Paul's Web Pages

10 Years of Spacelabs

Paul van Tilburg — 2010-11-21T00:00:00+01:00

A few months ago I realised it has been 10 years already since Spacelabs ¹ was founded. Today we will celebrate that with a reunion and probably reminisce about past projects, events and experiences. Therefore, I thought it would be nice to accompany this with a post.

The past

Spacelabs was founded to create something that sits in between research and consumer appliances. Since we are associated to the Electro-Optical Communication group these things often had to do with bandwidth. For example, showing the ease of use of plastic optical fiber or participate in GPRS/UMTS trials. However, due to the loose structure of Spacelabs, we ventured into many other projects of our own such a information system-enabled fridge with a barcode reader, a dynamic DNS system, etc. At some point we got our own Internet connection with an accompanying subnet. It has been fun and rewarding to learn how to setup and run a mini ISP.

Spacelabs doesn’t have any formal structure: when you are on the mailing list, you are a member. There are no regular meetings, no hierarchy, no obligations. So in some ways, we are a group that is much like a free/open source software community. I think that this approach has provided us the drive to work both on projects during our free time as well as our own ideas.

I feel that Spacelabs has contributed so much to my life. It might not be the typical study association, but it was a big supplement to my studies, it was fun and it was completely ours. Not only did it teach me many, many technical things—from networks to program languages to software design—but it also gave me experiences on other levels, such as very attuned group work and responsibilities for key systems.

The future

Soon, everyone connected to Spacelabs will have finished their Master’s or PhD (in my case) and nobody will be left to continue the project. Although this is a bit sad, I think we can be proud of what we have accomplished, learnt and experienced. I will miss our location high in the “Potentiaal/E-hoog” building overlooking Eindhoven, and our being together as a group. We are however not gone yet, there is still a lot to plan and to work on if we want to rescue the huge amount of servers and services that we have accumulated over the years if we were to leave…

¹ Yes, the website is very much from the past.

Master Project Finished

Paul van Tilburg — 2007-06-06T00:00:00+02:00

Yesterday, I have completed my master project with a presentation of my work and a defence of my thesis. I got awarded a 9 (out of 10) for my entire project. It is a result that I am very happy with and am very proud of. This result will allow me to get my Master of Science degree with honours on June 19, after the exam committee has checked everything. Note that the diploma will be handed out not on June 19, but on August 28, because I am on my holiday and at Debconf in Edinburgh the next two weeks.

Thanks everyone for attending my presentation, joining the “celebration lunch” afterwards, and all the encouraging words and kudos. :-)

Master Project Take 2 and 3

Paul van Tilburg — 2007-05-30T00:00:00+02:00

I just realised that I forgot to post about take 2, so I’ll combine it with this post about take 3. The past five months I’ve been busy with examining the effect of restriction on CCS with parallelism. We decided to do this in two steps. First (take 2) we considered interleaving of actions, and then (take 3) we added communication. The case with only interleaving of actions went smoothly; it worked out as a nice extension of the case without parallelism. However, when we looked at the case with interleaving and communication, it started to become troubling. I ran into all kind of complications and the risk of failure I described in a previous post seemed to come true. However, I think we managed quite well to catch a large part of the problems and describe them, and also offer possible solutions. In the end, I’m quite happy of the result.

So, today I can present the final version of my Master’s Thesis: “Finite Equational Bases for CCS with Restriction”. Yay! I have just submitted it for reproduction. The final presentation of my project will take place June 5, 2007 at 10:00 in the main building of the university, HG 6.29. If you’re interested and are able to attend, consider yourself invited. I want to thank Bas Luttik for his large amount of feedback, clear explanations and guidance, without him the project wouldn’t have worked out as well as it did now.

Almost finished, 6 days remaining…

Schedule Spring 2007

Paul van Tilburg — 2007-04-06T00:00:00+02:00

Since Spring is well underway, I wanted to post a sort of schedule summary of my activities in the following three months. First of all, I have registered and booked the flight for Debconf 7, yay! I can stay with friends of mine that I know from the time I worked in Edinburgh. I want to thank Krzysztof for this offer, it saves a lot of money and it will be nice to catch up.

Besides Debconf, there are also several nice parties and events this spring, and of course the completion of my master project.

2007-04-19: Finish my Master Project paper
2007-05-16: Finish my Master thesis
2007-05-17: A State of Trance 300 celebration outdoor
2007-06-01: Master Project presentation (date not definite)
2007-06-12 — 2007-06-26: Attend Debconf7, holiday in Edinburgh
2007-07-19: Official graduation date (ceremony postponed till 2007-08-28)
2007-07-07: Intuition Summer event!

And after that,… who knows? It probably should involve some work in the summer and maybe an ad-hoc holiday. I’m looking at several options: maybe do a PhD, maybe working for Google or maybe something completely different. More about that later.

