I guess I graduated? It’s kind of in limbo at the moment.
Category: Grad School
Actually I am quite good about commenting
I spent most of the past week and almost all of the last 24 hours writing code for my Master’s degree project, because I’m a terrible person. And then today I came in to work on zero sleep for the first time. This should be different.
On the bus here, I had a dozing dream about falling out onto a huge slick plain of PHP and whitespace. I knew it was stuff I’d written, but I couldn’t figure out where in the whole scheme it fit. I was lost! It could be miles to the nearest comment! It was pretty scary.
I have (wisely, I think) decided not to write an anacrusis about this.
The DBC of CS
Social engineering at its finest: SCIgen uses a context-free grammar to generate comp sci papers entirely too much like those from which I’ve been expected to learn for the past two years. It’s a little scary how good the results are. I was able to read the entire abstract of my personal paper while nodding my head, although the first clause of the introduction (“Unified metamorphic methodologies have led to many unfortunate advances”) broke the spell.
Oh, right, the social engineering part is that they got one of their generated papers accepted to a conference. Well-played, humans who probably remember daylight!
It turns out I actually did go to school.
I just had a stupiphany that would have been great if it had happened six months ago, when I had the option of submitting a thesis. Whoops!
See, you could store bitmap indices on a varchar field in a database as a two-dimensional black-and-white image for each character position! Normally you wouldn’t use bitmaps for text because the density would be less than 1%, but what if you compressed them like PNGs? You could save a huge amount of disk space, because sparsity would improve the compression ratio, and clock cycles aren’t nearly as valuable as disk access in this kind of situation so the decompression would be parallelizable. The binary operations would reduce wildcard search time by like an order of magnitude! Hell, you could probably store an average-value flattened composite for returning more relevant results faster, and since varchars only go to 256 you could do it as a standard grayscale image! And imagine the data mining you could do on a map like that, pattern recognition, domain linguistics, not to mention just rasterizing it and putting it on your wall…
I promise there are people out there to whom this makes sense. Oh well. Maybe someday I’ll write a paper.
I should mention that one of the reasons my resume is changing is that the thing I talked about late Wednesday night? Totally happened. Bam!
It occurs to me that I really don’t care about my GPA. This is literally the first time in my life, or at least in my living memory, I’ve been able to say that. I was always ashamed of my Cs in Handwriting, and since fourth grade I’ve been straining for As (and, since junior year of high school, usually getting Bs). Right now I want to get through my two classes, finish a project and graduate. All that matters is passing.
Of course, that project may be the lurker below. I had a solid setup with a professor at the beginning of the semester; it sounded like work I’d enjoy, and there was even compensation involved. All we had to do was wait for the company that wanted the code to sign off on the contract.
It’s March 10. Guess whether they’ve done so. Guess also whether the aforementioned professor appears to care, beyond a little guilt.
I’m going in tomorrow to talk to my advisor and find out what I need to do to get the DBCAC site approved as my final project. It’s for a nonprofit organization, and the work is easily as complicated as what I would have been doing otherwise; I’ll even write a paper about it if they want one. The quiet assumption is that MS students get a rubber stamp on their project requirement by building a professor’s resume, but I tried that and it didn’t happen. I’m not going to let someone else’s short attention span keep me here another semester. School has ceased to interest me, and I’m going to be finished in May, one way or another.