Had another dream about my long ago lost PhD this afternoon. This time a viva dream. Though I think it was going well! Anyway it prompted me to blog about the protracted mourning for my lost Computer Science PhD ...
Graduation musings
Jul. 1st, 2025 10:08 pmSome musings from me, prompted by last week's graduation ceremonies at Dundee University, plus this week's graduation ceremonies at St Andrews University.
Dame Ursula
Jun. 14th, 2025 12:55 amWe’re very proud that Martin’s PhD supervisor, Ursula Martin, has been upgraded from a CBE to a DBE in the King’s Birthday Honours. Ursula was an excellent supervisor for Martin, patient and encouraging. She was also a huge help to me, both as an undergraduate computer science student at St Andrews - having a female CS Prof in the early 1990s was gobsmacking for me - but also after I had to drop out of my CS PhD, and more recently.
Thoroughly deserved, and especially good to see given that some of her achievements as a female groundbreaker in CS have at times been overlooked by male colleagues.
Thoroughly deserved, and especially good to see given that some of her achievements as a female groundbreaker in CS have at times been overlooked by male colleagues.
Now up to 51/53 of the year entries chosen and filled. Was highly amused when I mentioned before dinner to Martin that I'd just added a "certain programming book". And he knew immediately which one it was. Kernighan & Ritchie's The C Programming Language. Which was a life saver in 1991/2 during a particularly problematic (lecturing wise) portion of my computer science undergraduate degree at St Andrews.
Copyright and AI training
Mar. 20th, 2025 09:19 pmHeads up for fellow academics as well as other authors. I'm not a prolific published academic, but at least two of my academic journal papers (on Scottish book history and library history) have been pilfered for AI training purposes. All done without my permission. You can search for these at https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/03/search-libgen-data-set/682094/
Lots of academic papers (co-authored) from Martin on there as well. And loads by my historian and computer scientist friends. It's also amusing seeing author namesakes. I now know which academic with a similar name (my maiden name - I have some early published academic work under my maiden name) is publishing prolifically about healthcare and medical matters! That Academia.edu keeps emailing me unhelpfully about, referring to "Vivienne Dunstan"!
Lots of academic papers (co-authored) from Martin on there as well. And loads by my historian and computer scientist friends. It's also amusing seeing author namesakes. I now know which academic with a similar name (my maiden name - I have some early published academic work under my maiden name) is publishing prolifically about healthcare and medical matters! That Academia.edu keeps emailing me unhelpfully about, referring to "Vivienne Dunstan"!
Watching another Treadwells recorded talk, and laughing when the speaker said "You don't need to note the references to books etc., I have a bibliography for you." Yeah right. Brings back memories of some St Andrews CS lectures in 1993/4 when a couple of us had to go along in person months afterwards to ask insistently for copies of the slides we were supposed to get and why we had been told not to take any notes at all! Anyway another good Treadwells talk.
I'm working my way through a subset of the Treadwells of London talks available for members, getting through all the ones I fancy before I cancel my recurring monthly membership subscription. Tonight's talk was from an archaeologist speaking about ritual deposits, especially in private houses between the 16th and 19th centuries. Fascinating. Possibly too many slides for the time allotted, but I certainly wasn't bored!
I'm working my way through a subset of the Treadwells of London talks available for members, getting through all the ones I fancy before I cancel my recurring monthly membership subscription. Tonight's talk was from an archaeologist speaking about ritual deposits, especially in private houses between the 16th and 19th centuries. Fascinating. Possibly too many slides for the time allotted, but I certainly wasn't bored!
Musing favourite computing books
Oct. 18th, 2024 03:32 pmMe just now: “I wonder what my 3rd favourite computing book would be?” I rediscovered my 2nd favourite today, complete with school prize bookplate in there. I had form for spending school prizes on computing books! Even a 5th year French prize on a Pascal programming book 😜 Will ponder. Then probably blog about it. So far we’re talking 1980s though.
I'm continuing my reread of The Fellowship of the Ring. And the party have just got through Moria. But I was struggling hugely to visualise in my mind the different rooms and levels that the party were going through, especially later on in their time in Moria. But I can remember a time when I could visualise them clearly. For many years. So this seems to be something I've lost since, or can't do now anyway. It's not that I'm not remembering the Peter Jackson movie version. But my image of the journey through Moria was memorably different from the movie I saw in 2001. I remember clearly having "thoughts" about the film's depiction of Moria, and how different it was from how I imagined it looked ever since I'd started reading the book for the first time as a young child. But now I can't really visualise any geography at all as I read.
Relatively recently I tried an aphantasia online test. And scored highly. Which would fit with my struggles to visualise things in my mind now. Including faces. Even very close family! But I'm now wondering after this LOTR rereading experience if it's something that I've developed more in recent years. Perhaps as a result of my progressive neurological illness.
When I was young I could visualise things, and draw from images in my mind. However when my neurological illness started in 1994 at age 22 I quickly noticed my ability to think abstractly diminishing. Rather a big problem for a computer science PhD student needing to program. I quickly lost the ability to program effectively in lots of languages. Though at the time I just coped as best as I could. It's more distressing looking back.
So yup, I wonder if visualisation is another loss with time, perhaps due to my long term illness. It's partly also why I dreaded designing cover art for my latest IFComp game. But hey, got there!
Curiouser and curiouser anyway. I am enjoying my LOTR reread despite this. Next up Lothlorien.