Space Efficient Algorithms

Paul van Tilburg — 2007-03-01T00:00:00+01:00

Last Tuesday I finished my paper about Space Efficient Algorithms and Histograms that will comprise most of the grade of my last remaining Master course, Advanced Algorithms. While I’ve been mostly enjoying writing this paper, I am glad it is finished for several reasons, one of them being able to do other things than just working on it and another is that it allows me to focus fully on my Master Project which is starting to progress nicely. (More about this later.)

FOSDEM 2007

Due to the amount of time I needed to work on the paper, the need to save money (I really would like to go to Debconf7) and that the scheduled talks didn’t seem to interest me that much, I decided to break with tradition and not to go to FOSDEM this year.

Just before FOSDEM, however, it seemed that lots of the people I would have liked to meet did go. While that was a pity, I hope to meet them in three months at Debconf7.

Bachelor of Science

Paul van Tilburg — 2006-11-29T00:00:00+01:00

After finishing Hypermedia and History of Computing in October I was ready to meet the requirements of the bachelor’s exam. I passed it on November 14 and received my Bachelor of Science in Computer Science last Monday.

While before the BaMa (Bachelor Master) system was introduced this 3-year milestone might have meant nothing at all, so it feels kind of odd that I have finished a study now. I’ve updated my CV. I hope I can do this again soon, namely when I’ll finish my Master of Science…

Hypermedia

Paul van Tilburg — 2006-10-17T00:00:00+02:00

This weekend I was finally able to finish (after 7 days of full-time labour) the assignment of my last pending bachelor course: Hypermedia Structures and Systems. The assignment of this purely on-line course consisted of the conversion of a linear document to a hypertext one. This meant splitting the document in dozens of nodes and then going through each of them (iteratively) and linking them together using several techniques while keeping useful guidelines in mind.

While discussing this assignment with Bas we decided it would be nice to build the site using Webgen. Webgen is good at transforming nodes that just contain text (with a bit of Textile markup) to nice XHTML 1.1 valid pages. We also extended Webgen with a few plug-ins: one to create links to nodes without having to mention the paths but just using unique identifiers. That way we were sure the links were also always pointing to the right page. The other plug-in we wrote was to be able to do bibliography stuff a la LaTeX.

I am quite satisfied with the result, which will be graded this week. ;)

Atanasoff

Paul van Tilburg — 2006-10-03T00:00:00+02:00

There was no real known reason why our essay for the course History of Computing was overdue, but Bas and I finally managed to finish it yesterday. Almost two years we have been postponing writing it, slowly collecting and reading more material, but after a few weekends of hard work, it is done:

John Vincent Atanasoff: The Inventor of the Digital Computer (copyrighted under CC SharedAlike 2.5)

The essay tries to acknowledge Atanasoff’s accomplishments, the ABC, and ideas that we still find in our computers today (binary system, regenerative memory, separation of calculation and memory and calculation by electronics and logic). Without these ideas and the derivations that found its way into the ENIAC, the world would’ve been a different place for sure.

I was surprised by the increased amount of work it requires to write a work covering a historical topic. For each sentence you write down, you either have to do a lot of research, you have to make sure it is objective or if it is not objective you have to find a source backing up what you are stating. This way, writing 1,5 pages on an average Saturday is a lot, comparing to writing a report about some practical assignment, which is fairly easy and straightforward. Even more so since our topic is surrounded by controversy.

Master Project - Take 1

Paul van Tilburg — 2006-09-20T00:00:00+02:00

Today I have effectively started with my Master Project! I have been been at it for a few days already in the past weeks though, but now I’m sitting on my own spot working on some proofs.

So, what am I actually doing? Well that’s still hard to put in words yet and it also requires some process algebra and general math prior knowledge, but I’ll try.

My graduation supervisor is Bas Luttik and in July he co-published a paper on defining a finite equational base (a set of equations from which all others can be derived) for a specific process algebra called CCS. This paper used a specific subset of CCS, namely without restriction (hiding) and relabelling. Restriction is an operator of the process algebra to block certain actions of happening, relabelling is an operator to replace actions by other actions.

Take 1 of my project is to try to consider this algebra with restriction and finding a new equational base and proof that either it works or it can not be done. This is a risky assignment because it can lead to: we have tried but haven’t gotten either results. The short period to come will entail considering CCS with restriction but without concurrency to drastically reduce the cases to be considered. If we succeed, we’ll continue with CCS with restriction and concurrency. If we do not succeed it’s quite possible we’ll change my project assignment.

More to come!

Journal Alive Again

Paul van Tilburg — 2006-07-01T00:00:00+02:00

After replacing the laptop disk of my “server” that was failing yet again, my journal is alive again. I already had to replace the disk in November 2005. Of course, I cannot expect it to run for more than 7 months.

