Your Personal Statement should be a brief but carefully written essay regarding: 1) your reasons you want to do graduate work in this particular field, 2) your specific interests and experiences in this field, 3) any special skill or experiences that may relate to an assistantship, and 4) your career plans.
—–

One of the most important lessons that I’ve learned during my time as an undergraduate student is that computer science is a continually evolving field. Specific languages and procedures that I use now might be rendered useless by new developments in theory or technique at any moment. Keeping abreast of current developments is a requirement just to survive in the job market.

However, I’d rather not just tread water, just keep afloat. I’d rather be part of the group pushing the envelope of what can be done with computers; I’d rather be writing the papers than reading them. Undergraduate studies are a step toward a career coding; they bring one up to speed with curent practice. Graduate studies are the next leap forward; they transform my role from that of a learner to that of an innovator.

WPI’s undergraduate computer science curriculum is project-based. Among other things, this means that before graduation, I complete two projects for class credit: the IQP is worth one class of credit, and the MQP is worth three. The former involved the development of a tool to aid people unfamiliar with computers with the process of setting up a complex database-backed web system. The latter, currently in progress, seeks to extend the Napkin Pluggable Look and Feel (napkinlaf.sourceforge.net) by creating a system which generates icons which look as if they had been hand-drawn, as the icons are called for.

The only common elements between those projects is that they both represented a significant amount of research, of delving into programming territory unfamiliar to me. I learned enough from the first project to qualify as a PHP/MySQL expert at the job I got subsequently; I expect to emerge from the MQP an authority on both Java PLAF technology and the specific graphical tricks involved in tricking people into thinking that a human drew something machine-generated. Some of my most interesting classes have been in AI and pattern recognition. I enjoy extending myself, branching into new areas and fields.

I don’t yet know what I will do after graduate school. I certainly wouldn’t mind doing pure research; holding a job learning things so new I’m the first person to get there could certainly be interesting. Alternately, I’ve had the idea for some time now that it might be fun developing intelligent opponents for computer games. For the moment, I intend to keep my options open.

One of the major reasons I look forward to graduate school is that I often read an article from one news source or another about a really interesting project being carried out by a team of graduate student researchers. Be it developing a control system for DARPA’s unmanned vehicle race, or a system which can beat most people at 20 questions, there are all sorts of interesting developments being made in the computing world today. Linus Torvalds was a graduate student when he wrote Linux. I want to make my mark too.

Any suggestions or comments are appreciated–I have a month before this is due…

PHP reserves all function names starting with __ as magical. It is recommended that you do not use function names with __ in PHP unless you want some documented magic functionality.

This sort of thing reminds me of why I’m fond of programming: it is the closest people have come yet to genuine wizardry.

On the minus side, I just spent several hours of coding to accomplish a small portion of what could probably have been done much better with about the same investment in time, spent configuring. On the silver-lining side, I now have a much better working notion of how PHP and MySQL actually work together, and the sorts of things they like and dislike.

Now, to sleep. My luck has been good recently; I’ll hope that my advisor isn’t too disappointed with last week’s progress. We meet in 7 hours, most of which time I will spend sleeping. However, this last week has been the first one so far in which my project partner and I haven’t met our weekly goals. Oh well. I suppose that just means that we’ll have to actually work in the coming weeks.

I’m pretty sure I’ve set the config to the proper directory, but it doesn’t seem to be working for some reason.

[edit 20080719]

This post doesn’t have the solution; five years later, I still have no idea how to make this work. On the other hand, I’ve had good experiences with lighttpd since then; try just using that instead.

I found out that I have enough money to pay to live here. This was a surprise, but it is good news.

The person who had my Palm Pilot for three weeks IMed me, said “Come to Founders and I’ll give your Palm Pilot back.” I came, he gave it back, in perfect condition. No indication as to why a three-week delay, but I’m not complaining. I wasn’t expecting to see it again.

