ChapterZero

I’m thinking about what my life plans are. What is it I want for myself, and more importantly, how do I plan on achieving it? Of course, like everyone else, I can easily come up with a list of goals, but I don’t have a list of formative goals, ones that I can look at and say, these *must* be accomplished in order for my life to be satisfactory, as opposed to ones that I simply want to meet.

Actually, I can say that even though I don’t know the entire list of my formative goals, I’ve already missed one: attending a reputable school (esp. CalTech) for my undergraduate education. That might seem like a shallow goal, but I still think it was reasonable, considering what my motives were: first, it is indisputably true that attending say CalTech would ease my way into a reputable grad school, and second, I think that places like CalTech would be more conducive to my meeting similar minded people who could help me in my career and academic goals. So definitely, one of my new formative goals is to attend a reputable grad school, for much the same reasons. To that end, I *need* to start the application process this summer!

Another goal on my list is to get into shape. Not only because I’ll look and feel better, as the cliche goes, but also because the process will necessarily strengthen my self-control, and break my bad eating habits.

The only other goal I can think of is to fall deeply into love, and spend the rest of my life so. This is one goal that I don’t think can be worked towards– or at least, meeting the right person can’t be worked towards. That is pure chance. But I can work on making myself a more desirable person, physically and mentally. That is a task that I will enjoy, and am beginning in earnest today.

I’m putting the finishing touches on the core part of the LaTeX-Render perl port. The only things I have left to definitely change are: currently the output directories and temporary filenames and settings for dimensions are hard coded, so you’d have to edit the variables at the top of the module file to change that– I’m going to add an interface that lets the user override those settings each time they call the module. Also, the error-handling is non-existent, mostly because I have no idea what the return status codes are for the programs used (convert, identify, latex); I’m going to look those up and add better error-handling. And I’m going to add a way for the user to check for errors, independent of determining whether a filename was passed back, or an error message (which is what the current error-reporting amounts to)– maybe a function that returns the status of the last job.

In addition, I’ve been working on integrating LaTeX-Render into the MathMT text formatting engine I had started to develop earlier. My major impediment is finding a reasonable way to determine when formulas are nested– that is, when one formula contains a text box that contains another formula. Problem is, I don’t think there is a way to determine that without writing a TeX parser, to track modes. So I think MathMT will end up not supporting nested formulas. Of course, the big problem with detected nested formulas is TeX’s starting and ending delimiters for formulas are the same ($ and $$), so I could just change notation, for example to and tags, and eliminate the problem. That is probably what I will end up doing, along with supporting the TeX notation, with the provisio that nested formulas are not supported.

That last problem points out to me one of the perils of using Perl– you can get so wrapped up in the text-processing capabilities of the language, that instead of doing things the *right* way, you do them the easy way.

Note as of 5-26-2004: This is a test post which will not be much to look at unless and until I get the MathMT formatting engine support working for LaTeX. A function is said to be of bounded variation on , denoted by if there is a number such that for all partitions of , where is an arbitrary positive integer. It is interesting and instructive to prove that this seemingly trivial definition (at least it seemed so to me at first), has useful applications; prove:

• for to be of bounded variation on , it is necessary and sufficient that its real and imaginary parts be of bounded variation.
• there exist and , monotonic on , such that .
• is Reimann integrable on , and and exist for all .

Another interesting post to the UHME mailing list, this time from Zach, is making me consider just how much I’ll have to put into it if I want to succeed as a mathematician:

It should be noted that UCB is the top rated graduate school in the country for Mathematics, and it’s for a reason. The competition there is so fierce that unless you enjoy having your ass handed to you on a plate on a bi-minutely basis, I would advise against attending UCB for graduate school. A large majority of their entering first year grad students get financial support. Of these, two-thirds get cut after the first year. Sound fun? It isn’t. Realize that you’ll be competing against Harvard graduates, MIT graduates, and people who took graduate level Real Analysis when they were 14 (no, I’m not exaggerating. I know such a person.)

Lastly, they don’t expect you to know it ALL before entering grad school, just before taking the PhD qualifying exam, which I think you have to do by the end of your first year (although I may be mistaken about that).

That was in reply to my posting a message about the latest edition of the Berkeley Problems in Mathematics being available at the library. In light of Zach’s comments, I’m going to have to really do my research to figure out which universities I can gun for, and which are probably off limits. Not to mention, it seems like I shall have to study a lot more, and review my basics– that not so much because of Zach’s comments, but from looking at the problems in the book. Maybe this summer is the perfect opportunity to ask about math grad school.

I was asleep just now and I heard what sounded like a car door slamming; for some reason, in that state of semi-consciousness that I was in, I got the impression that it was my father returning home. He left yesterday to go to Austin on business with some other folk from his office. I also heard noises, and considering how social my father is, I thought it might be some people from his work. Since I was lying on the sofa right in front of the door in a pair of boxers, I was frantically trying to get up and run upstairs– but I couldn’t! I just couldn’t move, and trying to made me feel extremely fatigued. After three attempts, I finally managed to wrench myself to my feet. Moral: I need more exercise. This is like those times that I start to feel short of breath when I’m taking a shower.