Anyway, holiday is near! I will leave for France (Perret, Bretagne) with friends and will really be gone for two weeks. I will leave July 8 and return on July 22. I am looking forward to this, especially because this is going to be my first real “external” holiday in 3 years.

Study

The study is going smoothly. I have almost finished my exams and the ones I have done so far went quite well. I had to change my planning though, since I was asking too much of myself. A feasible, less ambitious planning will get the job done much better than an overfull, too ambitious plan (4 courses, 4 assignment and 10 hours of work per week). While everybody is probably consciously aware of this, including me, I had to learn it the hard way.

After my holiday I plan to finish the pending thee assignments that I have been postponing for years and then, September 1, start with my 6 month Master project. I hope to finish the project and get my MSc somewhere in April 2007, so near… :)

Debian/Ruby

I noticed that the Debian Python team beat us to it with the rigorous policy changes. The Debian/Ruby Extras team has been planning quite some changes for a few months but actually haven’t gotten around to discussing about it and doing some real proposals. Meanwhile the team grown in numbers of members and packages and everything is running smoothly (except of course for some issues concerning the current policy). I hope to activate that process in or just after the summer holidays.

Gaia Contemplation

Paul van Tilburg — 2006-04-23T00:00:00+02:00

For the course Big History (taking history a little further back than just written history) I have been reading up on Lovelock’s Gaia Theory. Despite the existing criticism on that theory it still made me wonder… Given that life on Earth seems to exists for at least 3 billion years and that it is increasing in complexity (Fred Spier). Also given that to increase this complexity the biosphere has made an uncountable large number of optimisation attempts in this period, most of which we have no knowledge about. It occurred to me that as our human history is nothing on the scale of this process, we as species must be just such an attempt. Now that puts doing the almost biweekly laundry in a completely different perspective.

Internship

Paul van Tilburg — 2005-10-26T00:00:00+02:00

I have fixed my Hobix setup, so I can write again. There was some problem/incompatibility with the new Ruby 1.8.3 in sid concerning the YAML implementation.

A lot has happened in the past 7 weeks so I don’t know really where to start. I think I’ll start with the current hot item in my life: the internship that I am arranging. I’m planning to visit Scotland, Edinburgh in particular. There, at the Heriot-Watt University I will work on MathLang under the supervision of Fairouz Kamareddine (in Scotland) and Rob Nederpelt (here at the TU/e). MathLang is a mathematical language that will provide support for checking well-formedness and allow for better formalisation while also being usable in the digital world. What my exact assignment will be, I do not know yet, I will hear the specifics soon. For now I know that it has something to do with LaTeX, TeXmacs and Guile GNOME implementation-wise.

I really am excited about going there for three months already, but there is still a lot of stuff to arrange, both financially and formally. I received an extra scholarship today from a faculty institute which helps a lot in the financial department. Now, if I could just have all the form stuff done, I am ready for the local long-term holiday arranging kinda stuff :). Stay tuned…

Trimester 4.2

Paul van Tilburg — 2004-11-27T00:00:00+01:00

With trimester 4.1 (4th year, 1st trimester) finished, it is almost time to start the next already. The exams went fairly well, but have yet to see what became of all them and the assignments and projects. I’ve chosen these as my Master subjects for the next trimester (although the first three are obligatory):

I’ve also got some 3rd year subjects I’ll have to retry (yet again):

And these are subjects that I started last trimester/year, which I will be finishing next trimester too:

History of Computing (write essay)
Hypermedia Structures and Systems (do final assignment)

Hrm, still a lot… but I am going to enjoy this trimester, it’s more in the formal but also practical corner. Anyway, first a long weekend, time to get some free software stuff done.

Exam weeks

Paul van Tilburg — 2004-11-18T00:00:00+01:00

I haven’t written for weeks yet again. It’s has been such busy days, finishing projects, writing essays, etc. With only two exams left, it’s calming down now, and the Monday after the last exam, it’s starting all over again! :-) I have rejected a job for next trimester that I was asked for. With far less subjects (five) than in the past trimester (eight), I hope I can put some more time in Debian, RPA and other things I’ve planned.

GOAT!

The most interesting and time-consuming project in the past trimester was GOAT!, our Goal-Based Object-oriented Interactive Teacher. It allowed me and other to program Ruby all day long, using the IOWA framework. Final results: a rule-based intelligent-agent, that guides you through a hypertext course by hiding links to pieces you are not ready for and showing them later on, providing navigational help, tests to measure your knowledge level and suggestions to useful parts to read. Hereby I want to thank Kirk Haines, IOWA’s author, for his assistance, speed, insights and work that made our project a success.

