About this Site

To the right of this text you will see several courses that are a work in progress. As part of my coursework to fulfill my Ph.D. studies I will be creating new courses to be taught at Clarkson University (and other places perhaps). As I work through each set of course materials I will post a link in one of the boxes. Suggestions are welcome.

To the left of this text you will see several publications and CV content items. That section is part CV and part resume. I plan on adding new publications here as the opportunity presents itself.

Recap of the summer

So I had an offer accepted on the house that I like only to lose it the night before my home inspection. I was told the night before my inspection, after having received a verbal acceptance on my offer for the property, that someone else had made a full price offer.

I returned this weekend from 2 weeks abroad where I was teaching in Shenzhen and Taipei. In Taipei I stayed within eyesight of this famous building and was in a hotel which is attached to this even more famous building. It was a wonderful experience. I will hopefully upload some photos in the near future. I also hope to teach the same course internationally again in the future.

Returning back to the U.S. also means a return to work and a return to class. It also means I am a year older as Clarkson traditionally starts classes on my birthday or the following day. As for classes this semester, I am currently registered for thesis, and 2 credits of colloquium. My intent is to go to conferences like I usually try to do, attend colloquium talks at local colleges, and spend some time at IBM research seeing what is new and exciting. The next scheduled talk I plan on seeing is today from 1:00 - 3:00 and is hosted here at IBM Poughkeepsie as part of our Technical Vitality Affiliate Seminar Series. The Talk will be given by Dilma da Silva. She is a researcher at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, in New York. She manages the Advanced Operating Systems group. She received her Ph.D in Computer Science from Georgia Tech in 1997. Prior to joining IBM, she was an Assistant Professor at University of Sao Paulo, Brazil. Her research in system software addresses the need for scalable and adaptable system software. She has published more than 60 technical papers. The talk she will be presenting is about Cloud computing issues she is working on.

I am also auditing the Advanced Operating systems course Dr. Matthews teaches. Though I have taken the course before, a substantial portion of the content changes each semester, and it will allow me to refresh myself on the state of operating systems research. I look forward to it, once we work out the long distance communication details.

Another course I am strongly considering is a course in system-c which is a language for modeling hardware designs and systems. The course web-page is here for those who are interested in learning more.

I will be ordering books and completing my formal registration as soon as my Manager returns from his vacation on Monday August 31.

Posted: 08-26-09 @ 08:32

The ambiguity shows

I put in an offer on the house I like Friday before leaving to spend some time in CT with Steve Camras. I was dismayed to see that someone else has also put in an offer on the same property. The offers were presented to the seller, and she will get in touch with the listing agent sometime early this week. I imagine that means Tuesday at the earliest because of the Memorial Day holiday here in the U.S. I don't fancy the notion of a bidding war in a buyers market. So in the interim I have searched for a few other interesting properties.

I was asked last week to travel to Shenzen China (Peoples Republic of China) to teach a week long course on Linux on the mainframe. I as also asked to teach a course the following week in Taipei Taiwan. Taiwan's is an island nation off the coast of the mainland which is known as the Republic of China (or ROC). Taiwan was formerly known as Formosa which is Portuguese for "Beautiful Island", or so I am told. I have decided I think I will teach both. It will make an interesting trip, and I should return just before my birthday late in August. Kyle Smith, currently at VMWare constructed the labs and taught this course years ago in Canada. Once plans are confirmed I will need to get my visa for the mainland visit. Taiwan does not require a travel visa when staying such a short period of time.

I moved my plants outside for the season today. I am growing cherry tomatoes, oregano, basil, green onions, cilantro, and pygmy sunflowers.

On the music front, I listened to a bunch more Emery records today. The newest record "While Broken Hearts Prevail" should definitely get more radio exposure. The singers trade off nicely and the music is very palatable. Track 6 was the only let down that I noticed personally. Whiny and predictably sad would be the best description I can come up with. It is also the only ballad type song on the record.

Today I also gave a listen to the City and Color record "Bring Me Your Love (Special Edition)" as well as "The MySpace Transmissions". The former is a double disc version of something I already enjoyed. The latter was a nice 6 track album rife with sadness as is so common in the lyrics from Dallas Green. A man with a wonderful voice and a guitar can be a powerful musical experience. Drums and basses are for bands, and Mr Green is a Hero not a band (Note that when he rocks out with Alexis on Fire there are plenty of excellent drums and basses, and the guitars are electro-magical).

