Ninth Fleet Headquarters, Deep Space 9

Hello!

It's been quite a while since I logged in here (my last post was back in 2010)! Ryker caught me sneaking about on STO, and I felt I should probably check in and see what's going on these days. So, what's new?

Sideswipe! I was wondering if we'd ever see you again! Where the heck have you been??? And how have you been??
Well, what's new... hmmm... there's a leak on deck 4, section 12. Go fix it.

Short answer, I've been busy. When I was last about, I was in the swing of the final year of my undergrad. Things got very busy, very quickly. Also, sadly, illness occurred during exam time and I had to repeat one module the following year. Somehow I managed to scrape my way to a 2:1, and got accepted onto a funded PhD on the topic of timetabling and scheduling. I could give you the full title, but I don't want to bore you with the technobabble . I've been on the PhD now for almost a year, and it too has been extremely busy. I'm currently writing up my first conference paper, which if it's accepted will allow me to go on a nice trip to Belgium in August. Other than that, there's been the usual highs and lows that happen over a couple of years. Right now, things are good, though I'm getting more than a bit nervous for my differentiation in March (it's essentially a meeting to decide whether I can continue my research for the next two years).

Intercity125 wrote:Well, what's new... hmmm... there's a leak on deck 4, section 12. Go fix it.

Dammit Gadget, I'm just a simple country Battlestar Captain, not an engineer!

For god sake Jim I'm a doctor, not a pool man!

Ooooh! Well, glad to hear you're doing well now! And I think I can handle the technobabble xD.
So, what games do you play now? Bar STO?


And you're right... You're not an engineer... I am... I better go fix it myself.
*walks off,grumbling*

For the past couple of months, I've mostly been playing Civilization 4 with some friends in Belfast. My brother also convinced me to give The Lord of the Rings Online another go, as they'd just released a large expansion pack. There's also a hell of a lot of good indie games out at the moment, I heartily recommend To The Moon, Machinarium, and the Kerbal Space Program. Sadly my PhD keeps me so busy sometimes that I don't get to play games as often as I'd like.

As for the technobabble, my PhD title is "Inference-based Optimisation for Heuristic-based Scheduling Techniques". Basically I'm looking at improving the current heuristic algorithms used for timetabling and scheduling, with the end goal of being able to combine the consistency of deterministic methodologies (which are slow) with the performance of stochastic methodologies (which are faster), along with anything else that performs well. At the moment, I'm focusing on university examination timetabling, but the methodologies that I'm using are easily adaptable to almost any timetabling or scheduling problem. My current code is in C#, and is single threaded. The future work will be first in basic multi-threading, before we move onto GPU acceleration using CUDA or OpenCL. Assuming I pass my differentiation in March, it's going to be a fun couple of years!

CivIV eh... I never got my head around that game haha. Never liked it. .


and interested. Any particular reason you're using C#? Personal choice? I can see you're gonna have fun, so I wish you all the best for march! You're gonna pass with flying colours!

At the moment there's two main reasons for it. When I was doing my final year project on my undergrad, it was the language I was most comfortable using (besides Java). Also, my supervisor provided me a codebase to work from when I first started my PhD, which was in C#. The project is at some point going to move to C++, for performance and scalability reasons, but that is some stage off. I'll be implementing multi-threading initially in C#, so that I only need to worry about thread communication and safety. If I was to shift it to C++ as well, I'd also need to get my head around managing memory at the same time! If I can get the technique right, then it should be much easier to solve the memory management problem on its own

Yeah, that's what I was thinking, that C++ would have been the better bet in my opinion lol. But fair enough.
I didn't know you knew Java, I may have a question for you at some point

Good to have you back mate - its been far far too long

Holy shit. It's sideswipe! Long time, man. Nice to see that things are going well on your end.

Hey Arma. Long time yourself. How you been mate?

Well, all in all....better than I was last week, for sure. Last week, I went to the hospital, and got a wonderful CT scan. Turns out, I have kidney stones. Other than that, I'm busy pursuing a degree in Mechanical Engineering, likely with a minor in Mathematics. You know, I didn't think I'd enjoy integrating as much as I really do. On the fleet side, I have retired and "moved on". But, that's all previous history now.

Hey man,,,what's up???