A graduate school survival guide: "So long, and thanks for the Ph.D.!"

Brief description

A computer science graduate school survival guide, intended for prospective or novice graduate students. This guide describes what I wish I had known at the start of graduate school but had to learn the hard way instead. It focuses on mental toughness and the skills a graduate student needs. The guide also discusses finding a job after completing the Ph.D. and points to many other related web pages.


"So long, and thanks for the Ph.D.!"

a.k.a.

"Everything I wanted to know about C.S. graduate school
at the beginning but didn't learn until later."

The 4th guide in the Hitchhiker's guide trilogy
(and if that doesn't make sense, you obviously have not read Douglas Adams)

by Ronald T. Azuma

v. 1.08

Original version 1997, last revised January 2003

http://www.cs.unc.edu/~azuma/hitch4.html

Date arithmetic with shell or perl

http://www.unix.com/answers-frequently-asked-questions/13785-yesterdays-date-date-arithmetic.html

Windows Movie Maker: Superimpose xml

Found that superimposing image over video is not so intuitive in Movie Maker. Will try it out tonight!

Here's an example found on: http://www.windowsmoviemakers.net/Forums/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=194964&


<title name="PapaJohn Overlay 25" iconid="13">
<param name="InternalName" value="TitleStandard">
<param name="Description" value="Superimpose image 1">
<param name="LogoBitmapFilename" value="Overlay25.png">
<param name="LogoRect" value="0.00 0.00 1.00 1.00">
<paragraph>
<param name="IsOneLine" value="true">
<param name="BoundingRect" value="1.00 1.00 1.00 1.00">
<param name="MaxCharacterCount" value="32">
</paragraph>
</title>
<title name="PapaJohn Overlay 26" iconid="13">
<param name="InternalName" value="TitleStandard">
<param name="Description" value="Superimpose image 2">
<param name="LogoBitmapFilename" value="Overlay26.png">
<param name="LogoRect" value="0.00 0.00 1.00 1.00">
<paragraph>
<param name="IsOneLine" value="true">
<param name="BoundingRect" value="1.00 1.00 1.00 1.00">
<param name="MaxCharacterCount" value="32">
</paragraph>
</title>
<title name="PapaJohn Overlay 27" iconid="13">
<param name="InternalName" value="TitleStandard">
<param name="Description" value="Superimpose image 1">
<param name="LogoBitmapFilename" value="Overlay27.png">
<param name="LogoRect" value="0.00 0.00 1.00 1.00">
<paragraph>
<param name="IsOneLine" value="true">
<param name="BoundingRect" value="1.00 1.00 1.00 1.00">
<param name="MaxCharacterCount" value="32">
</paragraph>
</title>
</titledll>
</titles>
</transitionsandeffects>

Memory Management Programming Guide for Cocoa

http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/MemoryMgmt/index.html

Free fonts

Some sites for free fonts:

http://www.blambot.com/fonts.shtml


http://www.free-fonts.com/


http://www.fontspace.com/


http://www.dafont.com/

Simple things like find

http://www.softpanorama.org/Tools/Find/find_mini_tutorial.shtml

Unix find is a pretty tricky but very useful utility that can often fool even experienced UNIX professionals with ten on more years of sysadmins work under the belt. It can enhance functionality of those Unix utilities that does not include tree traversal (BTW GNU grep has -r option for this purpose and can be used on its own to perform tree traversal task: grep -r "search string" /tmp.). There are several versions of find with the main two being POSIX find used in Solaris, AIX, etc and GNU find used in linux. GNU find can be installed on Solaris and AIX and it is actually a strong recommendation as there are some differences; moreover gnu find have additional capabilities that are often useful.

But find can do more then a simple tree traversal available with option -r (or -R) in many Unix utilities. Traversal provided by find can have excluded directory tree branches, can select files or directories using regular expressions, can be limited to specific typed of filesystem, etc. This capability is far above and beyond regular tree traversal of Unix utilities so find is a real Unix utility -- a useful enhancer of functionally of other utilities including both utilities that do not have capability to traverse the directory tree and those which have built-in simple recursive tree traversal

The idea behind find is extremely simple: this is a utility for searching files using the directory information and in this sense it is similar to ls. But it is more powerful then ls as it can provide " a ride" for other utilities and has an idiosyncratic mini-language for specifying queries, the language which probably outlived its usefulness but nobody has courage to replace it with a standard scripting language.