Another new record I listened to today was the self titled debut LP record from "Telekenisis!" (who happens to be one talented dude playing all the instruments on the record). It is just excellent pop/rock. I recommend you listen to the second track "Coast of California" to get an idea of what this record is all about.

Dear Lazy Social-Web (via the humans who I know in real life and read this blog). Does anyone out there happen to have the record from Lonely Forest with the song "You Move" on it? I am looking to see if the rest of the record is similar to that track before purchasing it. Comments welcome via the usual non blog channels.

Everyone I have talked to about the graphic novel concept seems to like it. I guess I should get writing on it since I only have the summer before I will have to deal with the real world of homework and thesis investigation when I get home from work.

Posted: 05-24-09 @ 17:50

There is a vulture perching right off screen and it's bitter and whispers chaotic things

The semester is over and the dust has settled. Everything went pretty well given my hectic work schedule. Though I still have to do some investigations into some loose ends. I also have to register for some additional fall classes. I am currently only scheduled for thesis and colloquium credits. I think I will be auditing a course from Dr. Matthews and adding one more class.

I interviewed with Marist College and did a tour of their campus but I have not yet heard anything back from them. I had the impression when leaving that I would have heard something by now, but perhaps I misunderstood. On the work front, my talk delivered to IBM research went very well. I delivered it at the Yorktown campus, which was simulcast to Raleigh and Toronto. At the conference I met some amazing AIX researchers who are doing some excellent work on AIX involving a virtual type file system (think proc or sys) but with a particularly neat spin. I also met a researcher named Pin at the conference who wants to collaborate a bit on some research involving virtualization that they have going on soon.

I also have some interesting work coming up later this week on turning some of my thoughts on software testing into a course offering produced by IBM. I should begin work on that immediately after the current edition of the Linux Virtual Server Platform Evaluation test report is completed (Tuesday, a.k.a. tomorrow is the deadline).

Life has been strange and full of changes lately. A friend and mentor of mine named Dave passed away last week which was a shock to the system. I wont go into details but his passing was something no one really expected at such a young age.

I have been continuing with my concept for a graphic novel. I even made contact, in a roundabout way, with an artist who does some excellent comic drawing work. I am hoping to convince him to do some concept art for me and if he believes in the project to perhaps sign on as the artist for pencils and inks.

I have also decided that I would begin house hunting in earnest. For a long time I have been causally looking, and for the first time since I have arrived in pok, I have found something I think I genuinely like at a price point I can afford. The house needs a ton of work, but has a good skeleton and tons of potential.

On the subject of multimedia I have recently finished reading "The White Plague" by the author of Dune. Despite the Irish names and places which I thought hard to keep track of, the book was excellent. On the music front I have been listening to Armour for Sleep. I guess one would consider it some form of emo modern rock I guess. I have listened to Dream to Make Believe (2003), What to do When you are Dead (2005) which has a song called car underwater which I remember on the radio, and Smile for them (2007). I have also been heavily listening to the Gaslight Anthem (seriously sounds like Bruce Springstein singing but with music and some lyrics which sound like The Cure. I highly recommend you give it a listen. I have enjoyed both of the albums I got, "59 Sound" and "Sink or Swim". On the heavier side of the fence, I have been rocking out to the Receiving End of Sirens records "The earth Sings Mi Fa Mi" (2007), and "The Heart and the Synapse" (2005) which is my preferred example of their work (that last track "Epilogue" blows my mind). I also picked up the Silversun Pickups newest record "Swoon" (2009) a while back. In my opinion it is a shoegazer epic. I thoroughly enjoy it, but then again I loved their last album. I highly recommend the song "Substitution" which is better than the current radio sample "Panic Switch".

Posted: 05-19-09 @ 17:50

Meeting a legend, asking questions without fear

Long time without posting. I have been very busy with homework, and submitting paper abstracts for IBM conferences. I am posting today because I met Fran Allen today. Since Ada is no longer available, I consider talking to the first woman to be named an IBM Fellow (an odd term really in this context) and the first woman to win the Turing award to be an acceptable compromise. I have won Ada Lovelace day.

I watched her give a talk in a room with about 50 people in a small conference room near one of the campus cafeterias. In attendance there were 2 other IBM fellows (Richard Chu, and Charles Webb).

