Month: August 2010

  • Sensor Network Technology in Vinge’s A Deepness in the Sky

    An important function of science fiction is to help us understand sociological, technological, and other aspects of our future. A really good SF novel — like some of those produced by Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, Le Guin, Niven, and Vinge — is so full of ideas and possibilities that the reader’s mind is expanded a little.…

  • Going Going Gone

    Technically my sabbatical ended during the summer, but yesterday it really ended when I gave two 75-minute lectures back to back. On a normal Tuesday, this would be followed by a 75-minute embedded systems lab but the students and I get a free pass for a week or two while the lab admins get all…

  • What Blogs Are Good For

    My colleague Suresh (of Geomblog) likes to say that blogging is passí©. The first time I heard this it annoyed me because — dammit — I’ve been blogging for only about six months. It took me a while to figure out that blogs are irrelevant and I could care less if they’re passí©. The important…

  • The Future of Compiler Correctness

    Notes: This piece is mainly about compilers used for safety-critical or otherwise-critical systems. The intersection of formal methods and compilers for scripting languages is the empty set. Readers may be interested in a companion piece The Future of Compiler Optimization. A half-century of experience in developing compilers has not resulted in a body of widely-used…

  • The Future of Compiler Optimization

    Also see The Future of Compiler Correctness. Compiler optimizations are great: developers can write intuitive code in high-level languages, and still have them execute in a reasonably fast way. On the other hand, progress in optimization research is excruciatingly slow despite hundreds of papers being published on the topic every year. Proebsting’s Law speculates that…

  • Poll: Do You Want Compiler Bugs to Be Quiet or Loud?

    I’m preparing a longer piece on compiler correctness but thought this idea was worth putting into its own short post. The question is: Which would you choose: A compiler that crashes more often, or one that silently generates incorrect code more often? Of course, all real compilers have bugs, and all real compilers display both…

  • Timpanogos

    At 11749′ / 3581 m, Timpanogos is the second-highest mountain in the Wasatch Range. It’s a classic Utah hike and I’d wanted to do it for years, but never managed to convince myself the extra driving was worth it when there are a couple dozen 11,000′ peaks that are closer. Basically I should have done…

  • Ten Years in Utah

    Ten years ago today Sarah and I and the cats woke up somewhere in western Kansas and drove to our rental house in Salt Lake City: A lot has happened since then — marriage, kids, tenure — but still, it’s hard to imagine that more than a quarter of our lives has been spent in…

  • Knowing When to Quit

    In industry it’s often pretty easy to know when to stop working on a project: you might get moved off the project, it might get canceled, etc. In academia, it’s less clear: I can stop working on something after half an hour, or else I can work on basically the same idea until the end…