SP09 Prologue

It is a week into SP09 semester, and so far, so good.
Few things that happened in the past week:
1. I now have a thesis adviser! finally! I have been talking with this professor since last semester, and I made it final by putting her name and her signature on a piece of paper and handing it to the academic office. I am still working on the topic, but at least I have an area of interest I am researching under. And since I am planning to do 5 semesters here, I still have a bit of time - would be great to publish a conference paper or two though.
2. The course I am TA'ing for seems to have been affected by the budget cut... Last semester we had 6 TA's for 200 students, now we have 4 for the similar number of students. And 2 of the TAs are new to this course. OMG. So my teaching hours have been doubled, and surely my office hours will be doubled as well. And the exam markings will undoubtedly last even longer. OMG!!! The 12-hour horror!!
3. Got a new office assigned - I was in this humongous 11-persons office before, and I never liked studying in there because it was so noisy. During the winter break while I was in NY, a pipe that goes above my desk got burst and the whole office was flooded. So, after floating around with no office for 3 weeks (over the break so no biggie), I got a new office and this time it is a compact 4-persons office and I love it! It is still on the first floor where there is no service room for coffee or printers though. I have met those who share the office and they seem all very... quiet :D (so far just been saying hello and bye stuff).
4. Got a new camera! YAY!! My Canon Ixus i has been acting weird with its battery for a while and one day while I was in NY, it died after taking 5 pictures when I recharged it over night. It kinda still works time to time, like if I switch it on and off several times.. So, given my plans to visit Chicago again during the spring break and possibly overseas during summer, I thought I'll buy one and play with it a bit... clearly, they are paying me too much here :D.
Now, I'm a happy point-and-shooter and I think I took some good pictures with my itsy bitsy Ixus i. Plus I don't like carrying around a chunky dslr camera when I don't know how to use all the functionalities. I was eying the Canon G9, but I figured that for that much of money, I could easily buy a lower end dslr camera which will no doubt take much better pictures. So, I braved and bought Canon Rebel XSi (EOS 450D) with all the intention of learning every single feature it provides. So far, the wide angle and zoom I can get with my kit lens (well, compared to Ixus i) have blown me away.

Despite all these things happening and assignments and homeworks slowly mounting, I feel like I can do with a week more of holidays :p It's the post-holiday laziness I guess, and when things really start next week I'll whip myself into shape..

Data security, privacy, regulatory compliance, auditing, searching.....

I've been researching a little bit about these general areas, because that is where I want to head for my thesis. So this will be a chance for me to clearly write down the road map of what I have gathered so far.

In the past decade, data security requirements in IT field has been toughened by scores of regulations, such as SOX, HIPAA and FISMA and tonnes more - all US regulations, for example SOX applies to all publicly listed companies operating in US. But requirements are generally similar for regulations in other countries. These regulations apply to different industries and enforce different rules, and are almost always technology-free, meaning there are no specific technology implications in implementing any of them. I would divide the underlying implementational aspects into 3 main areas:
1. Tamper-proof data retention (WORM, insider attacks, privacy)
2. Auditable trail of data (COW, versioning, sanitized audit logs)
3. Searchability of data across versions (robust indexing)
There are a lot of studies already done and being done on these areas, like Write-Once-Read-Many data stores (many of them tape-based, optical media are used also but says it costs more), Ext3COW (a result of a research from Johns Hopkins uni), jump indexing etc etc (there are simply too many of them for me to have read all, yet...). My general focus is the "insider tampering" and auditing, but I'll have to talk to my almost-adviser..

So, thats the overall, simplified picture of my research to date. I am looking into Ext3COW at the moment, hoping to understand its implementation better - which means I have to know more about Linux (its file systems and linux programming in general). This scares me and at the same time, makes me eager because I have been envying those uber geeky people who talk in C/C++ in the land of Unix/Linux (I googled "C/C++ for java programmer" and someone says I don't wanna go there). I know it will be hard but it is a chance for me to really get into it I suppose. I have been reading Unix books and stuff also, but unfortunately even the simplest OS concepts seems to be out of my grasp. So I am going to audit (that's what people call it here.. basically I'm going to attend the class without enrolling - well I can't because I'm a graduate student) one of undergraduate architecture/systems course that covers the basics. Come to think of it, I did take CS210 Computer Systems paper back home, but we spent 1/3 of the course learning T-code - I think thats what it was called, try google but you won't find what it is. From what I remember, it is a compression algorithm developed by the lecturer who taught the paper... So, anyways, if nothing, I'd have been exposed to Linux at least.

So.. big hopes and dreams for my coming semester - it will be tough with 2 of my own courses + 1 seminar course + researching + auditing a class + 20hr/week TA-ing but I am excited. Hopefully I'll find a nice internship for the summer break too. Fingers crossed ;)

2009!

Whoa, it is already 2009! I was thinking about writing something grand like "a year in retrospect and another in prospect" but there are so many disjoint things happened in the past year, I will end up just babbling on and on and on.. so just a quick summary.
1. I made perhaps the biggest choice of my life (so far) last year. Overall, I feel that I made a right decision.
2. I realized I have some awesome friends. I guess it is that "you don't appreciate something till its gone" thing.
3. I have uccessfully finished a semester at UIUC. Got an A for this weird course where everytime I thought I did ok I got crushed and when I thought I actually screwed up a test/assignment I aced it. And A- for a course I really enjoyed. I feel happy because I have had several "omg what am I doing here" or "I feel dumb as a stump" moments over the past semester (and no doubt will have a handful of them in the coming semester) :p.
4. Learned a whole lot about myself. Will skip the gory details.
and etc etc...

As for the new year's resolution, I am not making a specific list on purpose because I don't want to be stressed out about it :D. Maybe I'm being lenient on myself but my rationale is that if I'm going to do something, then I'll do it whether I have it in a list or not. So I'll just say that I have a mental list of things I want to do during this year...