Published author

There we go, my very own ACM citation. I am now a published author. My thesis work resulted in a paper called Dynamic optimization of Bluetooth networks for indoor localization, which was submitted to and accepted for the AASN'08 Conference in Paris earlier this year. Googling for "markus jevring bluetooth" shows not just this paper but also my thesis, which is available through my university.

From all this, I'm sure you can gather that I have finally completed this stage of my studies. I am now a Master of Science in Computer Science, for whatever it is worth. I'm currently not looking for research positions, as I thought I would be, but that may change in the future.

I know I haven't posted in a (criminally long) time, but hopefully with this "catch up" post, I'll be able to start posting more often. I'll be able to get back to the mindless rants you come here for soon. I just felt that I couldn't do one before detailing the next big step in my life (that sounded less corny in my head, just now). Anyway, I now live in Brussels and I write software for a stock broker called Petercam. I really like the work, and I get to do cool stuff almost on a daily basis, so I'm happy. Our apartment is far from wonderful, but we are currently looking at alternatives, and we estimate that we'll be in a new, more acceptable, one my mid-February.
Being in Brussels, of course, means that I've left the Netherlands behind me. Two years in Enschede was quite enough. Anyway, time to get back to work. I'm almost alone in my section here today, as most people are on holiday. It's quite pleasant to have a somewhat calmer environment. Now if I could also get a properly sized monitor, everything would be just peachy...

On Academics

As in people in academia:

Most academics, however, are only academics. In the course of their careers, they have been paid a salary only by a university; they are one-dimensional people. They therefore have not had the breadth of experience to give them a sense of the reality of international relations; nor have they had the depth of experience to give them a sense of its tragedy. These are the hollow men, and the shallow men, too. For such people, there are only a few kinds of achievements possible in regard to international relations. One of them is to sit down and spin out theories that fellow academics will praise as being rigorous and original. (Merely being realistic and responsible, in contrast, will not evoke their praise.) In truth, most academics are only concerned about the good opinion of about a dozen other academic specialists in their particular sub-sub-field

Kurth, James. “Inside the Cave: The Banality of I.R. Studies"

The man speaks the truth, bitches!...

The Last Lecture

Randy Pausch is a professor at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), who's been in the news lately about his "last lecture". He was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and told he had about six months to live. This was a couple of months ago, and sadly, this brilliant man has passed away. I had heard about this last lecture before, thinking it was a cool thing, but I hadn't actually watched it. Then I was having dinner the other night with a friend of mine who goes to CMU and he mentioned Randy in passing. Then earlier today, talking to a friend of mine, he also mentioned Randy's lecture and told me that I might find it interesting. "Might find it interesting" was the understatement of the century. Watching it just now, I was completely blown away by not only this man's genius and insight into life, but also his incredible humility. It was truly a treat. While this man is a computer scientist, and many of you may not be, watching this 76 minute talk will fill you with such awe and wonderment, while at the same time filling you with such clarity and wisdom that missing this should almost be criminal.
I really had no idea what this talk would be about, and I certainly did not know that it would be this good. It is an absolute jewel, and I consider myself incredibly lucky to have just seen it, even though it was a webcast. The talk is available on YouTube here. This man is absolutely brilliant, and the world is a worse place without him. Watch this talk! I don't care if you do anything else in your life, but you watch this talk. It is that good. Such wisdom, such insight, such delivery. I really cannot say enough good things about this man!

Google Gets It Wrong

I regularly search for the words "context management" on google.
The concept of "content management" is well known and prolific, and as a result, google always asks me "Did you mean: content management?", and then proceeds to assume that I did, by just showing me hits from the "content management" query. I didn't even click the link that suggested I may have made a mistake. Sure, in most cases this works well, but in my case it makes it impossible to actually search for "context management".
The should have a link that lets you say "No, I actually want to search for this".
They could just provide you with a link to what they thought you were searching for, and leave the original query in the original results, but no.
Sometimes they do, when I misspell other things for instance, but in this case, it never happens.
It is incredibly infuriating, as my whole thesis hangs on me being able to get information about this particular topic.

