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Making the Sentence Structure of Paragraphs Apparent
This post is about a tiny thing that makes a big difference in practice because I spend so much time writing. Usually, people compose paragraphs as monolithic blocks of text. For several years now, I’ve written paragraphs like this: Integer overflow bugs in C and C++ programs are difficult to track down and may lead…
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The Children of the Sky
Basically anything Vernor Vinge writes will get reviewed here; he’s one of my favorite SF authors and certainly the best CSF (computer science fiction) writer working today. His latest book, The Children of the Sky, is a direct sequel to A Fire Upon the Deep and a cousin to A Deepness in the Sky. A…
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Fall
Pano taken from near the alpine loop road behind Mt Timpanogos, Oct 16 2011. Here’s a high-res version suitable for printing (36 MB).
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Career Advice I’ve Received
Following up on my previous post, here is a list of some professional advice I received as an assistant professor: Wear nicer shoes. Stop being flighty. Work on the same thing for about 20 years in order to become famous as “the person who does that.” Be at least gold medallion or equivalent on some…
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Advice for Assistant Professors
Today FCS posted some great advice for new professors, reminding me that I had a collection of notes on this topic: Follow Patterson’s advice. Across your research projects, make sure there is potential for both short-term and long-term payoff. Understand your institution’s retention, promotion, and tenure policies. More importantly, understand what is being left unsaid…
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Chimney Canyon
The San Rafael Swell is a large uplifted area in southeast Utah that has eroded into numerous badlands and canyon systems. The Swell is not particularly well-known outside of Utah because it contains no visitor centers, motels, restaurants, or any other services — it’s the kind of place you enter with maps, plenty of water,…
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Draft Paper about Better Fuzzing
The other day I posted about a simple, low-effort way to improve the bug-finding performance of a random tester. We now have a draft paper about this topic, it’s joint work between my group at Utah and Alex Groce’s group at Oregon State. The key claim is: … for realistic systems, randomly excluding some features…
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Draft Paper about Integer Overflow
Last Spring I had a lucky conversation. I was chatting with Vikram Adve, while visiting the University of Illinois, and we realized that we working on very similar projects — figuring out what to do about integer overflow bugs in C and C++ programs. Additionally, Vikram’s student Will and my student Peng had independently created…
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Hacked
As people probably noticed, lately someone hacked my WordPress installation and turned this blog into a pharmaceutical link farm. I asked Dreamhost for help and they sent me sort of a friendly “have fun fixing that!” message, but they did run an automated scan indicating that something was wrong with my wp-config.php file. Sure enough,…