Random Writings

I am finally approaching the end of my PhD and thus have the delights of writing a thesis. Now, all available evidence suggests that this is a longwinded and possibly frustrating business and so I have hit upon an ingenious plan to keep myself on schedule and produce a report without going totally stir-crazy. I work better in the mornings, so my plan is to write in the morning (from about 8am until 1pm) and then move the boat down the river or canal for a few hours in the afternoon. My experience suggests that four hours is about as long as I’m prepared to drive the boat singlehanded, and this should give me some thinking time and relief from writing.

So, the plan is to leave Cambridge at the end of May and head off across the Fens to Peterborough. From there we go to Northampton and then down the Grand Union to London. In London we pass right through the city from west to east on the canals and join the Thames at Limehouse Dock before cruising upstream again. We carry on upstream as far as Oxford, where we join the Oxford Canal heading north to Banbury and then pick up the Grand Union again to head into central Birmingham. We carry on northward onto the Shropshire Union canal to Middlewich and then switch to the Trent & Mersey canal through the Cheshire salt fields. Now, assuming I can clear all the paperwork, I then hope to go down the Anderton Lift onto the River Weaver and then head on into the Manchester Ship Canal into central Manchester. From Manchester we then head east across the Pennines on the Huddersfield Narrow Canal and then turn north again to visit York. On leaving York we head south again onto the mighty River Trent, which will take us to Nottingham. We leave the Trent and go on into the Soar, taking us to Loughborough and eventually Leicester. Hopefully at this point I should have a finished thesis to hand in to my supervisor and can then cruise slowly back to Cambridge…

Anyway, a full cruise plan (which will be updated regularly) can be found here. If I’m passing through your neck of the woods, please come to a canalside pub and say hello! At weekends I’m planning not to work on the thesis, and I hope to schedule my trip so that the more heavily locked sections of canal occur at weekends so that friends and family can come and help me. If you’d like to come and help, suggest times that are good for you or sections of the trip you particularly fancy doing, and I’ll add you to the schedule. Oh, and inevitably there’s also a Facebook group.

Well, I’ve been here for a week now, and I’m now getting pretty well-known around the CRC campus. Everyone’s been very friendly and lots of people have taken an interest in my work. This afternoon I gave a talk on my research – the longest I’ve ever done, at 45 minutes – to an audience of interested experts, and lots of discussion and questions ensued. I’ve also been offered the use of a lab full of shiny toys – actually, the sort of stuff I’d have gnawed my own arm off to have had the use of in my first year – and so I shall be moving in there pretty soon to do some more channel simulation work. One question that did come up this afternoon after the talk was “what exactly will your thesis be on?” – which is a very good question! I need to decide pretty soon which of the many interesting bits of the project I’m going to concentrate on for the remaining time before I down tools and get writing.

This evening I’ve been to choir practice at Christ Church Aylmer (to which I was invited on Sunday) and enjoyed singing with a new group of people. Oh, and at lunchtime I went to the gym with four of the guys from CRC, and I suspect I will feel the aftereffects tomorrow!

I’ve been a fan of online backup services for a while now – in fact, I’ve been using JungleDisk to keep backups of my photos for over a year. But I was more recently introduced to Dropbox, which is similar but also different. Dropbox creates an area on your hard disk which is automatically backed up to their servers, but which is also synchronised with any other computer you have logged in to your Dropbox account. I’ve used this to allow me to bring all my work-related files with me to Ottawa. Before I left Cambridge, I copied the contents of my personal area on the file server to the Dropbox area on my work laptop. At CRC I’m not allowed to connect my work laptop to their network, so I installed Dropbox on the desktop PC there and it all synced across. Now when i work on the desktop PC during the day all my files are backed up to Dropbox and can then sync back to either my work or personal laptops when I get back to the apartment in the evening.

When I finally go back to Cambridge, I can use SyncToy to keep the file server at work in sync with the Dropbox system, giving me an additional backup. It’ll be great for visits to Leicester and for working from home, too – because all the files are locally cached, I can work with or without internet access and things will sync back when the machine next connects.

One further refinement I added today was making Zotero work with Dropbox. Zotero is a plugin for Firefox that handles citations – I use it in preference to Endnote, Refworks or CiteULike because of the ease of adding papers to Zotero’s database from within the browser. Anyway, moving my Zotero folder to the Dropbox folder now means that all my citations databases stay synchronised across all my computers, which is great!

If you’d like to try Dropbox, you get 2GB of storage free, and if you sign up via my referral link we both get an extra 250MB of space.

What happened to May? It seemed only a few moments ago that it began… Anyway, here’s a quick summary of what I’ve been up to in what seems to have been a very busy month…
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Simulink is a companion to Matlab which purports to be a time-flow simulation package. This post is going to get quite technical, so if you’re not into either communications system design or Simulink in general, look away now.