For obscure historical reasons find mini-language is completely different from all other UNIX commands: it has full-word options rather than single-letter options. For example, instead of a typical Unix-style option -f to match filenames (like in tar -xvf mytar.tar) find uses option -name. Also path to search can consist of multiple starting points, for example

find /usr /bin /sbin /opt -name sar # here we exclude non-relevant directories

In general you need to specify the set of starting points for a search through the file system first. The first argument starting with "-" is considered to be a start of "find expression". The latter can have side effects if you specified actions in the expression.

It is very important to understand that you can specify more than one directory as a starting point for the search. To look across the /bin and /var/html directory trees for filenames that contain the pattern *.htm*, you can use the following command:

find /usr /var/html -name "*.htm*" -print

Please note that you need quotes for any regex. Otherwise it will be evaluated immediately in the current context by shell.

It is simply impossible to remember all the details of this language unless you construct complex queries each day and that's why this page was created. Along with this page it make sense to consult the list of typical (and not so typical) examples which can be found in in Examples page on this site as well as in the links listed in Webliography. An excellent paper Advanced techniques for using the UNIX find command was written by Bill Zimmerly. I highly recommend to read it and then print and have a reference. Several examples in this tutorial are borrowed from the article.

The full find language is pretty complex and consist of several dozens of different predicates and options. There are two versions of this language: one implemented in POSIX find and the second implemented in GNU find which is a superset of POSIX find. That can make big difference in complex scripts. But for interactive use the differences is minor: only small subset of options is typically used on day-to-day basis by system administrators. Among them:

• -name True if pattern matches the current file name. Simple regex (shell regex) may be used. A backslash (\) is used as an escape character within the pattern. The pattern should be escaped or quoted. If you need to include parts of the path in the pattern in GNU find you should use predicate wholename

  Use the -iname predicate (GNU find supports it) to run a case-insensitive search, rather than just -name. For example:

   $ find . -follow -iname '*.htm' -print0 | xargs -i -0 mv '{}' ~/webhome

  Usage of -print0 is a simple insurance for the correct processing of files with spaces.
  

• -fstype type True if the filesystem to which the file belongs is of type type. For example on Solaris mounted local filesystems have type ufs (Solaris 10 added zfs). For AIX local filesystem is jfs or jfs2 (journalled file system). If you want to traverse NFS filesystems you can use nfs (network file system). If you want to avoid traversing network and special filesystems you should use predicate local and in certain circumstances mount
  
• "-atime/-ctime/-mtime" [+|-]n
  Specify selection of the files based on three Unix timestamps: the last time a files's "access time", "file status" and "modification time".
  n is time interval -- an integer with optional sign. It is measured in 24-hour periods (days) or minutes counted from the current moment.
  • n: If the integer n does not have sign this means exactly n 24-hour periods (days) ago, 0 means today.
    
  • +n: if it has plus sing, then it means "more then n 24-hour periods (days) ago", or older then n,
    
  • -n: if it has the minus sign, then it means less than n 24-hour periods (days) ago (-n), or younger then n. It's evident that -1, and 0 are the same and both means "today".

  Note: If you use parameters with find command in scripts be careful when -mtime parameter is equal zero. Some (earlier) versions of GNU find incorrectly interpret the following expression find -mtime +0 -mtime -1 which should be equivalent to find -mtime -1 but does not produce any files

  • n: If the integer n does not have sign this means exactly n 24-hour periods (days) ago, 0 means today.
    
  • +n: if it has plus sing, then it means "more then n 24-hour periods (days) ago", or older then n,
    
  • -n: if it has the minus sign, then it means less than n 24-hour periods (days) ago (-n), or younger then n. It's evident that -1 and 0 are the same and both means "today".
    
  • Examples:
    
    • Find everything in your home directory modified in the last 24 hours:
      
      • find $HOME -mtime -1
        
    • Find everything in your home directory modified in the last seven 24-hour periods (days):
      
      • find $HOME -mtime -7
        
    • Find everything in your home directory that have NOT been modified in the last year:
      
      • find $HOME -mtime +365
        
    • To find html files that have been modified in the last seven 24-hour periods (days), I can use -mtime with the argument -7 (include the hyphen):

      find . -mtime -7 -name "*.html" -print

      If you use the number 7 (without a hyphen), find will match only html files that were modified exactly seven 24-hour periods (days) ago:

      find . -mtime 7 -name "*.html" -print

    • To find those html files that I haven't touched for at least seven 24-hour periods (days), I use +7:

      find . -mtime +7 -name "*.html" -print

• -newer/-anewer/-cnewer baseline_file The time of modification, access time or creation time are compared with the same timestamp in the baseline file. If file is a symbolic link and the -H option or the -L option is in effect, the modification time of the file it points to is always used.
  
