Martin's virtual lair

Imagine we have a Linux-based webserver using MySql, but phpMyAdmin isn't available for maintaining the databases. In that case we can SSH into the server and use the command line instead. For a brief summary of basic MySql commands see e.g. here.

Individual tables or entire databases can be easily removed using the drop command, but there is no straightforward way to delete a large number of tables from a database. I encountered this problem when attempting to upgrade a Joomla installation from v1.5 to v2.5. When I wasn't happy with the result of an upgrade attempt, I would first make tabula rasa by deleting the newly created mysql tables before making another attempt. Let's say the database in question looks like this:

$ mysql -u myusername -p mydatabase

mysql> show tables;

+-----------------------------+
| Tables_in_mydatabase        |
+-----------------------------+
| bak_banner                  |
| bak_categories              |
| bak_menu                    |
| bak_users                   |
| j25_banner                  |
| j25_categories              |
| j25_menu                    |
| j25_users                   |
| jos_banner                  |
| jos_categories              |
| jos_menu                    |
| jos_users                   |
| jupgrade_categories         |
| jupgrade_menus              |
| jupgrade_modules            |
| jupgrade_steps              |
+-----------------------------+

Intimidated by the prestigious nature of this conference, I didn't even try to apply for a conference talk at QIP 2011 (10th-14th January) and confided myself with a poster presentation. It was shortlisted for the "Alice+Bob Award for Original Imagery", but unfortunately got beaten by another poster that was entirely hand-drawn!

(download PDF)
(download source code)

The poster was created with the help of the baposter LaTeX class. I might elaborate on the technical details of this work once I have a bit more spare time. For the time being, feel free to download the source code and experiment with it yourself. :)

Here is the conference talk I gave at the AQIS 2010 conference in Tokyo, Japan on 28th August 2010. It outlines our various findings related to permutation-symmetric states of n qubits, the Majorana representation and symmetric state entanglement classes.

(download PDF)

The presentation contains animated vector graphics which may not display correctly on some PDF readers, so to be safe please view it with the Adobe Reader (v9 or higher, Win, Mac or Linux). If you want to learn more about the technical aspects of this LaTeX beamer presentation, please have a look at this article where I outline most of the points in detail.

Recently the Design Office of my university acquired a 3D printer, and they offered free print-outs during a trial period. This was a perfect opportunity for me to bring one of the abstract spherical functions appearing in my work to life. The function is closely related to the icosahedron, a regular polyhedron, in the sense that it has an icosahedral rotational symmetry. A more detailed description of the function as well as its relation to quantum mechanical entanglement can be found further below.