This weekend I’m graduating with my Master’s degree in computer engineering from Washington State University. It’s been a long journey with many challenges along the way, but it feels good to be done.

Things have been quiet on this blog recently, mostly because I’ve been hard at work on my Master’s thesis. Today’s news is that my defense is now scheduled for April 15th at 4PM on the WSU campus. If you’d like to see a presentation about the work I’ve been doing, feel free to come watch. I’ll post more details later.

The choice of a defense date firms up my schedule for the next few weeks. Here are the important milestones:

• March 25th – distribute the first draft to the committee
• April 1st – submit the second draft to the graduate school
• April 8th – deliver the final draft to the department
• April 15th, 4PM – present and defend
• April 22nd – submit the final version

I made some significant progress in my master’s thesis research this weekend. First of all, I was able to fix some bugs in the code and verify that all of the low-level functionality works correctly. This meant tackling some intimidating problems that had been hanging over my head for weeks. Fortunately, I was able to develop a clean and elegant solution and tie up the loose ends.

The second big piece of news is that I’ve started writing the actual thesis document. I completed the entire first chapter and wrote a draft of the second. Here’s my tentative outline for the finished product:

Introduction

Part One : Context

-Background

-Past Research

-Motivation and Guiding Principles

Part Two : Application Overview

-Program Flow Description

-Software Architecture

-Use Case Scenario

Part Three : Implementation

-Architecture Algorithms

-Mapping Algorithms

-Novel Features

Conclusion and Future Work

Appendices

-Verification and Testing

-Portability and Extensibility

-Requirements, Packaging, and Installation

-User Guide

“Everything is so simple!” The more I use Python, the more I like it. This comic from XKCD illustrates why.

After some hard work, I finally finished my paper, Fault Avoidance in Medium-Grain Reconfigurable Hardware Architectures. Yesterday I submitted it to the International Conference on Engineering of Reconfigurable Systems and Algorithms (ERSA), which is part of WORLDCOMP. For this conference, notification of acceptance will be sent out on April 5th.