I’ve used Simulink before, in my third year at York, but that was following a well-structured lab script where the lecturer had partially set up the models in advance. This time I’ve been doing a course (I’m obliged to do one of Leicester’s engineering MSc modules in my first year) simulating communications systems in Simulink, and the lab script is much vaguer. I’ve spent a lot of time banging my head against a brick wall in Simulink, and here are some important gotchas that might save other people going through the same level of auto-cranial damage.

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I finally have my Matlab package, it arrived yesterday, by DHL from Dublin. I thought the saga was over, but little did I realise what was in store for me this morning. David (the head of Engineering) appeared in my office with a printout of Monday’s blog post about Matlab. It turns out that the post was picked up by someone in MathWorks’ head office in the USA, and went all round their management before being sent to the UK office. They admitted fair comment on their customer service, but objected to my giving away the level of discount they offered us on the product, which should have been confidential. I’d not been told this, but had I been less frustrated and more rational that day I’d have realised that suppliers’ prices are jealously guarded things. Anyway, I’m shortly going to remove the offending figures from that post.

I am now, apparently, quite well-known within MathWorks…

Shortly after writing that last ranty blog post, the MathWorks salesman emailed me back saying that he could grant me temporary access to the software whilst the sale went through. It would have been helpful to know this six weeks ago! Anyway, I’m now able to get going on some RF simulation work, for which I’m profoundly grateful…

You may have come across MATLAB, the matrix-manipulating maths package that’s widely used by engineering academics. It’s published by an American firm called The MathWorks, whose slogan is “Accelerating the pace of engineering and science”. This appears to be, in the immortal words of Douglas Adams, a load of dingo’s kidneys. I’ve been trying to buy a copy of their software (MATLAB, Simulink and the various Communications add-ons for them) since before Christmas, and they’ve now wasted over a month of my time in failing to supply it.

The complicating factor is that MATLAB is extraordinarily expensive. The list price for my combination of options, as a single-user licence (that is, a licence for just me to use it on my computer) is over £6000! However, MathWorks have always given huge discounts to universities, which is why it’s so widely used in academia. BAS have been negotiating with MathWorks for about a year to get the academic price on the software (which would seem reasonable given that we’re a government-funded academic research institution) and just before Christmas I was told that the team had negotiated for a significant discount. I promptly raised a purchase order before the Christmas holidays set in, then came back to find nothing had happened. I’ve spent all of January chasing Steve (the purchasing officer) who has in turn been chasing MathWorks by phone and email and even refaxed the purchase order to them, and still no answer. Today I return to work after being on holiday for a week (Skiing in the French Alps, marvellous!) and find that a) nothing has happened and b) Steve is on holiday. I get a copy of the correspondence from one of Steve’s colleagues and chase the firm myself. Their salesman and I play voicemail tennis this morning and I eventually get a message from him saying that we need an invoice number to qualify for the discount. I go and see David, the Head of Engineering, who’s been doing the negotiating. He calls the salesman, who promises to email us more details of what hoops we need to jump through.
The saga continues.

In the mean time, I would like to say that The MathWorks, Inc, are a Bad Railway. If anyone else is planning on buying their products, I would seriously reconsider it!

So, the PhD’s been going for a month, what have I learned?

• Freshers’ Week as a postgrad living in a B&B is dull as ditchwater – you barely see anyone in the evenings.
• Access to journals online when you’re away from your University is patchy. Some work with the marvellous ATHENS system, but others just refuse to work off-campus(IEEE Xplore, I’m looking at you)
• Cambridge University Library will let you use its computers/wifi to gain access to electronic journals
• It takes two hours to get to work by bus from Waterbeach, mostly because of the huge queue for the A14
• Cycling to work is good, and takes about 45 minutes
• Cycling home from work in the rain results in being covered in fine grit from the towpath
• It takes ages to get an office at BAS – I still haven’t got one of my own yet!
• BAS kindly bought me a new laptop to work on. Woo!
• The domestic battery on Innocenti is even more knackered than I’d thought.
• The battery selector switch on Innocenti actually parallels the two batteries in all positions other than “off”
• The new pumpout facility in Cambridge now costs £3 – it was free before the refurbishment
• The coal stove can actually heat the boat effectively, but the chimney doesn’t draw very well because it’s too short and too narrow.
• Rowing eights sometimes arrive at Bottisham Lock at 8am, just as I’m leaving to go to work

I’m getting there, slowly!

Hello again! Since I last wrote the final details of my PhD have slotted into place, and I’m now pretty happy with how it’s set up. There are a few minor things still to get sorted, but it looks like a goer. This means I’m committed to spending the next three years of my life in Cambridge, and so I’ll need somewhere to live. In fact, I’ve decided to buy a narrowboat – and managed to find one I like at a price I can afford. It’s being surveyed this week (probably on Wednesday) and after that I’ll be embarking on a four-week trip from the outskirts of Liverpool down to Cambridge and passing through quite a lot of the Midlands on the way. I’ll be keeping this blog updated with the progress!