I talked to her about languages and compilers as well as how she saw herself (mathematician or computer scientist). She firmly considers herself a computer scientist. We also discussed software engineering vs computer science. She beleives, as Clarkson teaches, that they are 2 separate but complementary schools of thought. Noteably, she doesnt like C or C++ much.

I wanted to ask what she thought would make a good thesis topic, but I decided I could follow up with her email address or a phone call if I really wanted to persue it. I work at an amazing company.

Posted: 03-24-09 @ 21:23

Did they learn what you did?

Got home from work late. More SCSI fun. Found a particular 40 volume (LUN) with ext3 went south, and went read only. Did an FSCK on it to repair the damage, remounted the file system and within 30 seconds the volumes journal would become corrupt again and remount RO. Resorted to auditing all the mechanisms of access to this volume (you see more than one system can potentially access a lun if you dont have proper masking set up which is an incredible pain to do) Finally a reformat seems to have cured it. Filled out the NYS Jurror quesitonaire as required by state law and my overwhelming sense of civic duty. Proceeded to pay my ever increasing cable bill. Seriously thinking about shutting it off. It would leave moe time for reading, and I could always just get netflix. Tried to get in touch with Jeanna this afternoon about a discussion tonight. Unfortunately she hasnt called and I was too busy to notice. I shall remember to try again tomorrow.

My copy of Raise the Dead came today. The preface of the book was written by an author named Max Brooks whose own recent work I enjoyed, World War Z. Today I discovered that Max is the son of Mel Brooks and Ann Bancroft. I will read the book this evening as it is really just a collection of 4 or 5 individual comics that made up a miniseries.

In other book related news, my on order copy of "The Art of Systems Architecting" hasnt arrived yet and Amazon suggested via an email that it would would likely not be fulfilled with the remaining 10 days. As such the order would be cancelled by Amazon. It turns out that the edition I had ordered was the second edition and thre is a third edition available. A simple no brainer here would have been to offer to upgrade me to the very much in stock new edition of the text. Suffice it to say the new book is on order and will hopefully make it here this week.

Installed Tomcat on my work thinkpad today in order to play around with the javax.servlet classes. It would seem that the next couple assignments in Daqings class are likely to make use of it. Off to do some more reading. I am reminded of an old but familiar phrase used in collegiate environments, "Never let class get in the way of your education." It seems these days juggling work and school is preventing me from doing some of the academic things I would really like to do. Work is getting in the way of my education. Dear reader, if you happen to have the magic solution to add more hours in a day, or perhaps future winning lottery numbers, I would sincerely appreciate your contribution to my education.

No links this time. It shaved a good 15 minutes from writing this.

Posted: 02-17-09 @ 21:31

He had a lot to say. He had a lot of nothing to say.

I just sent in my multithraded http server implementation (supporting GET and POST, as well as automagic 404 page rendering). I should note that it seems browsers report the POST values in quite different ways. The professor tested my implementation with his Safari browser on his Macbook Pro. I consider my "failure" to obtain perfection as just another justification for buying that Mac I can't afford. After finding the source of the discrepancy (I assumed something about the relative positioning of 2 elements of the POST method) I then proceeded to take a break before looking through some of the remaining cloud computing and Hadoop papers I have laying around. I was pleasantly suprised to see a burst of activity in the clarkson alumni blogosphere. A special welcome back to Tim, and a strong thumbs up for Jason who posted a very interesting post about wireless technology today. I will also make some remarks regarding Mikes post. Queue the segue to my comments for Jason specifically.

Prefacing this section, I would like to state I am no mathmagician, and I could be wrong, as I have had my head buried in silly socket code all evening. I fear I may have found someone playing fast and loose with the integers. It is like I often say, estimation is the drunken uncle of mathematics. Regarding Jason's wonderful post about his new networking discoveries I was left wondering, wouldn't going from ~ 2MB/sec to ~ 3MB/sec be a 50% increase in performance. To get the reported 150% shouldnt you have observed aproximately a 5MB/sec? Your later calculation "upgrading from 54mbps to 300mbps I might expect to get roughly a 600% boost in performance" looks correct so I suspect you just made a casual error when typing the blog entry. To Jason's second point, I suspect that you are getting some Linux file caching effects when you talk about immediately transfering the same file a second time and getting increased performance. This of course assumes you were not randomly generating the file on the fly or some other odd thing. To test this hypothesis you can try "echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches" to empty the file cache between tests when reading an actual file off the disk. I certainly hope I am remembering this stuff correctly as I certainly did not replicate your experiment.

