Month: August 2011

  • Hello Android

    Some semesters I teach courses that just need to be taught. On the other hand, this Fall I get to teach a class that should be purely fun — an Android projects course for upper-level undergrads. I already promised an “A” to anyone who (legitimately) makes at least $100 using an application developed for the…

  • A Fire Upon The Deep — Retrospective and E-book

    Over the last few weeks I read A Fire Upon The Deep, surely one of the top five works of computer science fiction. The proximate reason for the re-read was the upcoming release of a sequel, Children of the Sky, which I am impatiently awaiting. I read the “special edition” which contains about 1500 of…

  • When to Teach C++?

    Some friends and I were recently debating when CS undergrads should be taught C++. People have various opinions, but it’s clear that C++ no longer enjoys the somewhat dominant position that it did a number of years ago. My own opinions are rooted in an experience I had around 1995 as a TA for a…

  • Box Elder Peak

    [nggallery id=46] I have a hiking book that refers to Box Elder Peak as the red-headed stepchild of the central Wasatch Range. This is true: Box Elder is a lonely 11,000′ mountain stuck right in between the big and impressive Timpanogos and Lone Peak massifs. The other day Dave Hanscom and I decided to climb…

  • C No Evil

    Your mortal enemy would like to ship a really great product in a week or two. Towards the goal of maximally delaying this product, you may inject a single C preprocessor definition into one of their header files. What is it? Keep in mind that anything which stops the project from compiling will be rapidly…

  • Testing Commercial Compilers

    A few weeks ago a reader left this comment: Just out of curiosity John, have you approached any of the big commercial compiler companies about getting free licenses for their products? I don’t work in the compiler business but if a university research time offered to rigorously test my software, for free, I’d say yes.…

  • Fall on Snow

    Yesterday the local news had this story about a guy who took an uncontrolled slide down a chute in Maybird Gulch in Little Cottonwood Canyon outside of Salt Lake City. The slide took him over some rocks and he was lucky to survive — the video accompanying the story is terrifying. Video Courtesy of KSL.com…

  • Open Proposals (or: Take My Idea — Please)

    Sharing research papers on the web is not very controversial because sharing benefits everyone (other than a few increasingly irrelevant special interests). Sharing research proposals is a thornier proposition: since the work remains to be done, it exposes researchers to scooping. However, I would argue that scooping is not really very likely, and anyone whose…

  • Isolation with a Very Small TCB

    A basic service provided by most computer systems is isolation between different computations. Given reliable isolation we can safely run programs downloaded from the web, host competing companies’ sites on the same physical server, and perhaps even run your car’s navigation or entertainment software on the same processor that is used to control important system…

  • Proposal for Automated Compiler Bug Reports

    [Yesterday I submitted a proposal to Google for a modest amount of money to work on turning large random programs that expose compiler flaws into concise bug reports. Below is a transcription that is mostly faithful (citations are omitted and I changed the example bug report from a floating figure into inline text). Feedback is…