Chan's Personal Blog

Minutes ago, I handed in my term research paper. It took about two weeks to write the whole thing. The paper was 9500 words long, or 29 pages double spaced, or 11 pages in academic journal style. When I started writing the paper, I challenged myself to write 1,000 words a day or else I wouldn't finish in time .... and it seems like it all worked out. The paper was due at midnight.

I'm encouraged that my supervising professor said that he intends to get this paper published for a major conference, so that's pretty exciting. I've never had anything published before.

My professor advised me to learn LaTeX which is a type-setting system that is widely used for academic papers. I'm glad that I learned it, because it made writing this long paper easier. The last major paper I wrote at the undergraduate level was done in Microsoft Word, and it was a nightmare because it wouldn't number my sections or figures properly. LaTeX takes care of all the numbering, labelling, and formatting, which allows you to concentrate on writing content.

The mark-up language that LaTeX uses is loosely similiar to HTML, which made it easier for me as I had a few weeks to learn it. Here's what it kind of looks like:


Notice in the example that we don't have to number the headers, like 1. Introduction. The system takes care of that for you which is nice. A lot of journals also have LaTeX style files, which basically takes the content you have written, and transforms it into the look that they want. This has some really nice advantages. Journal A might prefer documents that are 8pt in font, and headers should be Arial, while Journal B might prefer documents that are 6pt in font, and headers should be wing dings. So, all you have to do is link the code above with their style files, and you get a paper with the journal's required look. The advantage of this is, you don't have to change your content at all. Very useful when you're submitting an article to different journals.

I also like using LaTeX because it's a plain text format, so I can use my favourite text editor, VIM. People who have used VIM before know how it's WAY faster to work in VIM than Microsoft Word. With a plain text editor, I also didn't have a spell checker which was actually kind of nice, as strange as that sounds. It forced me to brush up on my spelling, and it made me less dependent on spell checkers. This was nice because I've noticed that my spelling has been slipping a bit these last few months.

Anyways, thank God that I made the paper deadline. This concludes all of my work for this academic season. I can finally return to a normal bedtime. So sleepy.... I've been pulling several consecutive late nights on this paper.

In either case, I will be returning with better quality blog articles now that I have my papers out of the way.

Just a quick article as I'm racing against the clock to finish my last term paper. It's T-MINUS 144 hours, and 6 minutes, and 33 seconds till the deadline.

Anyways, the University of Victoria recently released their 2005-2006 annual budget. I was suprised by how low tuition rates for domestic students rose. It's only +2%. Hmmm, could it be that this is an election year? Gone are the days of the +30% tuition increases for computer scientists and engineers I guess?

The most interesting part of the budget was the reduction in co-op fees.


That is a HUGE savings to international co-op students. I know some international co-op students who basically had to use their entire month's paycheque just to pay off their international co-op fee. I wonder what prompted the -44% drop in international co-op fees? And you can't blame it on an election year because international students can't vote.

Well, this week has been a whirlwind of activity. I had to prepare two presentations, and finish a term research paper. I think the average time that I went to bed was probably about 2:30am this week. Horray for sleep deprivation.

Presentation #1

My class right now has two research papers. One that was due today, and another due in a week and a half. The first presentation was kind of scary because we had to present half an hour on the latter research paper. I had to present my findings on Wednesday. It was cutting it close because I only finished collecting all my information on Tuesday afternoon. The fun thing was that I had an evening class on Tuesday night that went until 9pm. So, I got home at 10pm and started working on the presentation. It was a very late night getting that presentation ready for Wednesday. I fired off the finished presentation to the professor because we were all using his laptop for the presentation.

The next day I had to get up a bit earlier than normal because I had to dress up for grad photos. This worked out nicely because I could use my "dressed-up-ness" for my presentation as well. So, in the morning I had my photos done in two varieties.... we are now offering photos with Chan hatless, or with a hat.... whatever floats your boat .

I get an e-mail in the afternoon, and it's my professor saying that the presentation looked great. Okay, thanks. Then, I head to the night class again where I'm supposed to present. And the professor starts writing down the presentation order that was predetermined, and he goes... Chan... hmmm, lets put his presentation last because I think it'd be the most interesting. Yikes, thanks for overhyping it. He might have said that because the evening before, there were at least two people that totally tanked on their presentation. One guy went through his outline in 10 minutes because he hadn't started on his research. Another guy went through this crazy mathematical proof of why open source development was better, and I think everyone was super skeptical about his findings because he didn't have any data, examples, or anything to back it up. Lets just say he got ripped apart during questioning period. The day after he was still getting flak from people.

The best presentation from night before was from a guy that did a survey of Chief Information-Technology Officers (CIO) in the Canadian healthcare system. He wanted to know what the CIOs knew about open source software, and if they used open source software in the province's healthcare systems. It seemed like the more tech-savvy the CIO was, the more likely they were pro open source software. It was funny that the CIO with a degree in health information sciences (HINF) seemed the most hostile and uninformed about what open source software was. Muahaha, (I have a grudge against the HINF department) .