In reference to Mike, thanks for the interesting post. I think the theme message I walked away with from my reading of your thoughts is as follows. We as a species communicating much faster than ever before. I wonder though if we are communicating any better? I wonder if we as a special are transmitting qualitatively more interesting or insightful things. I suspect much as IDE's have allowed programmers to write bugs faster, the proliferation of communication media that has saturated our lives has made it all to easy to broadcast message with little substantive value to the casual observer.

Dr. Stephen Hawking famously said "For millions of years, mankind lived just like the animals. Then something happened which unleashed the power of our imagination. We learned to talk and we learned to listen. Speech has allowed the communication of ideas, enabling human beings to work together to build the impossible. Mankind's greatest achievements have come about by talking, and its greatest failures by not talking. It doesn't have to be like this. Our greatest hopes could become reality in the future. With the technology at our disposal, the possibilities are unbounded. All we need to do is make sure we keep talking." I'm not so sure he delivered his though in the clearest way possible. Dr. Hawking is welcome to disagree with me, but I think we need qualify that the "talking" should be done with with purpose. We should de-emphasize the drivel that people spout to one another and instead focus on sharing the ideas that matter. Then again who is to judge what matters and what constitutes drivel. All I know is a lot of energy and time would be saved if people just thought before they communicated, and then broadcast their message in an efficient medium.

I apologize dear reader, that thumping sound you just heard was me falling from my podium. It dawns on me that I havent much to say of merit in any of my posts except those whith summarize academic findings or course notes. Recanting tales of my tedium hardly is worth the elctrons this post is comprised of. Perhaps one day I will get a cell phone. I just feel that the current offerings are deplorable. I have been led to beleive that text messages are data sent in the extra header space of normal voice packets and they should for all intents and purposes cost nothing. Yet phone companies charge incredible ammounts for them. In fact many of you may not know that the first commercial text message was sent in 1992 (or 1993 if you want to begin counting when messages were sent with a GSM phone). The costs should well have been recouped for the tremendous ammount of R&D that went into it. Sarcasm is certainly a sultry mistress for sure (don't even get me started on her good freind Alliteration). In addition, I beleive that since telephony is switched digitally on IP type networks now (as evidence by my telephone service which runs on a cable internet connection and has free domestic long distance), why should it cost me extra to make a long distance call on a digital cell phone network? Sooner or later someone will come up with a plan that meets my thrify watermark.

Regarding my last post, the Thai food was excellent and the movie was average. I did end up meeting Mr and Mrs Smith for lunch at my favorite diner in the world in scenic Hyde Park NY (15 mins away from where I currently live). I also caught up with them Sunday evening for a few pints at my local haunt. Today at work I did a ton of configuration of a Cisco SAN switch (4 ports to each virtual host, going through 2 HA switches, into an IBM SAN Volume Controller. More info on IBM SVCs can be seen here). I also completed reading 2 of the graphic novels I wrote about the other day. I am awaiting delivery of the rest.

Posted: 02-16-09 @ 22:22

Man your own jackhammers. Man your battle stations.

I would like to digress from diving into my usual posting about what happened in my life for a moment. I would instead like to ask you if you know what has not happened lately. The answer my astute reader, is that you have not blogged recently and I have not had the priveledge of reading about your escapades! Yes, I am looking in your general direction. Though I would love to spin yarns about how this blog and RSS are equipped with phantom technology that lets me use your webcam to stream data back to me to confirm that I am looking at you and that indeed you havent blogged, I have my other means of marshalling my evidence. In fact now that I think about such a reverse-web-cam-blog apparatus, even if I had such technology I would be fearful to share this technology with the universe. Vis a vis the predicament that Buzzcos webcam alone would provide. The title of a textual transcription of his adventures could fill a book, whose title might well read as "Buzzcco and the Incredible Pants-less Wednesday Adventures, Volume 1". An ongoing saga of life, liberty, hijinx, and one mans eternal struggle to overcome the needless societal restrictions of denim devils and corduroy curmudgeons. Not enough paper could be produced to appropriately log such an epic. Truly Homer himself should be called out of retirement. No, not that Homer, and not even this one either.