Van Eck Phreaking

Van Eck phreaking (or TEMPEST technologies, denepding on where you read it first) is about reading information from electro-magnetic radiation. What it will allow someone to do, for example, is read your monitor from a distance, based solely on the electro-magnetic radiation that comes off of it.
I first read about van Eck phreaking in Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon. It is used a couple of times, and I was instantly intrigued. Since then it's made it around the net a couple of times, and today I picked it up again from a post on hacksine. They even had a link to the paper by Wim van Eck from 1985 (in astonishing quality, compared to most old papers that I come across).
I was even more excited when I found a little blurb about the author, and it turns out that he's an alumn from my university, Twente University. Sadly the discovery seems to have come some years later when he was working at some other company, but still.

Crunch time

As you may have suspected from my lack of updates, it's been crunchtime these last couple of weeks.
Not only have I released version 1.0 of cuftpd, but I have also, today, written what could very well be my last exam ever. I don't have that "it's all completed"-feeling quite yet, as I won't have the results for another couple of weeks, so there is still a lot of anticipation, but atleast I know that it is out of my hands now.
It didn't feel like a 10 (nothing ever does), but it didn't feel like a fail either.
Currently, all I want is a passing grade. I'm happy if I get more, of course, but I really don't want to have to redo the exam.
Luckily I only had one exam this period. It would have been hell if I had had more.

On a completely unrelated note, I saw a gameplay video of Mythos yesterday (when I should have been studying). Being as big a fan of diablo as I am, I believe that I will play Mythos until my eyes bleed when it comes out. I signed up for the beta, just in case.

Edumacation

I ran in to this quote today by Albert Einsten:

The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education.

Albert Einstein

It ties in really well with something I wrote down in one of my books as I was studying it last week:

The smarter I become
The dumber I feel

There's nothing better for letting you know how infinitely little you know about everything than learning about other things. The more you learn about one thing, the more you realize that there is so much more information out there about which you don't have a fucking clue.

Now, the reason why I think these two quotes tie in well together (which might not have otherwise been obvious), is that going to grad school really makes your knowledge seem insignificant, because you are exposed to so much other knowledge that you know you can't possibly learn it all. What grad school also does is expose you to a lot of useless knowledge, which in turn keeps you from learning about things that you are really interested in.

I find my education lacking

A big problem that software developers face today, with the advent of multi-core cpus and grid computing is parallel programming. Ask any computer scientist and he (most often he, sometimes she) will tell you that one of the 'big' problems that computer scientists face is problems of concurrency and parallelism.
Despite this well known and difficult to tackle problem, I have yet to see a single university course that deals with this in depth. Sure, some basic programming courses mention that this IS a problem, but doesn't arm you with any tool to solve these problems, or explain the problems in detail.
Granted, most toy examples that are used in schools never require any parallelism, but that's why I think there should be an entire course dedicated to it. A course where you wouldn't address some random problem and hope to solve it in a parallel manner, but you would specifically craft problems that would only be solved in this way.
Research into this area has gotten so far that most known issues in parallel programming even have names and scenarios drawn up for them to explain them properly, but this is never seen on a university level.
Looking over the various education paths available to a computer science student, I'd need to complete 4-5 masters programs to learn all the stuff I'm interested in from a teacher.
Sure, most people who are genuinely interested in their profession will take it upon themselves to read about this on their own time, but some of it might still need explanation, and people might need guidance. Also, getting a different view on a problem you're struggling to solve can be invaluable.

What I had really wanted from my stay at university was to learn how to program. To learn it in detail, learn different programming paradigms, learn how to solve problems, and to become a damn fine hacker(not that kind of hacker, look it up). Instead we are bombarded with modelling courses and levels upon levels of abstraction. I'm not saying that these courses are bad, because they're not. I'm just saying that there should be a university education for people interested in computer science (who suck at math, like I do), but that don't want to gun for middle-management right out of some data entry job. For the people who want to build hammers instead of use hammers to build houses.