  • -newer Modification time is compared with modification time of the basline_file True if file was modified more recently than baseline file.
    
  • -anewer Access time is compared with access time of basline_file . True if file was last accessed more recently than baseline file.
    
  • -cnewer Creation file is compared. For example: find everything in your home that has been modified more recently than "~joeuser/lastbatch.txt ":
    
    • find $HOME -newer ~joeuser/lastbatch.txt
      
• -local True if the file system type is not a remote file system type. In Solaris those types are defined in the /etc/dfs/fstypes file. nfs is used as the default remote filesystem type if the /etc/dfs/fstypes file is not present. The -local option skips the hierarchy of non-local directories. You can also search without descending more then certain number of levels as explained later or exclude some directories from the search using
  
• -mount Always true. Restricts the search to the file system containing the directory specified. Does not list mount points to other file systems.
  
• -xdev Same as the -mount primary. Always evaluates to the value True. Prevents the find command from traversing a file system different from the one specified by the Path parameter.
  
• -xattr True if the file has extended attributes.
  
• -wholename simple-regex [GNU find only] . File name matches simple regular expression (often called shell patterns). In simple regular expressions the metacharacters '/' and '.' do not exist; so, for example, you can specify:

  find . -wholename '/lib*'

  which will print entries from directories /lib64 and /lib. To ignore the directories specified, use option -prune For example, to skip the directory /proc and all files and directories under it (which is important for linux as otherwise errors are produced you can something like this:

  find . -wholename '/proc' -prune -o -name file_to_be_found   

  If you administer a lot of linux boxes it is better to create alias ff:

  if [[ `uname` == "Linux" ]] ; do
  
    alias ff='find . -wholename '/proc' -prune -o -name '
  
  else
  
    ff='find . -name ' # not GNU find does not support -wholename
  
  fi 

Other useful options of the find command include:

1. -regex regex [GNU find only] File name matches regular expression. This is a match on the whole pathname not a filename. Stupidly enough the default regular expressions understood by find are Emacs Regular Expressions, not Perl regular expressions. It is important to note that "-iregex" option provide capability to ignore case.
   
2. -perm permissions Locates files with certain permission settings. Often used for finding world-writable files or SUID files. See below
   
3. -user Locates files that have specified ownership. Option -nouser locates files without ownership. For such files no user in /etc/passwd corresponds to file's numeric user ID (UID). such files are often created when tar of sip archive is transferred from other server on which the account probably exists under a different UID)
   
4. -group Locates files that are owned by specified group. Option -nogroup means that no group corresponds to file's numeric group ID (GID) of the file
   
5. -size Locates files with specified size. -size attribute lets you specify how big the files should be to match. You can specify your size in kilobytes and optionally also use + or - to specify size greater than or less than specified argument. For example:

   find /home -name "*.txt" -size 100k 

   find /home -name "*.txt" -size +100k 

   find /home -name "*.txt" -size -100k 

   The first brings up files of exactly 100KB, the second only files greater than 100KB, and the last only files less than 100KB.

6. -ls list current file in `ls -dils' format on standard output.
   
7. -type Locates a certain type of file. The most typical options for -type are as following:
   • d -Directory
   • f - File
   • l - Link

   For example to find a list of the directories use can use the -type specifier. Here's one example:

   find . -type d -print

Oooooh.... Beautiful....

I fell into this site by chance: http://kaba.hilvi.org/
And I am ok impressed.

But the links....

cgafaq wiki

The plethora of source codes.... Oh.... I am going to pee in my pants...

http://www.geometrictools.com/index.html

Seriously... I mean pee like a broken damnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn.

And look at the resources link provided:

http://www.geometrictools.com/Resources/Links.html

OpenGL: glLineWidth

//set line width
glLineWidth(20.0f);

glBegin(GL_LINES);

//draw vertices
glVertex3f (-10f, -10.0f, -10.0f);
glVertex3f (10f, 10.0f, 10.0f);

....

glEnd();


Note that not all hardware supports a line width of 20. To find out the supported range and line width increments call:

float sizes, increment;

glGetFloatv(GL_LINE_WIDTH_RANGE, sizes)
glGetFloatv(GL_LINE_WIDTH_GRANULARITY, &increment)

Modules selection

Ok, I've decided. This is the way I am going to pace my modules for Year 2.

Next Sem: Y2 S1
Computer Animation and Simulation
3D Modelling and Reconstruction

Y2 S2
Human Computer Interaction
Scientific Visualization

Y2 S3
Introduction to Games Design
BI6129 Directed Reading


I am actually quite excited for school. Hehe.