Wednesday night's presentations were more interesting, with only one really bad presentation. One guy talked about business models using open source, another guy talked about the role of open source software in bioinformatics. It was pretty neat because he talked about how the SARS virus genome was decoded using Linux cluster.

The third presenter had a very poor presentation. He went all over the place, and no one could follow where he was going with the presentation. It was very incoherent, and he got ripped apart in the questioning period. Presenter number four did an interesting presentation, but he got a little beat up in the questioning period. Although, to be fair, he was getting bombarded by questions from his arch-nemesis, Mr. Crazy Math Proof guy. Throughout the term, the two had a few heated exchanges lets just say.

I went last, which was a bad spot because it was 9:00pm, and I'm sure everyone wanted to go home. The vultures were out as well, because they smelled blood from the two previous victims, er, presenters. I had 33 slides to burn through in 20 minutes, so I had to go fast. I presented on my work place's software which was going to be released as open source, and about the open source license we had to write. The presentation was probably more down to earth and accessible than others because I told it like a story. I finished my presentation 23 minutes later, and had a bunch of questions that I was able to handle. None of the questions were attacks.... because you can't really argue about the events we witnessed. Anyways, I felt pretty good about it.

Presentation #2

The next presentation I had to give was on Friday. This one made me nervous because it was for the software engineering colloqium, and all the grad students and professors in this area usually goes to this thing. The student that presented last week got hit by a barrage of pointed questions, although she stood her ground pretty well with all things considering. In addition, the presentation was supposed to be an hour long. The format of the colloqium was that the presentation should be fairly informal, and it was supposed to stir up discussion, so the presenter was not supposed to talk the entire time.

I took my presentation from Wednesday, and added more background information to it, because not everyone in the colloqium knew what open source was. I also added a bunch of slides for debates and discussion. I planned for 40 minutes of presentation material, and 20 minutes for discussion.

So, I get to the colloqium, and setup. Usually four professors attend this colloqium, but only one showed up, and it was my supervisor. This made me a bit more relaxed because it's usually professors that ask hard questions. The fewer, the more survivable. Throughout the presentation, a lot of good discussion and questions were raised. This was a good sign because people are less bored when they're involved. I hit the 1 hour mark, and I'm only three quarters of the way through my presentation because of all the discussion. The moderator announces that if anyone wanted to leave, they could. Suprisingly everyone decided to stick around. I take another twenty minutes to finish.

This was a good experience. A lot of people stuck around to ask questions, and I got a lot of kind words from people. What a relief. Phew.

Research Paper #1

Minutes ago, I handed in my first graduate level research paper. It was a research paper on open source communities, and how they operated. When the professor began the term, he said that the paper needed to be 8-10 pages, I thought.... that should be easy, the average length of one of my blog entries is usually a page or two! How wrong I was . The format and style had to follow an academic journal style which meant a page had two columns, and the font size was only 9pt. My paper ended up being about 7500 words long, and 10 pages long. To give you some perspective, a typical co-op work term report is supposed to be 2000-3000 words, double spaced, and 12pt font. My first work term report was 2600 words long, and it came in at 11 pages. Gah, the 8-10 page requirement was so deceiving.

Annoyingly enough, on Wednesday the professor said in class that the paper had to be 5-6 pages. I guess people were having troubles with finding information? Anyways, this was a pain because I had collected enough information for 10 pages, and he had essentially halved the paper's required length. Kind of annoying because it took a lot of time to get ten pages, and this was time I could have spent sleeping or writing my second research paper. Oh well.

Conclusion

So, this week has been crazy with a whole bunch of stuff to do. I'm a little more confident now after surviving the colloqium presentation. It has been a marathon, but there's no end in sight because I have to write my second research paper which is due in a week and a half. It feels like I've finished the marathon, but someone decided to move the finish line a few miles out.

There is no time to celebrate the end of term.

There is no ticker tape parade.

There is no time to rest.

Well, last night at 2 a.m. I finished writing the draft version of my very first research paper at the graduate level. This concludes a term's worth of collecting data. My research focused on an open source community. Anyways, I sent my paper to the open source community for reviews and comments, just to make sure that my facts are correct.

I've had two e-mails from leaders of the community, and they seem thrilled about the paper. Then I got a critique from some professor that although the paper's content was good, the writing quality was bad. In particular, he didn't like how I used a first person perspective in the paper, and God forbid, that can't be used in academic circles. I think he said that because he didn't know the requirements of my paper. I also think it's a matter of writing style. It's strange, because in high school English class, they told us NOT to use the word "I" or "you" when writing formal. When I got into university, the English professor said, you probably learned in high school not to use "I" or "you", but you're allowed to use it for academic writing. A teacher in my technical writing class also said it was fine.... so I really think it's a style thing. In either case, my goal was to make the paper very readable, and I told it like a story. Good critique nevertheless.

One research paper down, one more to go. This is going to be a crazy dash to the finish as usual. I think the most difficult part about this isn't so much that the work is hard, it is just time consuming, and it blows how some people are out every night living it up, while I'm stuck here writing papers. It has probably been more than a month since my last real weekend.

Oh well, such is the cost of investing in the future. 17 more days until I'm a free man. Back to the battle....