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Monthly Archives: June 2007

gah!


I managed to trash my WordPress installation while trying to change the sidebar code. I’ll fix it soon, but I have work to do today. In the meantime, enjoy this default theme.

evil metal fingers violently probing heaven



evil metal fingers violently probing heaven, originally uploaded by Mister Wind-Up Bird.

Or possibly, some kind of ventilation.

fulminations


Things I’ve expressed my disgust, disdain or downright loathing of in the past few days. Alphabetically. I’ve been under a lot of stress.

the films of Theo Angelopoulos
The Arctic Monkeys
Zach Braff
George Bush
Noam Chomsky
the cliche of hating on George Bush
Dane Cook
Stephane Dion
Rebecca Eckler
Riley Finn
the cancellation of Newark on Trent Firefly
French socialists
Garden State
Paul Haggis
Stephen Harper
hyperparametric models
Paul Martin
MATLAB and its publisher Math Works
Leah McLaren
Dennis Miller
Henry Miller
The National Post
Anais Nin
Oasis
papers that don’t give sufficient details to reproduce their results
the phrase “left wing”
the phrase “right wing” (on a different occasion)
Pitchfork Media
postmodernism
Telly Savalas
sociobiology
Superman Returns
support vector machines
Vancouver’s club scene
various women who have rejected me (individually and categorically)

another day, another paper



also known as "NIPS", originally uploaded by Mister Wind-Up Bird.

Paper writing is pretty stressful. Code crashes, mistakes are found in equations, and you never have quite the experimental results you want. As deadlines approach, the pressure builds and sleep is abandoned. But I kind of welcome them. And not just for the rare flash of “hey, I’m actually doing science!” satisfaction. A good, hard deadline adds some much-needed structure and discipline to the grad student lifestyle. It forces you to stop tinkering with code and equations and write that shit down. And having just submitted a paper is a great excuse to drink heavily and spend a few days watching movies and playing video games before going back to work.

The paper I submitted yesterday was for the rather grand-sounding Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems. Or: “NIPS”. (For years now, I’ve been thinking about making various off-colour “I heart NIPS” T-shirts, and I swear, one day I’ll do it.) This is my fourth paper since February — the fifth if you count my PhD thesis proposal. I’m kind of looking forward to not writing another one for a while.

This screenshot is my work environment a little before the paper deadline. If you click on that there image, you can see the Flickr version, where I explain what all those windows are doing (more or less: it’s an anonymous-review conference, so I can’t say anything identifying about the research).

On a geeky note (well, even more geeky), I did all the coding, experiments and figures for this paper in Python using Pylab and SciPy, rather than MATLAB. After years of cursing MATLAB (generally by muttering “god, I fucking hate MATLAB” every time it eats up all the available memory and then crashes) and threatening to switch to something — anything — else, I decided I had to either put up or shut up. And shutting up is not my way. Python is not a perfect replacement, but I’m quite happy to report that it worked very, very well and I expect to do most of my thesis work with Python.

goin’ to SIGGRAPH


Siggraph-SnipI actually had my sketch accepted last week, but I wanted to update my CV and publications pages first. But, I have another paper and a proposal to write, so I’ll skip that and just announce it, since probably half the people who read this are going to SIGGRAPH, too. So, yeah. I’ll be attending SIGGRAPH in August. And presenting a poster.

If you don’t know what SIGGRAPH is, picture Burning Man. Now replace all the naked hippies with mercifully-clothed computer graphics nerds and the burning man with a conference center exhibition hall. Happily, I find geeks far less obnoxious than hippies, nudity makes me uncomfortable, and I have a healthy fear of fire, so this is all good as far as I’m concerned.