. I like bold :-) =
:-) .
Now I found how to have HTML
mails again. Just shift while clicking the new mail button.Posted by email from Conformant thesis (posterous) | Comment »
Hum... going to try Posterous →
I need a blog from leave a trace of my thesis work. But, I like more the way posterous put it into twitter.