Research Update

Sadly, there hasn't been much coding of late. I'm no longer blocking on my professor and am working at full speed to get ready for URSI USNC in Ottawa at the end of the month. After struggling with derivatives of Legendre functions, I managed to blitz through a good bit of analysis this afternoon. Hooray! This made up the bulk of the work for one of three papers my prof and I are presenting. The shop has finished 2 out of the 3 prolate spheroids I needed to make measurements and hopefully I will receive the third tomorrow. Making my calibration measurements went well, but I did have to cannibalize a dry cleaning clothes hanger to make a Teflon plug puller. It turns out that no matter how slick you think Teflon is if you have enough surface area friction matters.

List of things to complete in time for the Conference:

• Prolate Spheroidal Monopole Measurements
• Comparison of calculated input admittance to measured
• Rayleigh Series Quasi-static Analysis and comparison to measurements
• Elliptic channel with PEC cylinder code
• Elliptic channel figures

It is quite the list but finishing the first three items will satisfy all of the non-writing work needed to finish my masters. Let us all hope I survive to make it to Ottawa!

Long time no blog

I realize it's been almost half a month since my last post, but end of semester duties and such take precedence. So in no particular order...

Seahorse: I've been made a co-maintainer and have mostly been focused on bug fixing and mentoring our SoC student, Pinar.

Open Street Maps: It owns my soul and is my new favorite form of procrastination. There is a warning on one of their pages about mapping becoming compulsive. I apparently read the warning and continued without a slackening of pace. OSM has replaced my attempt to use Google Maps' MyMaps feature to detail Clemson University. I have mostly been prepping for a future job with the NRO and updating the map via Yahoo!'s donated aerial imagery. If you've ever wondered where trains go and come from, the imagery is a good way to find out and why not map the tracks at the same time? I have purchased a USB GPS receiver (I know the box says Microsoft, but the receiver can be used with pure FOSS in the form of gpsd.) and can't wait to hit the trails with my bike to map the Clemson Experimental Forest. This may be the final straw in purchasing a N800, although if some kind embedded developer were to intervene on my behalf I may be interested in performing a Maemo port of Seahorse :).

School: Grades aren't in yet but between a take home exam and an in exam presentation, I can't help but believe the semester ended well. Hopefully, the metal shop will find the time to machine the parts I need to make measurements for my Master's thesis so I can wrap that up in time for August's graduation deadlines.

Conferences: While I probably will be unable to make GUADEC, my paper entitled "Prolate Spheroidal Monopole"
, the subject of my Master's thesis, has been accepted for presentation at the North American Radio Science Meeting in Ottawa from July 22-26. I'm already planning on trying to crash the Ottawa Linux Users Group picnic that week, but if there are any other Gnomies that would be interested in sharing a pint or signing GPG keys that week shoot me an email.

Qualifed

This morning PhD qualifier results for Clemson University's ECE Department came in. The electromagnetics group had a great showing with all 6 members that took the qualifier passing. Congrats to all of my fellow group members! Now get back to work !