With all comedy aside, this completely fictional reverse RSS webcam mojo should have served my purpose in pointing out that most of my readers have not been blogging. That actually makes me wonder, how do I know who IS reading this thing? I suppose there is some kind of logging I could put on my site, but in today's world of syndication I guess you just never know.

Now to continue with out regularly scheduled programming.

Thursday saw another busy day at work filled with normal testing activities. The major highlight was my afternoon call with a patent lawyer regarding a new disclosure pending submission to the USPTO. I am always amused when they ask if it is my first patent application. Yesterday I worked on some of the papers I have in draft. Sadly neither is at a 100% finished state. Also went to an education session to learn how to configure a SAN volume controller and SCSI fabric to support NPIV. The particular implementation was CISCO switch based connecting to a recent model mainframe. Challenging stuff with all the details to get right.

Later in the day I spent some time trading email with Shmuel Ur looking for a conference that will be covered by the corporate company budget for the testing paper we are working on. I was also sent an abstract for an IBM internal conference on predictive failure analysis methods that I intend to submit an abstract for. My pesky "day job" prevents me from doing all those fnu conference things I want to do. Later in the evening I celebrated a bit of unix geek heritage by watching the Unix time roll by.

I was pleasantly surprised to see this years IBM Shared University Research (SUR) grant call come out. I sent some mail to Jeanna and to Jan as they are involved with the labs I worked most closely with in the past. I will be sending a separate email to Daqing shortly on the same subject. I would sincerely like to submit another one, and truly hope it is is accepted.

I have some Java multi-threading homework to proceed with this evening. But in the afternoon I plan on slacking a bit. I intend on going out to grab some great Thai food for lunch. I may also go to the local second run movie theater (South Hills 8 Silver Cinemas) to see the modern remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still.

I think Kyle is supposed to be in town this weekend. Must remember to give him a call to see what his plans are. In other weekend related news, I am exceptionally happy for Todd and Patty as they get married today! I look forward to seeing photos of the event! Amazingly the weather here has held out rather nicely. I would be more than happy if this is not mother nature lulling me into a "punxsutawney double-cross"&trade (TM EMD 2009).

On a completely different note. I am finding myself increasingly frustrated with home prices in this area. My zip is 12601, but the red areas are where I would ideally live. Those areas are more wooded than the city (which I live in currently). I truly prefer living in a place where houses are not stacked on top of one another. Though the costs are beginning to come down a bit on the high end, it seems demand for the low end remains sufficient to bolster prices that many would consider ridiculous. In addition I am overwhelmed at the prospect of paying almost as much in taxes per month as the mortgage would cost. Suffice it to say home ownership is a goal of mine, but it is certainly not a priority at this point given the finances involved. In related financial news, yesterday was a pay day which is normally awesome, but I also received my Federal income tax refund. I also received mail from work regarding my Smith Barney account which now holds about about 25% of my stock portfolio (not counting stocks owned as part of my 401K holdings).

Posted: 02-14-09 @ 11:02

About Me

I am Eli M. Dow, a 27 year old Ph.D. student, inventor, and author enrolled full time, though remote, at Clarkson University in the Interdisciplinary Engineering Science Program. My advisor is the incredibly talented Dr. Jeanna Neefe Matthews. I am studying from both the Software Engineering and Computer Science departments (yes there is a difference!). I am currently working for IBM who is graciously paying my tuition. My primary academic and research interests are in the areas of operating systems, systems theory and systems-thinking, High-Availability systems and architectures, and virtualization.

Spring 09 Reading List

Some of the Recent Books I have Read or have in Queue (The Immediate Need to Read):

• Program Development in Java: Abstraction, Spec, and OOD
• System Analysis, Design, and Development
• Intellectual Property and Open Source
• Systems Engineering Principles and Practice
• An Introduction to General Systems Thinking
• The Art of Systems Architecting, Second Edition
• Mac OS X Internals: A Systems Approach
• The Enterprise and Scrum

Fall 08 Reading List

This list contains the books used during my Fall08 Semester:

• Agile Principles, Patterns, and Practices in C#
• Agile Software Development with Scrum
• Software Testing Techniques: Finding the Defects that Matter
• Systems Thinking: Coping with 21st Century Problems
• The Systems View of the World: A Holistic Vision for Our Time
• Systems Thinking Basics: From Concepts to Causal Loops
• General System Theory: Foundations, Development, App
• The Manager's Pocket Guide to Systems Thinking & Learning
• The Art of Systems Thinking: Essential Skills