February 25, 2009

Mission Graduate School -- Success

I’ve officially been accepted to two PhD applied math programs: Northwestern and University of North Carolina. I’ve also been accepted to the Masters of Science program at the University of Washington. Both of the PhD offers came with full fellowship offers(at least for the first year), which basically means that I just need to go and give them the best bang for their buck with my brainpower for five years, and then I’ll have my PhD.

February 24, 2009

GenHosts

Winter quarter 08, the hosts.allow files used by tcpwrappers was getting unwieldy. For one thing, we had certain groups of hosts that were all allowed to connect to eachother anywhere, some groups that were only allowed one port on one computer, some that were allowed certain parts of machines. It was basically a mess to try and keep up with it. So I wrote a set of scripts to let us update one place and have it synchronize everywhere else, all in very simple XML files.

February 9, 2009

Graduate School Applications and Microsoft

I finally finished graduate school applications last weekend. I applied to University of Washington, University of North Carolina, Northwestern, University of Colorado, and University of Nevada. It’s a lot of work getting a bunch of applications out like that: I definitely underestimated it. Hopefully my personal statement measured up to the letters of recommendation that people wrote for me. I also ended up having an interview with Microsoft that week, just to add a bit to the stress there.

February 9, 2009

My Hint for Foreign ATM Machines

I’ve been meaning to write this tip up for quite a while, but now that I’ve finally gotten some closure on it, I guess now would be a decent time. While I was in Brazil, there were two ATM machine clusters across the street from eachother, both between the beach and the hostel we were staying at. The CITIbank ATMs were more reliable, but the HSBC ATMs were a bit cheaper.

February 6, 2009

HMCP Set, TextMate, and RoR 2.0

I found a great little LaTeX homework layout for typesetting math homeworks a while back, and I’ve meant to write it up for quite a while. It’s from Harvey Mudd College’s Mathematics Department, engineered to automatically satisfy the department guidelines on how homeworks should be laid out. They also have thesis and poster templates, but the homework installation proceedures and sty files are located on the Homework Class page. Their website also has extensive information on their computer resources.

January 30, 2009

David Liff is a Master

Life is keeping me so crazy that I should not be taking the time to write this, but posting a link here was irresistable. David Liff is an amazing photographer. I think the best comment on that page(if you can make it to the bottom without running out and buying a plane ticket to one of these places) is “Your photos have more life than the subjects themselves!”. Wikipedia, you may be proud.

January 6, 2009

Why Do Math and Izhikevich

Professor Eric Shea-Brown has written up a nice website explaining what we’re doing with the computational neuroscience modeling. It’s currently on the Why Do Math website at this link: Brain Dynamics: The Mathematics of the Spike. For my project, we’re starting with a simpler model that is similar in behavior but quicker computationally and (somewhat) easier to analyze mathematically, known as the Izhikevich model(after its creator, Eugene Izhikevich). His website has some amazingly cool videos and a lot of papers on what he’s been doing.

January 2, 2009

Graduate School Applications

I am finally getting around to starting my graduate school applications.. and overall having a lot of fun with them. The places I’m applying to are: University of Washington, Seattle Northwestern, Evanston University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill University of Colorado, Boulder I’ve got my UW Seattle application about half done, and just starting the other ones. The UW has apparently gotten my full GRE scores, because they are now reporting them through the unofficial transcript interface.

November 29, 2008

Computer Ressurection and Elastic Cloud Experimentation

I was home on Thanksgiving Break with Sharvil, and we decided to revive some old computers. Partly I’d like to experiment with some clustering stuff without incurring CPU time at the AMATH department or Teragrid stuff I’m likely gonna be working on soon with Shea-Brown’s neuroscience research. So, it turns out I resurrected about 5-6 old computers(final tally is still waiting on the number of successful Xubuntu installs on them, among other practical issues(where the hell am I going to put six computers…?

November 8, 2008

Fame and FORTRAN

I must be getting more popular on some search engines somewhere. I just got six random comment-spam messages. Awesome. I guess that’s why the more important bloggers have come to rely on Bayesian filters and soforth for taming the wild flow of spam. Hopefully that trend doesn’t continue. Also, it seems as though I am now learning FORTRAN. I’m sortof starting working with Eric Shea-Brown on some Neuroscience research, working with HPC on NSF’s Teragrid.