I could have learned twice as much in half the time had there been a program like this for me. I would gladly have ditched a large portion of the courses I have taken in favor of proper advanced programming courses.
Maybe that's just me though, maybe I'm of a different breed, more old school that other people, but the last thing I want to wear to work is a shirt and tie...

Intellectual Masturbation

I have come to the conclusion that academia is nothing but intellectual masturbation. I have never seen people who are as full of them selves as academics. They espouse unnecessarily complex theories and procedures for the sole reason of making non-academics look starstruck when dazzled by their supposed brilliance. I'm currently reading part of a PhD thesis on software engineering, and the things that are suggested in this case might be applicable to 1% of development processes, and only in the case where one would be dealing with completely new concepts in computer science.
There are several more or less formal ways of developing software. Some are better than others, but what they all have in common is that they are extremely convoluted, and they requires books upon books to explain what is small sub-part of the entire methodology. It's not unheard of to have 900 page books on "realizing part A and part B of our amazing 59 part model".
Maybe I'm taking the carpentry approach to software development here, but please people it's not as difficult as you make it out to be. Granted, writing good software is not necessarily simple, but coming up with a methodology on how to handle everything around the actual writing of the source code is not as hard as people would have you believe.
The problem, I think, is that people are payed by the letter to write books on methodologies. I don't doubt that we need some research in the field, but to be quite frank, methodologies for developing things are, just like design patterns, revealed almost automatically after having worked in the industry for some time. What then happens is that academics come along and they look at these methodologies that have evolved in companies over time, working in this field, and they lump a bunch of them together, and try to extract some common features of successful methodologies. So far so good, to some extent, but what they then do is add their own rationale for these concept, and then they proceed to add their own parts to the methodology, to add their personal touch. The long-term goal of this is to get name recognition for something. Now, I know that having a good reputation is something we all want, but there are good and bad ways of going about it.
I can't say anything about any other fields of study, since I have just been in the academic world of software development, but I think that most academic research on methodologies, i.e. the meta-layer about getting work done, is pure intellectual masturbation, and it encumbers the whole software development profession with things that might otherwise have become clear, using nothing but common sense and experience.
It's fine when teachers teach students about some well-known methodology that is well rooted in reality. This way the students can have a head start when they get out in business life (which is the whole point of going to school). However, when teachers think "hey, I have a personal opinion of this little thing which I consider a flaw in a methodology, so I'm throwing all other information out the window and I'm creating my own methodology and then I'm teaching that to my students". This is wrong. I'm all for teaching students as much as possible, but we need to keep our eye on the ball here. Consolidate knowledge and look for things that are actually common between methodologies and teach people that. We don't need 10 methods that kinda-sorta work, we need 2-3 that actually work, all the time.
I guess academia is about finding new things and doing research info areas where business can't afford to go, or haven't thought off, but that doesn't give academia a license to go on some wild goose chase. When it comes to problems like some new algorithm, or finding a new element for the periodic table, or figuring out how to synthesize some new drug, I'm all for that. What I don't like is the meta-reasoning about all these things. At some point the reasoning about the reasoning about the reasoning of something has to stop. How many meta layers can we have before it all turns in to philosophy?

I want more concreteness in the things that are taught to students. Let students feel that the time spent in the class room actually gives them something of value, and not just something that they might be able to use should they go down a certain path of research in academia. Again, this is very much a carpenters approach to school, but isn't that what engineering is supposed to be about? I realize software is a young field, compared to building bridges or doing mathematics, but I also know that the rate at which the field develops is much faster than the speed seen for other fields in the past.

I'm rambling, but in summary, less intellectual masturbation in academia (at least regarding what is actually taught to students), and more concrete and correct knowledge.
Feel free to challenge me on this opinion.

Teaching - What a Rush!

