ALIVE @ Samford University

Tonight I am attending the executive committee meeting of the Alabama Academy of Science, where I am the editor for electronic media (i.e., I am in charge of the organization website). Tomorrow I will be chairing the Engineering and Computer Science presentations at the University of West Alabama in Livingston, Alabama. I did not submit a presentation this year, but I am looking forward to the six presentations from researchers across the state. The list of presentations is copied below and available on the Alabama Academy of Science website in the final program.

• A method for semantics-based conceptual expansion of ontology. Liping Zhou, Dezheng Zhang, Xin Chen, and Chengcui Zhang, University of Alabama at Birmingham.
• Design and fabrication of a research flight simulator. Harold Zallen, and James J. Baird, Jr., Joint Research Project with Malone Group International and Auburn University.
• Extracting coexpression relations between genes using grammatical parsing. Richa Tiwari, University of Alabama at Birmingham.
• Jibu: a tool for efficient and reliable concurrent programming. Srinivasarao Krishnaprasad, Jacksonville State University.
• Kinematic structure and evolution of the 9 march 2006 Mississippi/Alabama bow echo. Calvin M Elkins, University of Alabama in Huntsville.
• Metamodel recovery system using grammar inference. Qichao Liu, University of Alabama at Birmingham.

March 25th, 2009 | Tags: Add new tag, alabama academy of science, research, service | Category: research | Leave a comment

Wow - Sun microsystems has been busy - discreetly releasing and/or acquiring all kinds of important open source software projects. The banner of logos shown above just about summarizes it.

Today I discovered VirtualBox while working on a cluster computing project. VirtualBox isn’t directly related to cluster computing, but it can be used to run multiple compute nodes for testing. VirtualBox is an open-source equivalent to VMWare’s popular VMWare Workstation product. With the performance of today’s hardware, the ability to run multiple operating systems simultaneously on a single machine is becoming a reality for more and more people.

The basic idea is that by installing VirtualBox you install an application and a small set of services that allow you to create virtual machines for running an entirely different operating system in a window on your host operating system. I have just completed an install of the latest version of the Debian OS into a virtual machine. The entire process (including the several hundred megabyte download) took less than one hour to complete. Now I can boot up a Linux operating system whenever I want to run an application only available in Linux ( e.g., Kmines ).

The screenshots below give you a glimpse into how it works. The first screenshot shows the virtual machine configuration options, which represents everything you would find on a real machine. The second shows Linux running in a window on my Windows Vista host operating system.

March 3rd, 2009 | Tags: research, Software | Category: Software | Comments (3)

I am in the process of giving my Intro to Computer Science exam right now with two more exams to go after this one. I thought I would take a minute to update on a number of projects in the works:

• Ajax Performance Toolkit - I am in the final stages of getting ready to release this to web developers under the GNU General Public License (GPL). This “plug-and-play-and-configure” software allows a web developer to insert a small segment of code onto any web page to monitor the performance of Ajax requests being generated and the responses being received from a web server as well as the current load on the web server. Click on the screenshot below to see a larger image showing the toolkit applied to a page that retrieves the elevation under the cursor by sending an Ajax request to the server every time the mouse moves.
  
• Overclocked Q9550 processor - back up to 3.78GHz running at 1.38 core voltage. I invested the money on a nice processor, nice motherboard, why not use its full potential? A color-coded shaded relief map of the entire state of Colorado can be generated over 20% faster with the overclocked processor as opposed to the stock setup. Here is the updated PC Mark Vantage results.

December 9th, 2008 | Tags: research | Category: News | Comments (3)

The computer upgrade has gone really well, but it has been quite an adventure. The coffee cups on the table tell the story — lots of early mornings and late nights! The early results have been very promising on two fronts: 1) Individual maps can be produced two to three times faster than the original machine. 2) I was inspired during the upgrade to write a workshop paper for ICSE 2009 documenting my usage of Microsoft Office OneNote to bring topocreator.com from idea to live e-commerce website!

All that is left at this point is to replace the graphics card I am currently borrowing with ATI’s top “entry-level” card, the ATI HD 4670, which should be arriving on Tuesday. Since ATI is now owned by AMD, this is a great way of spreading the love around between processor manufacturers since everything else in the system is Intel-based.

November 9th, 2008 | Tags: photos, research | Category: hardware | Leave a comment

I just submitted an abstract titled “Investigating the impact of Ajax on server load in a web 2.0 application” to the upcoming 2008 ACM Mid-southeast Fall Conference. This annual conference is held each year in Gatlinburg, TN and is a great place for students and faculty to present current research and make connections for future collaborative work. I am looking forward to the beautiful fall colors and reconnecting with colleagues from the area.

October 13th, 2008 | Tags: conference, research, travel | Category: research | Leave a comment