HCC days

I visited the HCC days (largest computer stuff fair in the Netherlands) last weekend and bought mostly small stuff. Besides that, some friends and I acquired an IBM Netfinity 5000 (details) and are getting the second CPU next week :) It’s a nice machine, already named cube, and am confident we can put the thing to good use.

GOAT!

Paul van Tilburg — 2004-10-16T00:00:00+02:00

I have been working on GOAT! — Goal-based Object-oriented Adaptive Teacher the whole week (besides lectures and stuff). This was again for the Intelligent Systems course. It is the reincarnation of our Ruby Tutor project which was dropped earlier as a possible idea.

For the HTML page/templating framework, I have been using Iowa, a Ruby object based framework. I must say, once you’ve understood how it works, it is really nice! A HTML page together with its code (separate files though) together form a page class, that is instantiated and kept in a session for every user visiting. It allows you to think of a page as the object with which the user’s agent interacts, keeping a state (by means of instance variables). It also allows you do Ruby like iterations in HTML:

@item.name

simulating itemList.each { |item| ... }. Note that <ul/> is transformed by Iowa, since UL it is a subclass of a more generic repeater (you can always use <repeat/>).

I also would like to thank the author (Kirk Haines) for writing this piece of software and helping me out a lot of times. I think Iowa has a somewhat steep learning curve at first, but it gets better after a while I hope we can fix this by providing information regarding where the hard parts are, where more examples are needed, and so on.

Ruby Tutor cancelled

Paul van Tilburg — 2004-10-02T00:00:00+02:00

The plan to program a Ruby Tutor as I earlier posted last week has been cancelled. It seems that the purpose of the project for the Intelligent Systems course wasn’t clear enough to us.

Since I (we) have no time at all this trimester for such a large project and the major imperative to do implement is now gone, I don’t think it’ll ever happen. Sorry!

Ruby Tutor

Paul van Tilburg — 2004-09-25T00:00:00+02:00

For the Intelligent Systems course, we have to write an intelligent agent as a project. We came up with the idea to write a Ruby Programming Language Tutor. The agent should learn someone without programming or at least OOP knowledge the Ruby language. The agent does this by giving the student interactive lessons consisting of small explanations, examples and exercises on a certain topic. I’ve posted our idea to the Ruby Talk mailinglist, got some reactions so far, but would’ve liked to have more. Well, maybe that will happen when I post more concrete ideas, providing we’ll go with this idea anyway.

SEP essay

Paul van Tilburg — 2004-09-17T00:00:00+02:00

We, Dippsoft, finally managed to deliver our essay for the Software Engineering Project 2003/2004. We started somewhere halfway November 2003 and yesterday, we have finished our final (extra) assignment. I am so glad that it is over and am looking forward to our closing dinner next week! :-)

A new month, a new year

Paul van Tilburg — 2004-09-04T00:00:00+02:00

A clean slate, a new month and a new academic year. Althought the academic officially starts a September 6, my university thought ahead and started a week earlier. This also means we’ll stop a week earlier, can’t wait already. :) The trimester started as I expected, it is busy already. Now it’s just the trick to make working on all assignments and reading stuff a regular thing and all will go well. I haven’t had any lecture from Software Architecting yet (the subject I will follow with some relucatance), but all the other subjects seem nice and fun. Last Thursday and Friday I took the time to watch some movies (finally). I watched Jackie Brown and The Last Samurai on those days respectively. I always enjoy those Quinten Tarantino movies, they’re so different, got more real conversations and details. I also enjoyed watching The Last Samurai. I finally saw the pictures that suited the beautiful soundtrack I bought a few weeks ago. It’s such a strong combination, but I guess.. noone perceives this as I do though. Time for bed… a lot of assignments to finish tomorrow!

Bachelor/master

Paul van Tilburg — 2004-08-17T00:00:00+02:00

I had a meeting with the study advisor today to clear the bachelor/master confusion up. Since some of my 3rd year subjects are still pending results, I can’t start my Master CSE yet, but I’ll switch as soon as I have enough ECTS points. But first I’ll have to get by Bachelor, for which besides the pending results, I still need to finish 4 subjects. It seems it’s going to be a hell of a year. These are the Master subjects I have selected for trimester 4.1:

Software Architecting
Information Security
Intelligent Systems
Program and Modal Logic
The Linux Operating System
Complexity (retry this 3rd year subject)

and these are the subjects that started last year, which I will be finishing next trimester too:

History of Computing (write essay)
Hypermedia Structures and Systems (do final assignment)
Software Engineering Project (finish this 3rd year project)

I am also going to tutor/give:

Compilers (practicum only)
OGO 2.1 (tutor)

I fixed my bicycle today… finally! The front tire is brand new! It wasn’t that much work anyway, I have no idea why I kept postponing it. It’s funny to notice how close everything is to where I live, but despite that a bike is still preferable.