Currybeer web site
For those of you who are regular or potential Currybeer attendees, the social event now has a new web site, currybeer.com, and two mailing lists for announcing and discussing the socials.
For anyone who hasn’t been before, Currybeer is a social event in Manchester, held on the first Friday of each month. The premise is simple: we go the pub, drink beer, go for a curry, then return to the pub for more beer – hence the name “Currybeer”. Beer is optional and soft drinks or tea are acceptable substitutes, but curry is compulsory.
(The pedantic amongst you might ask “why not BeerCurryBeer?”, but that isn’t quite as catchy as Currybeer).
posted by Paul at 10:20pm on Saturday 19th September 2009 | No Comments »
Thesis submitted
I have now handed in my thesis—fully printed and bound. According to the graduate office, they expect the examiners to report within six weeks, so in theory I could hear back as soon as the end of October. However, I can’t do anything until the University gets back to me one way or the other. For now though, I have a backlog of freelance work to do and a huge pile of research papers to recycle…
posted by Paul at 7:53pm on Wednesday 9th September 2009 | 1 Comment »
Thesis finished
After almost two years of research and writing up—a process hampered somewhat by needing to combine both tasks with running a freelancing business or having a full time job at the same time—my thesis is ‘finished’. At 121 pages, it is quite a substantial tome, containing about 80 pages of solid text, 30,000 words and 118 references. Including the supplementary technical reports, the whole thing grows to 150+ pages and 40,000+ words. Alas, it will probably only be read by five people in the entire world (myself, two supervisors and two examiners). 
I’ll be handing it in for binding tomorrow, and hopefully collecting it to hand over to the graduate office towards the end of the week. At that point I simply have to wait for the examiners to decide whether they want to bring me in for a viva or pass me on the basis of the thesis—either way the timetable indicates that I should definitely have a decision by Christmas, and in theory it could be as soon as mid-November.
The only question is, what do I do to fill the enormous gap that has been left by handing in the thesis?
posted by Paul at 10:39pm on Sunday 6th September 2009 | 1 Comment »
Autumn clean
This weekend I’ve been recalled back to my parents’ house to clear my old room so that it can be redecorated, which means going through the enormous amounts of stuff I’ve collected over the years and throwing out as much as possible. Some of the things I’ve found whilst sifting through the piles of paperwork and books include:
- A piece of art I bought in Paris ten years ago, still wrapped up.
- The Warped banner and a few books which escaped the library handover.
- Copy of the database schemas for Fuse FM (I hope they’ve changed the default admin password).
- Vote Labour poster (no idea how that got there!)
- Project log book, which thankfully no longer smells of perfume.
I also hadn’t realised how therapeutic it is to go through everything and make a concerted effort to weed out the unnecessary cruft, such as issues of computing magazines which are several years old and are therefore never going to be useful in the future.
On the thesis front I still have a few more small amendments to make – mainly minor changes to diagrams, restructuring a few paragraphs and adding a final conclusion. I’ve set a deadline of Thursday for the final version, so I can print it on Friday and hand it in for binding on Saturday – at which point it is over to all intents and purposes.
posted by Paul at 11:21am on Monday 31st August 2009 | 3 Comments »
Thesis (almost) finished
Got an email from my supervisor today, just a few minor changes needed to my thesis and a final summary of conclusions saying how brilliant the research is and then it is ready to submit! With any luck, I’ll be able to make the changes by Saturday, do one more full check for spelling/grammar mistakes, and then hand the whole thing in for printing and binding sometime next week.
posted by Paul at 6:25pm on Wednesday 19th August 2009 | No Comments »
First draft of thesis
After another week’s worth of work, I’ve got to the stage where I have a complete full first draft of my thesis, all the way from the abstract to the conclusions. It’s now in my supervisors’ inboxes awaiting comments, though at 30,000+ words and 113 pages I suspect it will be a while before they get back to me. In the meantime, I have to write another technical report describing how to run the proxy/parser software, which is mostly done and won’t take long to finish, and a final report outlining future work which builds on the thesis. There might be a conference or journal paper to write as well, though not until the final thesis is handed in.
Ideally now I would take a rest for a couple of days, but I still have a backlog of UKUUG work to process (emails to speakers from the recent conference, plus two newsletter articles and chairman’s report to write), a lightning talk to finish off for Manchester Free Software on Tuesday and freelance work to catch up on…
posted by Paul at 10:38pm on Sunday 16th August 2009 | No Comments »
Final chapter
I thought this would never happen, but I’ve just emailed the final chapter of my thesis over to my supervisors for initial comments. I now have until 14 September (allowing time for printing and binding before the final submission deadline) to iterate over the whole thesis as many times as possible to shake out any remaining typos, poorly worded paragraphs and confusing sentences. I just hope I don’t get asked for a viva (the examiners can dispense with the requirement if they think the thesis is good enough), otherwise it might drag on until Christmas…
posted by Paul at 9:41pm on Tuesday 4th August 2009 | No Comments »
Identify LaTeX symbols
Those of you who use LaTeX regularly (as I do, both for my academic work and other papers) might find this LaTeX symbol classifier helpful. Basically you draw the symbol you want to produce in LaTeX and it will provide you with a list of matching symbols and the commands to reproduce them. Far more useful than having to look up a huge symbol table or trying to guess what the command might be.
posted by Paul at 12:43pm on Saturday 25th July 2009 | No Comments »
My next degree
Degree in rhetoric from UCLAN. Very tempting. 
posted by Paul at 10:04pm on Tuesday 14th July 2009 | No Comments »
OpenTech, APIs and the T word
I was down in London last weekend for OpenTech, which was up to the usual high standard and full of useful talks on all manner of techy things. I made some useful contacts during the course of the day and have some ideas for how to take a couple of projects forward as a result. My hotel was cheap and cheerful, although the clamp for the shower was broken and the ceiling in the bathroom was so low that I had to crouch—I dread to think how anyone much taller than me would have coped.
Some boredom earlier this week made me decide to hack together a basic API for ScenicOrNot in response to a post on the mySociety mailing list. I’m quite pleased with how easy it was to get something up and running, as it’s been a long time since I did any programming for fun instead of research or work. If I get a bit of spare time this weekend I have a few extensions planned, such as returning all location points within a given set of coordinates (not entirely sure how this will work yet).
The T word is still coming along slowly, chapter 4 has now been provisionally accepted and I emailed across a first draft of chapter 5 this evening. Hopefully in the next couple of weeks I will have a complete first draft of the entire thesis ready, and then it’s just a case of going through as many iterations as necessary to produce the final version. I expect there will be several such iterations, but it’s much easier to tinker with an existing document with most of the words in place than it is to write something from scratch.
posted by Paul at 10:39pm on Wednesday 8th July 2009 | No Comments »