Author: Aren Cambre

Doctorate progress

My doctorate is showing signs of progress! To recap, I am working towards a Doctorate of Engineering in Engineering Management through Southern Methodist University Engineering School‘s Department of Engineering Management and Information Science. (I am simultaneously enrolled in a Master of Science in Engineering Management, but this is only in case the doctorate falls through.)

On Friday, I passed my Preliminary Counseling Exam. This was a 30 minute chat with three EMIS department professors where they verified knowledge of basic concepts. I flubbed some precise definitions (e.g., couldn’t remember the exact words behind the abbreviation MARR), but I showed competence in the heuristics of the concepts. For most of the session, we chatted about my proposed praxis topic, which is on speed limits. This topic dovetails well with engineering management, especially with its economic implications.

My research advisor agrees that I have finished all advanced coursework, so I am formally cleared to begin the preliminary praxis steps of assembling my supervisory committee and passing a qualifying exam.

This degree requires 66 credit hours of coursework and a 12 hour praxis. To date, I have earned 52 hours. Fortunately, my Master of Science in Computer Science, which I earned in May 2003, satisfied all the elective credits for the doctorate, so I am really only doing twelve courses beyond that degree.

I have finished the following courses. (EMIS means Engineering Management and Information Sciencece (my department), CSE means Computer Science and Engineering, ENCE means Environmental and Civil Engineering, and CISB is for the Cox School of Businesses‘s Caruth Institute for Entrepreneurship.)

  • EMIS 7370 – Engineering Statistics
  • EMIS 8360 – Operations Research
  • EMIS 7362 – Production and Operations Management
  • EMIS 8378 – Optimization Models for Decision Support
  • ENCE 7391 – Urban Transportation Systems
  • EMIS 8361 – Economic Decision Analysis
  • EMIS 8363 – Engineering Finance
  • CSE 8344 – Computer Networks
  • CSE 7382 – Computer Graphics
  • CSE 7348 – Internetworking Protocols
  • CSE 8313 – Object-Oriented Analysis & Design
  • CSE 8340 – Software Practicum
  • CSE 8391 – Mobile Computing & Databases
  • CSE 7350 – Algorithm Engineering
  • CSE 8330 – Database Management Systems
  • CSE 7381 – Computer Architecture
  • CSE 7394 – XML & Java
  • CSE 7192 – IP & Information Technology

This spring, I will take Experimental Statistics (STAT 5372) and Network Flows ( (EMIS 8374). I expect this spring to be the most difficult semester of my graduate career. I hope I get through it without too much bruising!

After this spring, I have three courses left:

  • CISB 6210 – Essential Law For The Entrepreneur (this is an MBA course)
  • EMIS 8362 – Engineering Accounting
  • EMIS 8364 – Management for Engineers

…and that pesky praxis.

Relandscaping, Part 5

Here are details of the plants we used.

Encore Azalea
Prolific bloomers, tolerant of full sun, dwarf habit. We got two shades of red for the front and white along the side.

Salvia
These are planted between the azaleas. They almost look like bluebonnets when in bloom.

Oak Leaf Hydrangea

Fall colors (I thought I had a better picture somewhere, but I could not find it):

“Dynamite” Crape Myrtle
This has a vibrant red color and is a prolific bloomer.

Forsythia
These have tons of yellow blooms in the fall.

Fall flowers:

Burning Bush Euonymus
Vibrant red fall color.

Fall colors:

Doggitus Stupidus
It was a moment of indiscretion.

The next few plants are in front of the walkway.

Anthony Waterer Spiraea
Maybe it’s named “waterer” because, like the other plants, it likes to gobble up water? It will have lots of little pinkish flowers when in bloom.

Sedum
This tiny succulent turns a nice red in the fall.

Knockout Rose
This is a crazy rose bush. It just won’t stop blooming regardless of how poorly you treat it. The flowers have no fragrance, but this is definitely a good low water plant.

Purple Coneflower
This one is in the early stages of a bloom.

Butterfly Bush
Attracts butterflies. Seriously! Lots of nice, vibrant, small flowers.

Cardinal Flower

Gold Flame Spiraea
Not quite sure what this does yet.

Black Eyed Susan

Holly and Nandina
This is our pre-existing row of nandinas and hollies.

The hollies had a horrible shape when I moved in. I hacked the back to stumps two winters ago. They have grown back nicely.

Fall colors:

Viburnum and Hosta
We have both David and burkwood viburnums in the back yard. Between them is a patriot hosta.

Hibiscus
This plant doesn’t look all that great. Maybe it will grow back better in the spring?

Nikko Blue Hydrangea
This plant never looked happy. In fact, it looked downright crappy as winter set in.

Boxwood Hacking

My latest project, performed yesterday. We have some overgrown boxwoods on the side of the garage. Normally I wouldn’t complain about these, but they give a great hiding place for someone who wishes to attack people returning home.

