Older blog entries for isenguard (starting at number 7)

Chapter finished

Finished another thesis chapter today. Only a couple more of the technical chapters to go, and then the bulk of the work is completely finished.

Long time...

Well, no update for ages, mostly because I’ve been away quite a bit. Since the last posting:

• Played in goal for my first football game for St Mike’s, and got man of the match. That was partly because I lost a contact lens 10 minutes into the second half, with the result that I could see two balls for most of the rest of the half, but still somehow managed not to let any goals in.
• Spent most of last week in London having job interviews, and have now got a job.
• Went to my last York house group; really sad to leave everyone there.
• Had my second and last St Mike’s game, this time letting three goals in.
• Got very little thesis work done.

House group

Church house groups started again this week, with a social evening last night.

Circuit training

Matt and I went to circuit training at the Sports Centre again yesterday. Matt had a particularly enjoyable time: lots of football skills, and the instructor misheard his name and spent the whole evening calling him “Emmet”.

Skippy Music goes live

Went round to Dave’s for dinner last night, and had a look at the website for his record label, Skippy Music. All looking very nice, and I’m hopefully going to be able to listen to some clips from the album soon, once he’s got his monitors hooked up again. After dinner we ended up having an extended discussion with Claire about capital punishment (Dave and I pro, Claire anti).

I was intending to play football with the St Mike’s team beforehand, but my lift didn’t turn up.

Went back into work later, and had quite a long chat to Steve. Apparently we’ve got a £50 gas bill, which seems a little excessive given that the heating’s not on at the moment.

This morning my phone (an Ericsson T610) decided it wasn’t going to turn on, so now I’ve got to take it back to the shop to see if they can fix it up.

Phone trouble

This morning I went to Vodafone to get my phone fixed. As I expected, they are going to have to send it away, so I’ll have to wait a couple of weeks before I get it back (probably minus the phone book). Annoyingly, the first phone they gave me (a very beaten-up Nokia 8210) had a broken microphone so I’m now stuck with a horrible Siemens handset.

NR experiments

Kicked off experiments for the final variant of <span class="caps">NR</span> during search.

Optimal Golomb Rulers

bram: you might be interested in this paper and those referenced by it on using CSP models and search algorithms to solve OGR problems.

Model Checking

raph: I was interested in your reference to model checking. I work on SAT algorithms, and at least for some hardware model checking the state of the art is to encode the BMC problem as a SAT problem and solve that. Have a look at NuSMV for a free model checker that does all sorts of clever stuff.

pcburns: Despite God being able, if he wished, to do anything we can do (and do it better), he chose to first create us and then send his Son to redeem us.

This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. - 1 John 4:9

It is his love for me that motivates me to act in service to him. God chose to give me a purpose in life, even though he was under no obligation to (and from a human perspective, he has no reason to).

> Which brings me to a point. Are there any *good* scriptable
> OpenSource plotting programs. Gnuplot doesn't count.
> Compared to any of the "worthwhile" graphing programs on
> Win32 (Origin, IgorPro, and Kaliedagraph), it blows
> massive chunks. I need something good enough to do
> neutron scattering curve fits, and able to print out
> professional quality graphs for publication.

macricht: Try R (see http://www.r-project.org/. It is mostly a statistics package, but it includes an excellent plot engine and is an implementation of the S language (so it is completely scriptable). I don't know if it can do the curve fits you need, but its output is certainly good enough for professional publication. There is also a great community of R users and developers if you have questions about R or its use.