Paul's Web Pages

Ph.D. finished, new job

Paul van Tilburg — 2012-01-08T00:00:00+01:00

I have defended my thesis with success on 27 October, 2011. For archival reasons, I have moved my Ph.D. website from the university site, as my account will be removed this year at some point.

What are you doing next? A question often asked to a Ph.D. student. My answer is Mozcode, my sole proprietor company that develops custom made software and/or uses free & open source software components to design, build and deploy software solutions according to your wishes.

Ph.D. defence

Paul van Tilburg — 2011-08-22T00:00:00+02:00

Because the defence date is quickly getting nearer, I have put up a page with related information. I will keep updating the page up until the moment is there!

Also Giving up on Ruby Packaging

Paul van Tilburg — 2011-01-25T00:00:00+01:00

I have just sent a mail to the Debian/Ruby Extras mailing list stating that I will also give up most of my Ruby packaging efforts and reduce my involvement in the team. I am following Lucas Nussbaum in his decision. Although our reasons are slightly different, I subscribe most of what he says in his blog post. Besides that, I haven’t done much Ruby programming in the past years, making me lose the motivation for the huge load of packages I am responsible for and thus subconsciously perceive that as a burden, as I feel guilty not having/making time to work on them.

So, what does this mean? I will handover (co)maintainership of over 50 libraries. Many of which have dead upstream, unfortunately. Also will I be looking for someone to take over the administrative tasks of heading the team such as mailing list moderation and Alioth repository access. I will keep maintaining some programs that I still use, such as Camping, and am approachable for (mentor) uploads.

Meanwhile I will continue my work on my PhD thesis, which is progressing well and should lead to my defence (hopefully) somewhere around September this year. That said, I will try to keep tinkering with Ruby and other F/OSS projects. Oh, and also to get more motivated and some inspiration…

Exploring Reykjavík

Paul van Tilburg — 2009-06-23T00:00:00+02:00

I’ve been here for over 2 weeks now and I feel like I’ve gotten used to the place. I am a bit behind with the journal posts but on the other hand always quite up-to-date with the pictures. The following describes event from Thursday June 6 until Tuesday June 16.

Sunsets

Sunsets are different everywhere. On Thursday we took a trip to the tip of the isle on which Reykjavík is located to a separate town called Seltjarnarnes. Since we were there around sunset, I took some (quite colourful) pictures.

2009-06-11: Sunset near Seltjarnarnes

Later in the week, when Arnar left for a workshop in Dublin, I took the bicycle out for a ride. It was nice to get some exercise again, Reykjavík being considerably hilly. When I arrived at the university around midnight, I noticed that Willard was just arriving. We had some tea, met other people that were hanging around and viewed the sun set from the roof of the building.

2009-06-14: Bike trip to the RU and back

Master and Bachelor Graduation

Reykjavík University, being a rather small university (there is also the University of Iceland here), does the graduation ceremony in one go. So, I went with some friends of Arnar to attend his graduation on Saturday. Well, this was quite different from the one I had. This ceremony is for 420 (!) candidates at once, while mine was more personal. However, they make a big event out of this which speeches and musical intermezzos while mine was rather bare in that respect.

From 2009-06-13: Graduation Ceremony

After the ceremony there was a reception for all students followed by a party at Arnar’s. This party ended with hanging around in the kitchen for two hours, talking and laughing. This formula is the so-called “kitchen party” which seems to be an Icelandic thing.

Work

I ended my work here in Iceland on Tuesday with a lunch and meeting with Anna and Luca. We discussed our previous work and a way to supplement the results to be able to make it into a journal paper. The discussion was productive and we decided on a plan, so I’ll start with this somewhere in July when I return from my holidays!

Working in Reykjavík

Paul van Tilburg — 2009-06-11T00:00:00+02:00

So, I have been here in Reykjavík for a while, working, exploring, eating, sleeping. I must say, some things are totally different from everything I am used to (especially the surroundings, nature) and other things are very familiar (if not to NL, then to Scotland).

Work

I have been working at the Reykjavík University, a private university coexisting next to the University of Iceland. It is located across the street of a big mall which turns out to be very convenient for lunch and instant-need purposes. The Computer Science school has a “theory day” on the 19th and I will giving a talk which I am preparing now.

Leisure

Although I have been here for just a few things, I have engaged in many activities already. First of all there was the very nice hike to the waterfall Glymur. It has shown me a glimpse of the adventure and nature that Iceland can offer.

2009-06-09: Hiking to Glymur

2009-06-10: Stroll through Reykjavík

Besides that, the infinitely long days seems to induce a very relaxed, free view on planning. Having dinner at 23:15, going for a hike at 20:00, visiting the cinema at 22:30. This makes every work day still feel like a holiday.

Iceland, Here I Come!

Paul van Tilburg — 2009-06-05T00:00:00+02:00

I am all set for my trip to Iceland! (Well, except for the actual packing of stuff.) The purpose of the trip is a work visit and holiday combined. In the first week (maybe extended to 9 days), I will be working at the Reykjavik University on some process algebra things and possible present my past work. During my time there I can stay at the appartment of Arnar, whom I’ve met when he was attending our university for his Master’s. Thanks for providing me with accomodation and congrats with obtaining your Master’s degree! When my days at the RU are over, I will explore, tour, hike around the island with him and some of his friends. Very much looking forward to that!

