Sam’s Network Simulation Cradle Blog

PhD seems to be getting a bit bigger. Went past the 40,000 word mark. Well, the word count is approximate, so maybe I haven’t. Or maybe I already have. But it’s probably about right.

sam@hesiod:~/900/thesis$ make wordcount
Approximate word count: 41095

(40,000 words doesn’t seem like much for the size of the document. I’ll probably remove a few thousand before its finished. Somehow its almost 200 pages worth, though. Not sure how that works out…)

The literature review chapter has been getting a major cleanup this weekend and will hopefully soon be a lot more cohesive than it was. I’m much happier with the structure now, though the new structure isn’t finished yet! I have 3 more subsections to write before all the content is back.

Then I just need to read over it and add bits that make it flow better: discussion sections and bits that help transition from one section to another. I’m hoping this will be fairly obvious later on. It’s probably not too bad as it is, actually. It’s already feeling a lot better than it was.

Hopefully I can finish this one over the next week. It has turned out to be a lot more work than I was expecting. Still, it’s all progress and when I’m done this time it should be pretty decent (though I always wish I had more time to really think these things through and discuss them with others. Oh well).

“Literature review” chapter needs a bit of love and care.

Need to make it a bit stronger, so it really sets the scene for the thesis to come. Reader should know a bit about the problem space, the problem to be solved, other approaches, and why we need a new approach by the end of this chapter (the intro chapter will have a bit of this too).

I think the main change will be a reordering of the sections in the chapter and perhaps making bits of it a bit stronger. Can probably drop the background chapter, too. More on this later perhaps…

Performance chapter is done — 2nd draft is off now. That’s good progress, means the core 4 chapters of the dissertation are just about ready for further dissemination.

Need to sort of the literature review next. Once that’s done, its just the beginning and end that need tidying up: intro/background and conclusions need some work still, but probably not toooo much.

So, further progress. It is slow, but its steadily forming into something much more like a PhD thesis. Getting closer with every passing… month.