I spent some time today in the computer rooms of the school. We were working on a project that is due in 2½ weeks for the Design of Software Architectures course. As we were getting done and getting ready to leave, I saw a friend of mine whom I've done other course work with, sitting at one of the computers with some problem for another course. We started talking a bit, and he was telling me about these problems he was having with getting a particular application to work. As I started helping him fix his problems, I felt a sudden rush of pleasure through my body. The further we got in to the problem solving, the more my body told me that it liked what was happening. In the end we managed to solve his problems, but I couldn't help but feel that helping people solve problems and explaining to them how to do it was one of the most wonderful feelings in the world.
I have previously thought about becoming a teacher at a university. It's been my long-term plan for some years, but right now it feels like I never want to set foot in a school again. At least not as a student. The problem with getting a teaching position is that you have to spend eons in school first as a student. Your regular Master's degree generally isn't enough.

This is a problem for me, because when I'm finished here, I don't want to ever have to write another exam or do another assignment, yet I want to be a teacher, so more of this shit is required. Granted, doing PhD research isn't like taking courses, but I still don't know if I can take any more of being a student. Time (and position offers) will tell, but right now it feels like I don't ever want to set foot in a school again. Maybe that changes, maybe it doesn't, but teaching is still one of the most fun and rewarding experiences in the world.

Mo Money

I just got word from the financial aid agency for students from Sweden, CSN, and they are granting me more money! It turns out that they had misinterpreted my schedule, and dropped four weeks of aid. I noticed this last year, but it didn't occur to me to do anything about it. This year I did, and after some back and forth via email, they altered their decision.
Today was a good day....

MultiAgent Systems

I just got through the better part (10 chapters plus appendix) of Michael Wooldridge's An Introduction to MultiAgent Systems. Normally when I'm faces with self-study of a massive piece of educational literature, I get bored easily, because the way literature is written is usually very stuffy and boring, and not particularly explanatory.
Reading An Introduction to MultiAgent Systems, however, was a pure delight. Wooldridge writes in such a way that information sticks the first time around. Rarely did I have to re-read a piece of text. He also writes in a very entertaining way, without digressing or causing off-topic chuckles.
The book is about 350 pages long, with a core of about 250 (according to Wooldridge). The first part deals with the concept of intelligent agents, and the second part deals with a society of such agents.
All in all a delightful read, and I would definitely recommend it to anybody wanting an overview or a great course book for multi-agent systems. If more authors wrote like this, then maybe people would actually pass their courses and not drop out of school.

What I Should Have Done

Before I went to college for computer science, I wanted to become a psychologist. Every year from graduating from high-school I would apply to the psychology program. Of course, since this was a very popular program I could never get in because my grades were so low. Finally I went in to computer science, something I've been doing since I was a young child. In the second semester of my first year, we did a couple of months of Human Computer Interaction. Basically applying psychological concepts to the user experience and the interaction between man and machine.
Considering my burning lust for psychology, I thought that I had found the perfect combination; behavioral psychology together with computer science. I was thinking to myself "this is what I want to do with my life".
The problem was that most of the HCI we did was focused on usability studies and user interfaces, which I find incredibly boring (albeit incredibly important). When I graduated and it came time to choose a minor, this turn of events made me chose database technology as my minor, as opposed to HCI.

Now, in my 6th year of university, I'm looking for a thesis topic for my Master's Thesis, and as such, I was roaming the halls in our faculty, reading posters and generally seeing what my school was up to with regards to research. I have to start my thesis in January, so I'm going to try to be prepared.
I started at the 5th (and topmost) floor, reading posters and successively working my way down to the 2nd floor, where the HMI (Human Media Interaction) people are. In the top 3 floors I found what amounts to maybe 1.5 interesting topics to write about. When I got down to the 2nd floor, I got a certain feeling about it. People had open wine bottles in their offices, they were roaming around in more of a hippie kind-of style. It made me think of what the early computer labs in the 60ies and 70ies must have looked like. Reading the posters on the 2nd floor gave me tons of ideas, but since I haven't been specializing in HMI, I doubt that I could go down that road with my thesis.
All in all, the courses I have been taking over the last 2 years have been dull. Some of them have had some interesting parts, but I can say that there haven't been more than maybe 2-3 courses that I have actually enjoyed.
Now, hindsight being what it is, it would be easy for me to conclude that I should have chosen HMI when coming to this university, but since hindsight is just that, there's little I can do about that now.
I chose software engineering hoping that I would do what I love most, write software. However, the amount of software written during this education has been little to none. It's all about the meta level. How to develop methods to develop software, and quite frankly, it bores the hell out of me. I certainly cannot imagine myself as a researcher on the topic.

