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As SIGBOVIK 2009 comes to its glorious conclusion, it's time for me to reflect somewhat.

This year's events was quite successful, for a number of reasons. First, we were in Scaife Hall 125, this amazing conference room which is perfect for the event. I hope we continue to have it there. There were a number of great presentations. The proceedings (which can be purchased or viewed for free here) look amazing. But what's more, there was a great turn-out, and the days events proceeded very smoothly, with the one exception of my maybe having too much coffee. 

There were also a bunch of "real" projects that people spent their time on. For example, check out:

• Stacey, Mike, Carsten and Jeff in a Ghostbusters/Ghost Ride the Whip Parody.
• Tom7 had a MathMan parody (you know, from the TV show Square One) for teaching children about LF, LFMan, which you can really play.

And of course, there was my own work! I made a game called, Arkan∞id, the infinite brick-breaking game. (In the spirit of Breakout and Arkanoid.) You see, it's like a normal brick-breaking game, but it goes on forever! Some semi-clever engineering makes it so. Plus, it's a Blackberry game, so you can leave it running all the time! So, here's what you should do:

• Download the game! If you have a Blackberry, point it to http://a8.nelsbeckman.com/ so you can download and play! It looks and plays best on a Blackberry Pearl, but all platforms should work.
• Read the Paper.
• Check out my presentation.
• Watch Youtube Videos of the game here, here and here.
• Finally, if you are interested, the full source code is available on my Google Code project.

Oh, and one more thing: This research work is award winning! My paper won the 2009 award for "Most Pixels," which really I think I deserved. The award itself was a flash animation, which you can see here, and which itself won the people's choice award for best presentation!

 
This Sunday is SIGBOVIK 2009! Be there! I will be formally presenting Arkan∞id, whatever that could possibly be!

Just wanted to remind you all of your constitutional obligation to submit to SIGBOVIK 2009, CMU's preeminent fake conference in computer science. This year we've got an EasyChair submission site, just like a real conference. I am currently working on a (secret) project that will be the basis of my submission. It's sucking up all my free Spring Break time, but is pretty fun. I'm not actually sure that this will be at all funny, but it certainly will be strange and something that could not otherwise be submitted at a real conference.

On Saturday night I went to a heroes/villians costume party as The Shoveler, from the movie Mystery Men. Not too many people recognized my character. I guess that movie wasn't as popular as I remembered. If you have thefacebook, here's a picture.

Sunday afternoon was SIGBOVIK 2008! This year I had a great time wearing three different hats. As Guy Fantastic, I was the MC for the day, introducing the speakers and (more importantly) stalling with the dumb A/V equipment was giving them trouble. As Nels E. Beckman, I presented my work on Relentless Parallelism! You can read the full paper (both pages!) by going to my publications page, and you can see the slides from my talk here. I thought it went pretty well. Finally, as lead singer/lead guitarist of Sick Ridiculous and the Sick Ridiculous, I performed a rousing rendition of The Theme from SIGBOVIK along with Tom.

The highlights? Well Tom's Tom VII Entertainment System Hero, was pretty rad, although right at the moment when he was to give his presentation things stopped working. He made a parody version of the Guitar Hero games that takes his MIDI files and converts them into a musical score that can then be played just like in Guitar Hero. And because the XBOX 360 GH controller is USB, you can really play the game!

Otherwise, the phrase "The Majestic Stopcock" sticks out. I'll be laughing about that one for a while.

As part of my contribution to this year's SIGBOVIK, I have invented a brand new concept in computer science, Relentless Parallelism. Full details to follow. However, I do want you to know that those who cannot wait can already download the Eclipse plugin, which will effectively make your Java code Relentlessly Parallel, from my web site here.

Currently, if you Google(R) Brand Web Search the terms Relentless Parallelism and Relentlessly Parallel, you get a bunch of random links about literature, Japanese and otherwise. My goal is to become the number one hit for either (or both!) of these terms. Wish me luck! (Of course, links from your site wouldn't hurt either...)

SIGBOVIK is fast approaching! In fact, it's April 6th. We know the way these things work, though. You're thinking, "Blogface, I have a paper idea, but just not any time to work on it. Besides, who wants to write a funny paper all alone in their condemned apartment?" Great point.

That's why this Saturday you should join us for the first PC meeting. We use the PC meeting as an opportunity to write papers, and then immediately accept them for publication. There's lots of people there. Last year it was fun, and this year it should be too. Here are the details, I command you to come:

SIGBOVIK: First Paper Writing Party
Saturday, March 1st
10am - 6pm (Come for any amount of time you desire. Usually we order some food at some point.)
NSH 3001

We've been looking for a new way to display all of our past hikes in UrbanHike. I was initially thinking Flash, because I pictured the map zooming in a out to different parts of the city of Pittsburgh. Also, I thought it would be easy and much simpler than coding something up with Google Maps (I was worried that I would have to use some kind of server-side scripting, which I don't think our site supports).

Anyway, I was way off. I had way too much trouble with Flash. Conversely, Google Maps was really freakin' simple to use. You can program it using JavaScript (at least for all the simple stuff we're doing), the API is really well documented, and it only took me like 30 minutes to get things up and running. Here is the prototype. Furthermore, if we get ambitious, we can do neat things like including the entire route of the hike, or something like that. Wicked.

In other news, I finally finished my SIGBOVIK submission yesterday at the "PC Meeting." As it turns out, all of the authors were on the program committee, so it looks like my paper may get in... But more importantly, it was a good environment in which to bounce ideas off of other people, and it looks like the final product is better than I was thinking it would be. I'll post a link in a couple days.

I am trying to work on this comedic research paper, and it's just not going all that well. The real problem is having to sit down and say to yourself, "self, time to be funny!" It just doesn't really work that way. I feel like if I had written down every funny idea that I had re this paper since the idea first came up, I might have something good. But as it stands now, I'm a little worried. It could just end up being corny...

I am working on a fake research paper for a comedic  research conference, SIGBOVIK. However given the fact that this week (and the last few) have been absolutely murder, I don't really have much yet. I was going to stay up all night tonight to crank something out, but I didn't think it was going to be too funny. Looks like they may have extended the deadline a few days, which is great news since now I may actually have the time to do research (making my advisor happy) and writing a funny paper (making me happy).