YAY! I Passed~~

You look drunk.
Yes, I am drunk. On happiness.
No, you really look drunk.
Oh yes. I am going to write a one hit wonder. And get so rich on it, I don't need to work. Oh yes... That sounds perfect.
Stop eating the gummy. You're getting a sugar high.

Vista TWEAKS

Without much emotional attachment, I am now on Vista. The good thing is, most softwares install on this OS. Bad? I am still getting around the flow of it. But gosh... talk about fancifully slow.

So here are some guides on tweaking and optimising which I cannot guarantee works.

At least my batch scripts still works here. Hehe. Cool...


http://www.tweakhound.com/vista/tweakguide/page_2.htm

http://www.iamshadowlord.com/2007/06/windows-vista-optimization.html


Getting rid of that annoying activeX popup in Alex, under "Removing the Internet Explorer Toolbar Alert":

http://www.databoysoftware.com/allow.html

Hey, cool lectures on graphics

http://www.cse.msu.edu/~cse472/index.html

Collision Detection: Frustum Culling

http://www.flipcode.com/archives/Frustum_Culling.shtml

VR: Stereoscopic Projection - parallax problems

On horizontal & vertical parallax.

http://local.wasp.uwa.edu.au/~pbourke/exhibition/vpac/theory.html

Music to listen to while you're studying

And perhaps the neighbours are noisy and you needed to cancel them out, or you just don't want to fall asleep.

How to categorise that?
1. Not too slow or soft or soothing that you might fall asleep.
2. Nothing and I mean nothing that can distract you, (so you should not listen to any songs in languages that you understand or can sing along to).

These are the choices given by some people:

1. Brian Eno - Music for Airports

2. Boards of Canada -- > ooh I've been meaning to get their music.

3. Sigur Ros - They make me trip. I can't use this for studying.

4. Chicane - Ooh nice... must get their music.

5. Kaskade - Nice nice... Must get them too!!

6. Cirque du Soleil - oooooo?



Someone suggested these:

• Sigur Rós - any of their albums are great, especially their b-sides/EPs
• Mogwai
• Boards of Canada as mentioned
• Haibane Renmei - "Hanenone" - excellent soundtrack to an excellent anime
• Any of the Final Fantasy Piano Collections (well, except IV and V, they're pretty unimaginative)
• Film scores (particular favorites of mine are "Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within," "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," "Hero," "American Beauty," and "Crash")

I must say, Mac users are way cooler.... Their suggestions are good!! http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=249125



http://www.amazon.com/Music-Listen-While-Youre-Studying/lm/CTMB4VPEAPU9


http://www.amazon.com/Trippy-chill-stoner-music/lm/1VQIBDTM9AQMU

My personal all time favourite has to be JAM and Yuki Isoya (solo effort), Shiina Ringo (given to me by accident). When I hear JAM, I just want to start Xcode or pick up my notes.

Animation: Classical Framework

In the classical animation framework, they're 4 models; 2 stimulus and 2 response.

Stimulus
1. Environment Model: Animation's environment where static and dynamic objects are created. Includes modeling and rendering.

2. Perception Model: Techniques of "perception" by the characters. Information detected by the character's sensory capabilities.
i. zonal approach
ii. sensory approach
iii. synthetic vision approach.

Response
3. Behavioural Model: Behavioural techniques provide the characters with ability to autonomous activity with its own decision. This can either be reactive or driven by internal desire/experiences (not so much Artificial Intelligence, but more Artificial Life....? )
i. Rule-based approach
ii. Network approach
iii. Artificial Intelligence approach
iv. Mathematical approach

4. Motor Model: Movement techniques - to move & animate the characters. Not related to planning of movement, that is done in behavioural model.
i. Basic dynamic approach
ii. Procedural approach


More references:
http://www.red3d.com/cwr/boids/

Some physics

Beginner's physics:

http://theory.uwinnipeg.ca/mod_tech/index.html


This is good for what I need to know:
http://www.kwon3d.com/theory/rigid.html

Moment of Inertia (good diagram here):
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/HBASE/inecon.html

Ooooh Maths Cheat Sheet

http://tutorial.math.lamar.edu/cheat_table.aspx

Kinematics

All about calculating arm: http://www.societyofrobots.com/robot_arm_tutorial.shtml

Trigonometric Identities

http://www.clarku.edu/~djoyce/trig/identities.html.

for derivatives, look at the Calculus part or the table of derivatives.