This, here, is me trying it out. With any luck, the appearance of a new toy will get me back to actually blogging some more – it’s been winding down a bit much here lately.

This should be a temporary state, and I hope that the akismet issue solves itself soon.

What differentiated this offer from all other spam I get was that it was actually written well enough, and tailored enough, that I believe this guy would even go through with it. Only …

I am not interested.

I run this blog because I like running it. I do system admin myself too. The domain name is mine since my family wants it, and my parents chip in. The net connection also is something that the family chips in on, and is handled without significant cost.

All in all, I do not NEED ads to keep this place up and running.

Furthermore, I do not WANT ads here. I want this place to be my venue of expression. Not some advertiser or other. I want complete control of my content, and no bullshit with banners or whatever.

If you want me to recommend something of yours, make sure I get to try it. I write about things I end up liking occasionally, and the best way to get me to write about your things is to produce things I like and make sure I’m exposed to them.

But I will not publish your ads.

When I got back from T’bilisi, just over a month ago, I had research leads that I expect will end in three different publications.

I was slated with writing one LARP report for a swedish gaming magazine, and a series of various popular mathematics articles for the local student-run mathematics magazine here.

All in all, very many things converged this June/July for me.

It has started paying off though – the gaming article is published, and yesterday I submitted the first of the T’bilisi articles to the Journal of Homotopy and Related Structures as well as to the arXiv.

I now am listed on the arXiv with three papers, out of which one is already published, one is rejected (not unjustly so), and one is just submitted for review.

Note that the name changed for the last paper. I am cheating a very little bit – August 25th, I will marry the most marvelous woman I have ever met, and will – among other reasons for the sake of academic unicity – take her last name in addition to my own.

Aaaaanyway. This is my excuse for having missed .. what is it? three carnival issues?

It turns out, though, that
1. The plugin jumps on quoted perl code, interpreting it as mathematics. Bad things ensue.
2. It needs valid XHTML, which has not been a priority so far – and trying to validate it, the validator chokes on the &’s in my LaTeX array expressions for LaTeXrender.

Oh bugger. No iTeX and MathML for me.

Go take a look. Submit your own blog posts. And then check it out in a week – the carnival is scheduled for the 9th.

Hardware woes

The old computer running this website had some problem all of a sudden about 3 weeks ago. These problems appeared as a complete lockdown of the system – no response to anything. So my brother – with me on the other side of a telephone, tried to reboot the box; but couldn’t get it back up online again. He was headed out to a LARP anyway within hours – and so couldn’t really do much more about it.

Right.

End result? I joined forces with a good friend of mine; we split hardware costs for a slick new box – an Asus barebone box with a 64bit processor and a gig of RAM. It received the harddrive and network interface from the old box, and was with that good to go – only .. processor architecture changed; and so for optimal performance, it’d be a nice idea to actually use a new system install that took advantage of the extra available bitwidth.

A completely failed OpenBSD installation later, we settled for Gentoo – which now is humming along nicely. It even turned out to be surprisingly easy to restore the old data on the new box.

There. I won’t blather more about my hardware woes – but instead poke about other themes for a while.

Party party party

My students here for the course rock. The REALLY rock. We had the course evaluations a couple of weeks ago – and apparently my exercise sessions has been gooooood. At least the students thought so. I average in the upper fifth of possible ratings in every single evaluation area. All of them. I kick ass, yo!

Compared – both to the faculty mean, and to the workgroup results – I outperform in all evaluated areas.

And, in addition to this cause for celebration, the end of the school term (last week) comes with all manners of parties, celebrations, meets, and activities. I think I had my first non-planned evening in about 2-3 weeks yesterday.

Summer in the city

The Jena climate, though, leaves a bit to wish for. I sincerely long to get back to Sweden during the hottest summer weeks we have up there, in order for me to cool down a bit. We have had 25°+ since beginning of June (i.e. about 2 months of active time with weekly lectures, seminars and exercise classes – in tropical bloody heat); and the last about 2 weeks or so, the temperatures have been in the upper 30°ies.

Horrible. Horrible, I tell you.

And of course, this heatwave has coincided with the World Cup, the Thüringertage and several other huge parties that cover the town in DJ booths on the streets and drunk germans shouting on the streets at 3am.

This wouldn’t have had to be a problem, if it wasn’t for the fact that the main bar street begins at my front door. And the heat forces me to keep as many windows open as ever possible, lest I boil away in the night.

The wild swinging of the PhD topic

As I begun here, I was told that since the people here don’t know much about A_∞-algebras, operads, props and similar topics, so it’d be best if I shelf it and keep it a hobby. My advisor hesitated on suggesting one possible and highly computational theme since he couldn’t see any applications of it later on; no directions for further research. And so I studied group cohomology in order to at least try and understand what’s going on. (I’m getting there – by and by…) Then my advisor went to Oberwolfach for a week. Upon returning, A_∞-stuff is hot, operads seem related, the computational theme is worthy of serious consideration and I should consider whether I really want to commit that deeply to the original ring-theoretic ideas.

So … right now I know even less of what I’m going to do for my PhD than a month ago. On the other hand, one of the leads would amount to my programming for about half a year, and then publishing a paper about that and start using that program to gain intuition for results to put into the PhD. This might be a good direction to go.

The constant distractions

I’ve started looking at Haskell. I -like- it. It’s a language where I’m capable of hacking together an efficient algorithm for enumerating subsets just by thinking through what a subset is. How did you do it, you may ask, whereupon I answer: Recursion.

Consider a total ordering of your finite set. Pick the first element. For each subset, either this element is there, or it’s not. So if we take all subsets of the rest, and throw in once with and once without this particular element, we get what we want.

Now, just translate this to actual code – and the result is

Useful for parsing this is to know that : is the cons operator, and ++ concatenates lists. map applies the given function to all elements of the following list; and where lets you define local variables postfixedly.

A shoutout to sigfpe for piqueing my interest in these things enough to try and make sense of the language. Without his category theory heavy posts on Haskell, I wouldn’t have looked into it.

The migration was to a large portion motivated by commenting problems I’ve been told about. I hope that my readers out there will be able to comment now; possibly even without logging in!

I hope I will also actually gain a reader or two. Probably should get a technorati tagging plugin running to get this off its feet too – but that’ll have to wait a bit.