Two seminars: memory banks and WLAN

I went to two seminars in the IIT CS department on Thursday. It was just me and about fifteen grad students, a couple professors, and maybe a few confused undergrads. The talks were over my head, but not far enough over that I didn't understand them; just far enough over that I didn't fully grasp the context in which the points made should rest.

Talk 1: controller/hardware level memory allocation, and the correct (best worstcase scenario) way to redirect addressing functions between banks (because a bank based on an 8bit system with a 16bit address, which is the current norm, ends up only having 64KB of address space, and therefore there must be more than one bank... ) There was some discussion on NP hardness. Now, I had a bit of an introduction to NP[n] with Nazli and databases, but it was cursory. Here, have a semiuseful wiki page. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NP-hard

There was a debate about how this scheme works with vortexes. I don't know what a vortex is in this context; I'm under the impression that it's a pattern of behavior of a hardware system, or possibly an equation describing the behavior of a bank-selector-direction planning schema. Some googling brought up these links.

"The "Vortex" processor is a general purpose CPU with a novel architecture and instruction set." http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=4137031&userType=inst

"Vortex is a language-independent optimizing compiler infrastructure for object-oriented and other high-level languages." http://www.cs.washington.edu/research/projects/cecil/www/vortex.html

Talk 2: WLAN, network access points, accessibility, and algorithms (and business plans!) which will enable some users to be hop points, i..e transfer traffic through themselves (like using your smartphone to provide a mini wifi network for the guy with the netbook next to you on the train) in an automated way which compensates the guy with the phone for providing access to the guy with the netbook.

Calculating how much someone should be compensated for how much bandwith (and he didn't even mention battery life issues) and how to auto-sense things like which device is closest to the network connection point and how to minimize the number of hops... how to make a grid of access towers such that they're on optimal frequencies for not interfering with each other (because you know that the main wireless frequencies overlap with each other, so you shouldn't have a tower broadcasting on frequency 1 next to a tower broadcasting on frequency 1... much better to have a 1 next to a 4, etc.)

There were graphs showing optimal arrangements and equations showing how the interference amount was calculated. Throughput tradeoff with interference, charts of data. MUCA, MICA, RC, ADJ. (what are those? In context?) Company-set limits on maximum transfer point usage, etc to keep the cost curve in the right place. Large graph of user benefit, transfer point cost, transfer point benefit, and company benefit/cost...

I have seen the future, and it's based on equations.

Maybe you can get more out of the lecture descriptions than I can.

http://webservices.iit.edu/calendar/webCal3_detail.asp?event_id=5410

http://webservices.iit.edu/calendar/webCal3_detail.asp?event_id=5408

There are two more next week which I won't be able to go to because I'll be at #ghc10

Persistent links here:

http://webservices.iit.edu/calendar/webCal3_detail.asp?event_id=5420

http://webservices.iit.edu/calendar/webCal3_detail.asp?event_id=5421

New books!

1. Design Patterns by Gamma, Helm, Johnson, and Vlissides

I own this, and it is wonderful.

http://www.amazon.com/Design-Patterns-Elements-Reusable-Object-Oriented/dp/0201633612

Creational patterns, structural patterns, behavioral patterns. This book will blow your mind continuously and repetitively and probably make you enormously better at everything that you do that requires structure of any kind.

I'm reading it, and I keep having to look stuff up. It's wonderful.

These following four are from the "new books" shelves in the university library.

2. LINQ programming by Mayo c2009 http://www.amazon.com/LINQ-Programming-Joe-Mayo/dp/0071597832

LINQ is about databases. LINQ is to databases as web 2.0 is to 1995.

First sentence starts with "C# 3.0 and .NET 3.5 introduce a new set of language features and APIs for working with data called Language Integrated Query (LINQ)." So if you hate it already, go away and be a hater, because that's what the entire book is about. It actually looks pretty cool.

Here, have an uninformative Wiki link. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_Integrated_Query

3. Eyetracking Web Usability by Nielsen and Pernice c2010 http://www.amazon.co.uk/Eyetracking-Usability-Voices-That-Matter/dp/0321498364

Contrary to what I actually thought, this book is actually about what your eye looks at. Right now my eye is looking at the inside of my eyelid, because I'm tired and typing by touch. Dammit, typo. Go back and fix. Zone out while typing again- this time with eyes open but unfocused in the direction of my keyboard. Man, someone could make some serious revenue by sticking an ad in the whitespace to the right of the textbox that I'm typing in right now. Come on, people- the money isn't in ads on the blog, but in ads on the blog interface! Sooo many people blog that there's gotta be some serious money in there.

On the other hand I'd probably go a little mad if there was an ad there, especially if it were moving or blinking.

We're all guilty of immediately clicking the big button, then saying "oops" ...we're pretty well-trained lab rats.

One last note: lots of cool color pictures of websites with eyetrack patterns superimposed.

4. Six Themes on Variation, edited by Hardt. http://books.google.com/books?id=zuWttfJmexwC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Six+Themes+on+Variation,+edited+by+Hardt.&source=bl&ots=B7wgOJhzxL&sig=tgH2fBx9W1Jer7m9u6_EFHdjMjs&hl=en&ei=gZqaTO2NCsSnnQfCocntDw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CBIQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false

Calculus of variations! Little eentsy book. alephomega might <3>

5. Protectors of Privacy by Newman http://www.amazon.com/Protectors-Privacy-Regulating-Personal-Economy/dp/0801445493

It's a nontechnical book with discussions of politics and regulations, expertise as power (in online communities), and makes surprisingly little mention of encryption. it addresses the issue of court cases about what one person accessed that was illegal in their country but hosted in another country. Lots of international law issues. This book is very meta and summarizes itself a little often. The bibliography is long and beautiful. Was this someone's thesis?

I was hoping for more discussion of crypto.