"Research" or "How I Got To Do What I Love For Credit"

This past semester I took a class titled "Thesis Proposal" dealing entirely with that thesis that I'm supposed to write by the end of my senior year. The one for Honors*. It only met twice a week for the first half of the semester, still, it got me all worried about getting started on some research.

Therefore:

A few weeks after the class ended, and after several trips to VTURCS, I was sitting in a professor's office in front of its occupant. It was an informal interview of sorts, just so he could see that I was as competent--hopefully more--than a quick email from me led him to believe. The topic of research was virtual machines, which I had been playing with on and off for the last year or so. The professor decided that I seemed qualified enough, meaning that I at least knew what I was talking about, and thus I became part of the Synergy group!

So, how did this all begin?

My first two years at Tech I began playing with different operating systems on my laptop. Mainly Linux, but there was attempts at OS X and others. It was a terrible addiction wherein I would accidentally "break" my laptop whilst in class, rendering it completely useless. Nothing like sitting in the front row of your engineering class, where a computer is required, and shutting your laptop since it no longer boots. For example.

Well, by this point I was just getting over my habit of installing a new operating system on my computer every month or so. Be it a new Linux distribution or the latest OpenSolaris, perhaps I'd broken Windows again. The point is that all that experimenting required large amounts of partitioning and repartitioning of my lappy's hard drive. With a slow 5400 RPM drive, doing almost any sort of partitioning takes an afternoon. No good. Luckily, there was hope to be found. *cue choirs of angels*

I learned of a nifty new thing called a "virtual machine" nearing the end of my first year. Namely VMware. In essence it allowed me to run an operating system within another operating system; no partitioning, rebooting, or migrane required! A novel concept for sure, hence I quickly began looking into the details, soon finding plenty of other software that did the same thing--more or less. QEMU, KVM, VirtualBox.

Obviously, then, as I blabbed on about how much I loved virtualization, my professor could see my enthusiasm. Hmm, more like couldn't help but be hit by it. And, for once, playing around and having a child-like interest in things actually paid off! Who'd've thunkit.


* I'm still not entirely sure what the benefits really are at this point.