I’m working on my summer reading list, which I will be posting here as I work through it. It will most likely change over time, as my free time waxes and wanes. Here is the first incarnation of immortality (couldn’t resist it :))

• Abstract Algebra with Applications (vols 1 and 2). Karlheinz Spindler. I’m reading this both because I’m interested in the math for its own sake, and also because I need to know abstract algebra in order to build a CAS.
• Extraction of Signals from Noise. L. A. Wainstein, V.D. Zubakov. I’m reading this because I’m disappointed in the two signal processing courses I took at UH: they were interesting, but simplistic, and showed no applications. This book is really quite nice: it seems like I can understand it from my current level of knowledge, and it deals with probabilistic signal processing. Plus, just from the title, you can tell it has many practical applications.
• Advanced Modern Algebra. Joseph J. Rotman. This is an excellent algebra book that I had started to read, but had to eventually put down due to time constraints. I’ll be reading it for the same reasons I’m reading the other two.
• ANSI Common Lisp. Paul Graham. For now anyhow, I’ve decided to continue my sabbatical from Scheme, and learn CL. Probably, I will end up reversing that decision at some point.
• Numerical Methods for Engineers. Steven Chapra, Raymond Canale. I desperately need to review the material for the class I proctor– no one this semester has asked me any significant questions, so I haven’t had much call to review– consequently, I’ve forgotten all but the most inane details.
• Advanced Calculus. Wilfred Kaplan. I also need to review my calculus. This is a nice book for that purpose– and will hopefully provide me with all the background in ‘analysis’ I need for the purposes of my research this summer. I would like to add a true analysis book to this list, but it is already unrealistically long.

So that’s it; 7 books in all. Not bad, for me. If I can dedicate myself to this, and strictly control my trips to the library, I can do this.

I finished this semester last Thursday, so school’s out! Like an idiot, I missed Oscar’s graduation yesterday, a once in a life time opportunity, and he’s leaving on Sunday too, so I won’t be seeing him for a long while. I can’t imagine what he must think of me right now; although, he might understand, considering that he does know about my social problems.

Now that shool is out, and I have a short lull before going to TAMU for my summer program, I actually have time to pursue other interests; so little time, so much I want to/ can do: ranging from reading several books (right now, one on extracting signals from noise, several calculus books, and a really good advanced basic EM book), to completing several of the online projects and programming projects I’ve committed myself to, working out, watching lots of movies using my sister’s month-long pass to Blockbuster’s. Of course, there is much more, as always.

But, I discovered a new interest worth mentioning: HAM radio. I’ve been seeing some books on it everytime I visit the half price book stores, so on my last trip (Thursday night), I picked up a couple of books. It seems interesting, but not as technical as I had feared (hoped for?) at first. I would like to get involved, just because it seems like fun– sort of like IRCing– and you also have access to a wide range of broadcasts. I bought three books published by the ARRL (http://www.arrl.org): a ham operating manual, an antenna manual, and a handbook for radio amateurs. They all look pretty interesting: at the least, from the antenna manual and the handbook I’ll learn some practical EM and circuit theory. And I’ll be learning a little about that interesting niche society.

I’m getting really frustrated with my hosting service. convert is not working for me, which is holding up basically all the web-based projects I’m working on right now. I’ve traded several emails with the support team, all of which amount to my giving them the error message, and them converting a handful of the files I need converted and telling me everything should be working since they can do it, so try again. Here’s their latest email:

It should work fine. Please check it again. If you still face any problem with this, please contact us with the ps file which is not converting. We shall check the issue. Please let us know if you require anything else. Thank you.

Damn! I need convert to work so I can script using it– fix the problem! What I want is simple and reasonable, I think. The thing most frustrating about this is that convert is saying that it can’t find the magick.mgk and delegates.mgk files, because they should be in a directory that doesn’t even exist . I keep mentioning this, but the support techs don’t seem to think that is important. I’m getting very pissed off.

Every once in a while, it turns out that there is some Perl module that I need to use that isn’t installed already on the server. Then, I have to go through all the hassle of trying to install it without root access, which can be a huge pain if you don’t know what you’re about. Others should benefit from my hard earned knowledge, so here is the easiest way to go about it:

Use the CPAN.pm module. It should already be installed. Call it using the command line

perl -MCPAN -eshell

If you have already installed it, the shell will come up right away; in that case, use the line

o conf init,

and follow along the next steps.

Complete all the configuration steps as prompted, except those which ask for the parameters for the perl Makefile.PL command and the make install command. For the first of these, you need to make perl install the module into a local directory; do so by entering the line

PREFIX = /home/username/usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.6.1

or the equivalent. The particular directory doesn’t matter, I just try to mimic the normal installation directory because when I install other possibly non-perl based programs locally, they can all be logically organized. For the make install , add the line

INSTALLMAN3DIR = /home/username/usr/lib/perl5/man/man3

to let make know where to place the manual files.

Once you’ve installed the module, you need to let your programs know where to find it. The easiest way to do so is to add the following line at the top of your programs:

use lib qw(/home/username/usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.6.1);

There is also a way to do this without using CPAN. Cf http://servers.digitaldaze.com/extensions/perl/modules.html. The same site also has alternative methods of calling the installed modules from your programs.