Some travel information for Sunday June 7 (travelling with Iceland Air):

09:45	Leaving by foot/bus/train to the airport
14:00	Departure from Schiphol with flight FI503 (UTC+0200)
15:00	Arrive at Keflavik Airport (UTC+0000)

I will be returning on Sunday June 28:

16:30	Departure from Keflavik Airport with flight FI504 (UTC+0000)
21:30	Arrive at Schiphol (UTC+0200)

I will attempt to keep you all updated via this journal and/or the usual microblogging sources: Twitter / Jaiku / Luonica.

Work Update

Paul van Tilburg — 2007-12-11T00:00:00+01:00

Some information in the work department is past due. It has been over four months since I started my new job and I feel quite settled in. I attended two events in the past six weeks that resulted in some material that I could use to finally finish the missing parts of my website at work which I overhauled yesterday.

SIREN 2007

On 30 October, 2007, I attended SIREN 2007 to present my poster. The event was quite nice. However, since the scope had been broadened from Computer Science to ICT in general, the audience had little prior knowledge about the research area my poster was about. Anyway, it was nice to meet some people in the field and spend a day in Delft.

IPA Fall Days 2007

I spent the last week of November in Willibrordhaeghe, the conference hotel where the IPA Fall Days were held. I enjoyed this week very much. There were some good talks which also showed me what was happening on the other side of the fence. An Open Session was held where PhD could tell something about their work. I created some slides using the SIREN poster for my talk in this session.

The hotel was slightly cold, it was one of very small number of negative points of this event. Not that the organisers can be held responsible, the hotel was just badly insulated. The food was good, especially the lunches. The dinners were a bit all of the same, but I could vary, being the flexitarian. This however really confused the waiters. (Are you vegetarian or not?!) I also enjoyed meeting more of my PhD colleagues, playing various games and our endless discussions. Of course I made some pictures, just for memory sake. I’m quite confident I will attend the Spring Days. :)

Getting Rid of Titles

Paul van Tilburg — 2007-09-20T00:00:00+02:00

I propose that we get rid of names and titles, especially journal post titles. There are these annoying moments when you clearly know what you want to write but you can’t think of a fitting title, so you just don’t write it down and it is forgotten. It’s the inverse of the writer’s block, I think. It is similar to having a clear idea about a piece of code, a line of code, a function or a program in your mind, but you just can’t think of any suitable variable, function or program name. Designation by “brain-concept” would be far more preferable. Maybe that’s something to think about for the future. This concludes my excuse for not writing much the past few months.

Now that I at least have a title for this post, I might as well abuse it. Here are some things that I have been busy with the past few weeks:

Creating a poster for the SIREN (Scientific ICT Research Netherlands) 2007 event showing what my PhD project is all about. When it is finished I’ll link it from my university page.
Reading up on and toying with concepts related to my PhD project.
Continuing work on my paper based on my master’s thesis.
Assisting and tutoring students that are involved in two teaching related activities.
Working on LaTeX packages for typesetting process algebra and drawing graphs, transition systems in particular. I know that for the latter there are already some alternatives available, but I found the interfaces to be either overly complicated or too general.
Hacking on Camping/Photos. The first release should be ready soon. :)
Toying with the new Xorg 7.3 release and the related ATI driver updates with dynamic on-the-fly output (re)configuring.

Off to CONCUR 2007

Paul van Tilburg — 2007-09-02T00:00:00+02:00

I had some posts planned, but didn’t get around to it. I’m off to Lisbon for CONCUR 2007 now. I’m flying with TAP (flight TP661) at 18:05. I’ll be back next Saturday (September 8)!

Work Has Started

Paul van Tilburg — 2007-08-15T00:00:00+02:00

Two weeks ago I started my new job at the Formal Methods research group of the Department of Mathematics of Computer Science at the Eindhoven University of Technology. So, what have I been up to until now?

Well, as you can imagine it takes some time to settle down. I got a room with two other PhD students. I have installed my new (and fast!) computer with Debian Sid and am very happy about it. I have created my academic website using Webgen (like I do with all my sites), attempting to have it look the same as the main university site. I think I have succeeded. Next to the settling down I have been meeting all the people of our group and reading a lot of papers in my future area of research.

What will I be doing the next few weeks then? For the moment I’ll continue to do a lot of reading. My research is in the area of the automata theory and the process algebra and ways to combine them. Besides reading up on that I will be continuing upon my master project and try to get the result published. Also, my first conference has been planned! Yay! From September 2 till September 8 I will be in Lisbon to attend the CONCUR 2007 conference and also have a look around town, of course.

Next Stop: PhD

Paul van Tilburg — 2007-07-05T00:00:00+02:00

Just graduated… and now what? Well, I had the opportunity to choose among several options: a PhD position at the TU/e, a PhD position at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, or pursue a job at Google. After much consideration, I have chosen the first option. I found it to be impossible to decide based on the research assignment or the people I would work with, so I looked at more personal and practical reasons which led me to my current decision.

I will start my job on August 1, 2007 and hope to finish the PhD in 2011. My research will involve working on project MoCaP, Models of Computation: Automata and Process, in which we try to achieve a better integration of the concurrency theory with the classical theory of automata. The thought behind the project is to make undergraduate computer scientists more aware of concurrency theory.