I just hope that I can actually find a topic for my thesis, and find and advisor willing to help me, because if I don't, and I get stuck with a topic that I'm not interested in, this is going to be a horrible school year.

Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck

My first failed exam this year. I mean I knew it was hard, but I didn't think I did this poorly. Not even close to passing either, a 3.8 out of 10.
I was really hoping for a calm and easy summer this year but noooooooo. Now I have to study my ass off for weeks to pass this fucking thing. Last time I studied for about a week with abysmal results, so I guess I have a lovely 2 weeks of hardcore studying ahead of me before exams.
This sucks massive donkey nuts. I thought that I had managed to slide in over the edge, but no sir.
The only good thing about this is that I'm not alone. 44.4% of the exam takers failed, and I know that some people didn't even show up to try.
We didn't do particularly well on the first assignment either, but I have high hopes for the second assignment.
Out of 5 questions I was above average on two, and abysmally below on the remaining three.
I would have been less pissed about it if the teacher wasn't such a smug ass.

My University Experience

In 6 panels.

(Ohh and btw, the machall archives are back up, yay!)

Better School = Higher Expectations

I just read that Twente University came in 7:th place in this years ACM ICPC.
The ACM ICPC is a worldwide programming competition, kind of like the olympics, or the world championships. My current school placed 7:th, and I don't even know if my previous school even tried out. The best Swedish school on the list came in 26:th place with half of the problems solved.
Shared 26:th I should say, together with around 20 others.

This positioning seems to reflect the skill and the expectation difference between my previous and current educational institute. At my old school I flew by without actually exerting myself, and I was something like top3-5 in most of my courses. Here I'm working my nuts of, and I'm still not making the grade. Sure, I pass my course, some even with good grades, but it's at the expense of 60-80 hour work weeks, and much mental suffering on my part. The worst things is feeling inadequate in a field where you used to excel.
It seems like I've been knocked down several pegs on the ladder of prowess.

I am a carpenter among architects.

And it bothers me to no end. Feelings of inadequacy are right up there with death as the toppers of my greatest fears. (For most people the number one is speaking in public. I love doing that though, but I'm a bit of an attention monkey, so that might be why.)

This quarter especially has been one of way too much work for me. I can't remember last time I had a weekend of that wasn't during christmas break. This has got to change, but I have no real recipe for making this happen.

One thing I do know for sure though is that I'll never be part of a team bound for the ACM ICPC...

Top of the World Ma!

Being a former student at Uppsala University, i regularly get their mailings about progresses that the university has made, and this one is extraordinary.
Not extraordinary in any research sense, on in the sense that it's made the world a better place.
No, it is extraordinary in that it gives me some bragging rights!

What happened was that May of last year, a man from Uppsala University, together with five others, reached the peak of Mt Everest. "But many people have reached that peak", you say, "it's practically a tourist attraction by now.". Right you are, however, how many of you can claim that you have the flag of your university flying at the highest peak of the world? Apart from this man's extraordinary feat of climbing to the top, he also placed a flag there to show everybody who comes after him that Uppsala University is a force to be reckoned with!

Now, I normally don't brag about where I'm from (except that one time), but a man has to have something he's proud of, right?

Eight

The position that "h" occupies in the alphabet, and the grade I just got for my Switching and Control Systems in Multi Service Networks course.
I was really sure I had failed when I left the exam. Much like the other two that I took last period, I had not studied more than an hour or two, tops.
This was supposedly the hardest of the courses I had to take too, which made me even more satisfied when I got the result back via email this afternoon.
I was also told a couple of days ago that I got an eight on my assignment for Reference Models for Networked applications. Getting good grades is always fun, but the course however, was not.
SCS was really interesting, and I actually learned things, but Reference Models told me absolutely nothing of value. I don't know if I've ever had such an unnecessary course. I'm pretty sure that every course in the past taught me something, except this one.
Ohh well, at least I got acceptable grades. Now I just need to get the result from the other two courses and be allowed to switch tracks and I'll be sounds as the proverbial pound.