Bad news is that I seem to have come down with the disease of the moment. As of right now, symptoms are limited to a runny nose, but I don’t know if they’re going to get worse or better. Also, I figured out that the video card that got put into my computer by the repair techs doesn’t do 3d at all. I’m currently waiting for Ebay to validate me so that I can bid on a replacement card of the kind I originally had. I expect to be able to get one for less than $20, including shipping.

Another inconvenience: I haven’t played with PHP since WPI changed the way it worked a while ago… until today. Now, having played with it, it seems that the new ‘security upgrade’ that they performed incidentally eliminates all error messages before I get to see them. Which means that if anything is wrong, from a dropped semicolon to a miscalled function, my only indication is that the entire program doesn’t work.

I may be installing Apache and PHP on my local machine in the near future, so that I can attempt to make functional pages again.

The only language I’ve ever used in which the graphical element has been fairly unobtrusive and simple was PHP. I suspect that it’s because PHP was built from the ground up to take the input and output functionality of HTML and run with it, as it merges very well with HTML code and fits the general style, and has no other obvious input or output methods. This was a good choice, because HTML itself was designed to be a interface design specification language of a high degree of power and flexibility, yet simple enough to be hand-coded without significant trouble.

The reason I’m mentioning all of this is that I’ve started to look into the how and why of creating a graphical desktop application for Linux. I would be doing this for Windows, but I no longer use that operating system. This is all leading into the creation of the graphical SCP client eventually. Right now, I’ve created a rather useless hello world program which, nonetheless, runs on the KDE desktop. However, I was following a tutorial rather closely. Next on the menu: creating a program of my own design and specification (a simple digital clock which I can resize with the font size adjusting accordingly, perhaps with alarm and/or analogue mode).

Why do I program and learn during summer vacation, when I could be mindlessly bent on relaxation? I’ve relapsed into a seminocturnal sleeping schedule, and there are only so many novels I can read…

The fun part about working with frames is that I can keep the old php code in all the other frames where it’s still the best-suited language.

on the plus side, I got all my christmas shopping done and everything wrapped. also, I may get to go skiing with my family over the weekend.

… not much more is going on right now. went to worcester today, so I spent many, many hours on the road… it was raining all day… I like rain…

I would be asleep right now, but I got up after tossing and turning for an hour. when that happens, I’m obviously not tired enough.

I think that one of the main benefits of handling it in this class-based way is that I can create subclasses whenever necessary, which means that I can handle all the really funny-formatted comics properly. Right now, I’m thinking of Demonology 101, which currently isn’t even in the directory because (1) it only updates once a week, and (2) it has a format so alien to the current directory structure that it’s impossible to parse.

Of course, one thing that I’m going to have to watch out for is load time. Already, it takes upward of 30 seconds to generate the webcomics directory, though most of this is because it has to load at least the index.html for each comic in the directory to give it a shot at parsing. With the new code, I can only increase the overhead processing time on the server, because I’m handling things at a higher level. One thing I want to attempt to combat that is to multithread the process, so that each call out to a foreign server happens (relatively) simultaneously. Of course, that would make this my first multithreaded program ever, and I’m not looking forward to it; everything that I’ve heard about it makes it sound hairy. Also, this would realistically force me to buffer all output until all the threads are finished processing, at which point I’ll need to flush everything… hopefully this’ll all happen fast enough that I don’t run into time-out errors on the client side…

For the moment, I’m going to be putting all my test implementations here, in case you want to see a buggy work-in-progress.

Of course, this means that I’m going to have to teach myself SQL in general, the mySQL implementation in PHP, the way PHP handles classes, all about multithreading… I think that’s all I’ll have to learn, for the moment, but I might discover more once I start coding.

Wish me luck!

At least now I have an idea as to how to approach the problem. It’s a start. And I’m still waiting for TauCeti’s source files; at this rate I’ll have figured it out myself before he gets them to me…