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What is my purpose in life?

Natural selection saw to it that professional heroes who at a crucial moment tended to ask themselves questions like "What is my purpose in life?" very quickly lacked both. -- Terry Pratchett (Interesting Times)

The First AUT Annual Programming Contest

Well, I can't really help it. I'm addicted and I can't just let go. If you wonder what is this about, I'm talking about programming contests. Well, if you had a good team such as mine and the memories like I have, you might have been feeling the same.

And now, there is yet another programming contest on the plate! AmirKabir has started a set of annual programming contests (May be after the 3rd IAUM-CCC, they felt they have been left out of the league!). Everything is just like ACM/ICPC contests; i.e. participants are teams of three and contests are around 5 hours with around 6-10 problems. The online round was held quite smooth, with the help of the UVa Online Contest System, and with rather a good problem set (and the result was quite good as well!). The on-site round is on 27th and I'm already depressed that I'm going to miss it (Anyone knows of any travel grants for such contest?). Anyway, I wish my teammates the best of luck and hope they'll repeat the experience we had in Babol. I hope they won't get a single Football as their prize though! ;)

Hack on!

Your code today becomes the mind tomorrow: Your plan its means, your dream its ends, your ideal its elegance. Hack on.-- Ken Shan

4th DYNAMO Workshop

Today I went to the DYNAMO Workshop. DYNAMO which stands for "Dynamic Communication Networks" is a research group, part of the COST program (European Cooperation in the Field of Scientific and Technical Research). Something like the IEEE's Technical Committees, but more organized and more limited (2 members from each EU country).

I have to admit that I couldn't understand some 70% of what was presented! That is, I could hardly get the problem definitions, let alone the solutions that where presented. At the end of the workshop, I told my Professor about it and he condolences me by saying this was very focused and specialized and some kind of the edge of the ongoing research in the topics presented. Anyhow, I feel really stupid and illiterate! :( I hope the speeches of tomorrow morning (DISC) would be better.

The whole thing was quite interesting though, I met some famous and cool professors from all over Europe and sat at lunch table with them (Felt really good!). There were also some 3 presentations, which although I couldn't quite understand the solution they presented, the problem statement itself was quite interesting for me. It also showed me how much I have lost by not studying things like Probability and Advanced Algorithm seriously.

DISC 2006

The 20th International Symposium on Distributed Computing (DISC) is hosted by SICS and held in Stockholm, 18 to 20th of September. I am going to help on the reception day and get a free ticket to attend the presentations later on.

There are some cool invited talks, namely:

• Provable Unbreakable Hyper-Encryption Using Distributed Systems,
  Michael Rabin (Turing Award Winner).
• Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of My Ideas about Distributed Systems,
  Leslie Lamport (Microsoft Research, it is said that "his research contributions have laid the foundations of the theory of distributed systems" [Wikipedia]).
• My Early Days in Distributed Computing Theory: 1979-1982,
  Nancy Lynch (MIT Professor, TDS group)

There is also the "4th DYNAMO Workshop" held a day before the actual conference, with some interesting sessions. I am interested in the third session in particular, where algorithmic topics like "Algorithmic aspects of DHT-based overlays", "Algorithmic Game Theory: Mechanisms with Verification" and "Building a peer-to-peer system from scratch" are presented (May be the last one isn't much algorithmic, but non the less, interesting).

Sounds interesting, doesn't it?

And thus I have to learn UML!

Yes, that is true! I have to learn UML. And not just learn to read and understand the diagrams, but to be able to create some complex ones! God help me. We need it for our Modern Methods in Software Engineering Course. Actually, that is something that supposedly I had to have learnt during bachelor studies (during the Software Engineering II course). But since I didn't budge at that time, I am almost an illiterate in this language.

Reading the specifications, it may seems to be easy in the beginning, but the hard part is when you actually try to draw one of the diagrams. Everything is vague and depends solely on your judgements. For example you have to decide whether a wheel and a bicycle have an aggregation relation or a composition relation! What could be called an entity and what could only be called an interface, etc.

The other problem is the choice of the tool. There are many UML tools out there and I have not managed to mak up my mind on which tool I'm going to use. My candidates at the moment are: ArgoUML, but it is java based; Poseidon, which is a good tool, not quite free and has problems with C++ as well; Rational Rose, it is perfect, but not free; Umbrello UML, it does everything and the interface is quite nice, but it is a KDE application. You may wonder why that could be a problem, well not a problem for me, but apparently it is going to be a problem for my teammate!! (A comparison list of UML tools if you are interested, it is in German though!)

Anyway, I always used to claim that I'm fond of learning new languages, however obscured they may be. I have to add an exception here, to exclude modeling languages!

And let there be light!

Well, I'm just going to start writing and skip giving reasons and motivation and so on and so forth! As you can see, I have decided on English over Persian (I am Iranian, where Persian is the official language.). You may ask why, I should say it has a long story and I am going to relieve you of the details, let's just say I used to write in Persian for some time and now I'm going to give English a try. I hope the long and dark winter ahead (here in Stockholm) and the extreme amount of course work we have (SEDS, KTH) would not extinguish the light of my new venture!