Switch

I'm a switcher. Or, at least I'm going to try to be.
I'm not switching something as important as my computing platform (heaven forbid), but what I am switching, however, is tracks here at the school.
It turns out that telematics relies heavily on knowledge that I as a CS student should have, but that I don't have. I suck at math. I really and truly do, and the coming courses require me to not suck. Since I can't just un-suck myself, (hmm, eww) I see no other alternative than to switch tracks.
I went to the guidance counselor today to talk to him about it, and he said that there should be no problem with this, but we need to talk to the guy who's in charge of the track I want to switch to.
Apparently that guy had been on the admission board when they discussed my application this summer, so I'm fairly sure he won't have any objections. After all, Software Engineering seems to have less stringent knowledge prerequisites than Telematics.
This might, however, cause me to have to stay here for longer, which completely fuck with my monetary situation, unless I can pull my shit together and do some major catching up.
I'm having a meeting tomorrow that will, more or less, decide my future. Hopefully it will go well.

Keep your fingers crossed that I get out of this place by June or July 2008, as intended. If I don't, then I really don't know what'll happen to my life.

I try to not be a quitter, but sometimes it's damn hard. Right now, I hate my life and my very existence, but I guess it's a sunny day, so it can't be all that bad. I think that if I can just switch tracks, and get a pass on at least two of the (three) exams I took two weeks ago, I'll be fine. (More fine anyway)

My Day

So, I got the relatively harmless question "Have you had a good day" just now over icq, and, as I hadn't really had an especially good day, this is how I responded:

actually, up until about 2 hours ago, I've had a pretty crappy day =(
I got up early, had a small breakfast and went to school.
scheduled project work with one guy from 10-12, then from 12 to whenever with my other project.
then when we got done with that project, I call the first guy up, and we continued to work.
you will notice by now, that "lunch" didn't figure in to that description.
I get home around 18, nothing edible in the fridge, so I'm off to the grocery store, still burning my single sandwich that I had for breakfast.
at this time I'm pretty cranky, and quite sure that if anybody was going to give me any trouble, I'd tear their head of and shit down their exposed throat.
so I get to the store, get what I come for, and go home.
When I come home, there's a mountain of dishes. This is not unusual, and really not a problem, except for two things: a) my raging hunger is at the point where any setback seems like world war 3, and b) there is no dish soap in the house
Thus, back on my bike to the store.
I come home with the dish soap, do the mountain of dishes (about 45 minutes or so, I'd guess), make dinner, leave dirty dishes all over the place, and then, I simmer down and watch some tv, and now everything is good again.

how was your day? =)

So, after dinner (curry chicken), some CNN and some Mythbusters, I'm all happy again.

Ohh, and the game store called be about my pre-order for TBC. The store is going to open up at midnight tonight, and I'm most likely going to be there to score my copy of TBC, and then LAGG OUT in the blasted lands all night. Tomorrow's working day might suffer a bit, but I really don't care that much.

Right now I'm selecting courses for next quarter. Currently, it looks like:
- Performance evaluation (I suck at math and statistics, and this is heavy on both. Mandatory, unfortunately. Die Markov chains, die!)

- Mobile and Wireless Networking (Might be interesting. One of my current courses have touched on the subject, and it's mighty interesting.)

- Aspect Oriented Programming. (With my favourite teacher Mehmet Aksit. This guy is the shit, quite possibly one of the best teachers I have had in my entire life. He was on the ballot for the teacher of the year here at twente. I voted for him, but I don't know how it turned out.)

They tell me that performance evaluation is going to be VERY difficult, so I'm going to play it safe and stick to the normal 3 courses per quarter, having done 3½ the last two. Luckily, I have a PhD student in mathematics living in my house, so I'm sure he'll be able to explain things to me if I get stuck.