They look full in the picture, but don’t let that deceive you. They were actually quite spindly.

Before:

After:

We’re now just going to replace them entirely with a shade loving plant.

Relandscaping, Part 4

Both of my loyal readers have been begging for an update on our landscape project.

Last time I wrote on this, we had just finished preparing the beds. That was a lot of work.

Now I talk about the very end, where we finally install the plants!

This is the truck dropping off the plants.

As with the landscaping materials (mulch, compost, etc.), we were able to get wholesale prices at a major Dallas-area wholesaler thanks to a good contact. Speaking of landscaping materials, you can see that a lot of compost and most of the pine bark mulch was still left.

Here are all the plants sitting in front of the garage:

The whole collection was nicely fragrant.

The first step is to place the plants where they will eventually go.

Alec helped us with this chore:

Next step is to dig a hole for each plant:

In this case, you can see an area where we failed to till in the compost deeply enough. The sand left by the prior prior owners (i.e., 2 owners back) is still there.

It’s hard to tell in this picture, but you need to make sure the top of the root ball is a hair above the surrounding soil level. This ensures the root system gets enough oxygen.

Several hours later, all the plants in the front yard are planted.

Finishing up the side of the house:

See that crepe myrtle in the middle? Man, that was a heavy sucker! We ordered a 15 gallon one, but they gave us a 30 gallon instead. I had to get a neighbor help me set it in place. We just couldn’t do it.

In an earlier post, I said I had to replace a railroad tie that had rotted out. In the pictures at top showing where all the plants had been dropped off, you can see a railroad tie. Here is where I dug out the bad tie and put a foundation of bricks below:

The same spot later on, with the tie in place:

At this point, I still need to amend the soil behind that tie. (I didn’t amend the soil earlier because it would have fallen.)

The back yard was more of the same.

Computer still crashes

I am confounded by a problem on my computer.

Since getting my replacement motherboard (first one was DOA), the computer usually runs reliably except for an occasional blue screen of death (BSOD). The BSOD error codes suggest some kind of memory error because the OS detected a data error.

With most hardware problems, you can usually successfully diagnose them by swapping out components or modifying the configuration until the crashes go way. However, before messing with anything, I ran a memory checker all night long three times. This memory checker never found a problem.

I have two 512MB memory sticks. This allows me to use 1GB of RAM in dual channel mode. Thinking that either of the memory chips could be bad, I took out one chip and ran the computer on 512MB RAM for 3 days. No crashes. Then I ran the computer on the other 512MB RAM for 3 days. Surprisingly, no crashes again!

This morning I put both memory sticks back in. When both sticks were installed before this test, they were in slots 1 and 2. When I ran the single memory sticks, I ran them in slot 1. Just to make sure that slot 2 couldn’t be bad, I put both sticks in slots 3 and 4:

About 15 minutes after booting my computer with both sticks installed, I get another BSOD!

Shortly after rebooting from that, I started getting random application errors like this:

I shut the computer down shortly after that error and stuck the sticks into slots 1 and 3. This disabled dual channel mode. Now it is about 3 hours later, and I haven’t had a crash or any other system instability I can attribute to bad RAM.

I don’t get it. Why does my computer run fine only when I am not in dual channel mode? Is my motherboard unable to handle dual channel mode? Are these the wrong chips? I can’t think of anything else. Why do the memory chips work fine individually, but together they cause problems?

Now that you’ve read the symptoms, I have to describe my hardware. My motherboard is a Gigabyte GA-K8NF-9 Nforce4 board. I am running an AMD Athlon 64 3500+, and–this may be the clincher–I have PNY Optima 1GB PC 3200 memory (2 512MB sticks) that was apparently designed for Apple Macintohses. Yup, I ordered D1GBPC32-G5KIT from NewEgg based on the specs and the generally positive customer comments. (Virtually no piece of hardware has 100% positive customer comments, so the few negatives didn’t overly concern me.)

The publicly available specs suggest that this memory should be identical to the memory PNY recommends for my motherboard, the D512MPC32CUSA. However, since PNY’s Part Number Search does not work for the D1GBPC32-G5KIT, I cannot know for sure.

A little investigation shows I may not be the only one with this kind of problem: http://www.planetamd64.com/index.php?showtopic=10660 and http://www.devhardware.com/forums/memory-35/crashes-at-1-gig-ram-but-not-with-512t-35240.html.

And something that’s interesting is that Gigabyte’s approved memory list for this board only certifies double-sided 512MB memory sticks. Both of mine are single-sided. I am not sure what that means for me, especially given that this list is 10 months old (a long time in the computing world), and the disclaimer that suggests that many memory chips not on the list may be fine.

Just as a side note, I just updated my BIOS from F6 to F9. I have not put the memory back into dual channel mode yet, but that’s the next step. This problem sure is weird!