Relatively recently I tried an aphantasia online test. And scored highly. Which would fit with my struggles to visualise things in my mind now. Including faces. Even very close family! But I'm now wondering after this LOTR rereading experience if it's something that I've developed more in recent years. Perhaps as a result of my progressive neurological illness.
When I was young I could visualise things, and draw from images in my mind. However when my neurological illness started in 1994 at age 22 I quickly noticed my ability to think abstractly diminishing. Rather a big problem for a computer science PhD student needing to program. I quickly lost the ability to program effectively in lots of languages. Though at the time I just coped as best as I could. It's more distressing looking back.
So yup, I wonder if visualisation is another loss with time, perhaps due to my long term illness. It's partly also why I dreaded designing cover art for my latest IFComp game. But hey, got there!
Curiouser and curiouser anyway. I am enjoying my LOTR reread despite this. Next up Lothlorien.
Worldcon this week
Aug. 5th, 2024 09:31 pmEnvious of my friends (including some St A CS folks!) who are heading to the Glasgow Worldcon this week. Sadly though we have in person attending tickets we can't go. I'm far too seriously ill now to manage it. Plus the infection risk is too high for severely immunosuppressed me. We can use the streaming part of our tickets though, both during the event, and on catchup after through to Christmas. So will get to see lots. Have fun folks going!
Graduation 30 years ago today!
Jul. 6th, 2024 10:51 pmJust realised Martin and I - plus pal Andrew - graduated 30 years ago today at St Andrews University! We hope to get video clips soon, but the uni haven't got them to us yet. Meanwhile here's the Dundee Courier page from that day, 6 July 1994. Listing the 3 of us - me and Andrew Computer Science, Martin Astronomy + Physics.


2024 versus 1994
Jun. 17th, 2024 10:47 pmLooking at this year’s photos of graduating computer science students at St Andrews, and remembering when my BSc(Hons) year had just 3 graduates ... To be fair this year’s photos include postgraduates as well. But the number of other new graduates will still be much healthier than our number was 30 years ago.
Declarative / imperative
Apr. 16th, 2024 04:41 pmGood spurt of IFComp game coding. Inform 7/10 is a largely declarative language, very like coding in Prolog. But sometimes you have to go imperative. And I've just coded a ridiculously large set of nested IF ... OTHERWISE ... statements to handle a key situation. Now approaching the end of the game, though still have masses of earlier stuff to go back and finish off writing properly.
Coding by playing
Jan. 25th, 2024 02:32 pmBack to Inform interactive fiction text adventure coding, and there's something really magical about trying early stages of the game myself as a player, thinking "This is the experience I want the player to have here", then coding it, replaying to try it out myself, tweaking and so on. Like alchemy! It is a phenomenally iterative process, and it does take time. But it's stupidly fun. I never had this much fun with programming during my computer science degree, when we learned loads of languages and IDEs. This is just brill.
Uisge beatha
May. 29th, 2023 10:26 pmThe drawback of reading Iain Banks’s “Raw Spirit” whisky tour book is I now have a very long list of whiskies I want to try! If we ever get back to the Balmoral Hotel in Edinburgh I am going to have to spend a long time - and a lot of money! - in their dedicated whisky bar. It is also marvellous reading more about whisky names I recognise from all the computers at St Andrews Computer Science back in the 1990s 🙂
90s throwback
Jan. 8th, 2023 12:51 amMe to Martin just now: “It’s like an Occam folding editor!” as I try to explain cut/spoiler sections in DreamWidth blog posts. That won’t make any sense except to fellow computer scientists possibly of a certain vintage. But sharing for them! I can still vividly remember coding Occam in the Edge basement Sun lab on the Scores in St Andrews in the early 1990s.
Book 68 of 2022
Dec. 20th, 2022 05:28 pmJust finished Hello, World! Opinion columns from the Daily Princetonian by Brian Kernighan. Obviously I'm more familiar with his writings on the C programming language - his classic textbook on it was a constant companion during my undergraduate computer science days! And he's written other computing books. But this is a collection of his essays for the Princeton University student newspaper. And it's a delightfully varied mix of academia, computer science, and just life and stuff. Thoroughly recommended reading for anyone with an interest in any of these topics, or like me multiple of them. A very tiny number of the essays are perhaps too specific to Princeton student life to be very accessible for a wider audience. But generally they are a joy.
Python upgrade
Nov. 23rd, 2022 04:00 pmFinally installing Python3 on my new Mac so updated my family reconstitution code from Python 2 to 3 (very easy). Running both versions in test sequence produces identical results, core output and GEDCOM file. And the Python 3 runs 3 times faster than Python 2! This is reconstituting nearly 7000 baptisms and 3000 marriages at Melrose parish in Roxburghshire (Scottish Borders) before 1800. Putting children into families with parents, and outputting family groupings as a GEDCOM file for import into a genealogy program. This is the only Python program I've ever coded. I was a computer science PhD student when my neuro illness struck at age 22 in 1994. I had to drop out, and have barely coded since. But something must have stuck! The pseudo code was easy to convert into Python, even for a newbie.


RIP Fred Brooks
Nov. 18th, 2022 06:46 amRIP Fred Brooks, architect of the IBM/360 and its OS, and author of The Mythical Man Month. A hugely influential computer scientist. As an undergraduate computer science student I worked part time in the Physics/Maths library at St Andrews University. And for much of my time there in between helping users I’d pull The Mythical Man Month off the shelf of short loan books behind me, and have another read.