A Quantum Immortal

I wrote my master thesis in computer science 4.5 years ago, and it was published by my universitry, the Technion. It was always very Googlable – just Google for “Ron Gross master thesis”.

Well, I happened to do this exact Google search today, and found the correct Technion webpage with my abstract, clicked on “Full Thesis Text” to download the PDF … and found that my thesis is now access-locked outside of the Technion network!

What the fuck?

I hate academic censorship. My thesis might or might not be relevant to someone out there (someone actually cited it a few years ago), but there is no reason to have it locked. I did find another technion page that provided full access, but who knows … that might be gone tomorrow as well.

Luckily, I have of course saved a full copy of my thesis in my trusty old gmail. So, for posterity, if you happen to be interested in “Invariance Under Stuttering in Branching-Time Temporal Logic“, go right ahead and download it. Free as beer, and free speach. No subscription required.

BTW, I’m a proponent of the Higher education bubble hypothesis.

Finally, after years of research, months of writing and correcting, and weeks of bureaucracy, I finished my M.Sc thesis!

Anyone using LaTeX will sooner or later want to embed images in his paper. LaTeX only accepts EPS files – no standard support for jpg or png images. In order to use such images, you must first convert them to EPS. I’m using ImageMagick’s ‘convert’ utility for this.

The problem was I was converting a 20kb png file and got a eps file over 1 megabyte in size! Reducing resolution and quality didn’t help. Today I found the source of the problem – it appears that the eps format has 3 versions, and the default version is 1 – a very old format that pretty much saves everything as uncompressed ASCII. Once I told ‘convert’ to use EPS 3, the result was a 20kb eps file 🙂

Usage is simply:

convert fig.png eps3:fig.eps

I’m using a lot to write my thesis. Today, when searching for something in the complete manual (PDF), I came across this:

Just thought to tell everyone that the 2008 Turing Award will be given to two guys that invented Model Checking, that has a very loose connection to my own master thesis. How loose? Both relate to Temporal Logic, that’s it.

After some posts containing only links I thought I’d update a bit on other recent events:

1. LAN Party at Oren’s place. Great games of Starcraft and UT. I still hold it again Zelner for dropping out 2 minutes after the start of a game, where him, his brother and I were against 4 players. That left only Ari and me vs the other four players. We fought bravely, but lost as expected. This was the first LAN party in which I actually somewhat enjoyed a game of Call of Duty. Next party should be held sometime after Starcraft 2 and UT3 are out.

2. A week of diving in Eilat with the family. Well, we dived only a small portion of the week due to the cold water running nose. Aya started her 1st star diving course, but unfortunately failed to complete it because of an ear infection. BTW, except for weekends, Eilat is a ghost town in the winter (and with good reason :).

3. In January I’m going to snowboard in France for 8 days, with Jonathan, Pisnoy and more.

4. A small breakthrough with my thesis. After about a month of being stuck, I managed to prove something 🙂 Huzza for me.

5. I joined Facebook, but am still very neutral/ignorant towards it. Luckily I refuse to install any applications or causes. I do like its image tagging mechanism though.

That’s it folks. After a long time of being away from Herzelia, Aya and I are heading south for the weekend. CYA.