-
Wanted: Invariant-Based Synchronization
Although a significant fraction of the programming languages community works on detecting race conditions in multi-threaded software, I haven’t been able to get very excited about this. Certainly race-free programs have some nice properties, but race freedom is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for concurrency correctness. This research area doesn’t feel to me like…
-
Wanted: One RSS Feed Per Conference
I attend a few computer science conferences each year, and look closely at the proceedings for another half dozen. I know how to deal with these conferences. On the other hand, the conferences that give me trouble are the next 25 or so that I’m passingly interested in, that probably each contain 1-2 papers per…
-
November Snowshoeing
[nggallery id=28] I make it into the Uinta mountain range less than once a year, on average, even though its near end is only an hour from SLC. Yesterday, taking advantage of the early snowfall, Bill and I snowshoed up the Norway Flats trail a few miles east of Kamas, UT. Actually we didn’t even…
-
Angel’s Landing
[nggallery id=27] Earlier this fall while visiting Zion NP I did the Angel’s Landing hike with friends. This route climbs the spine of a sandstone fin that sticks out into the middle of Zion Canyon, with thousand-foot drops on both sides. This video captures the feel, though the use of a wide-angle lens makes it…
-
Staying Sane in Academia
This is a quick followup to this post from the other day. Here I’m going to list a few of the strategies I’ve developed for keeping my job from driving me crazy. Find places to work: home, the library, the coffee shop, whatever. Although new professors are often able to get work done in the…
-
Some Good and Bad Things About Academia
Partially in response to Matt and Daniel‘s posts, I wanted to list a few things I like about being a professor: It’s a good match for my short attention span. If I get interested in something new, I can drop everything and work on it for a while. When I get tired of a project,…
-
Reviewers Get Worse Over Time
This is a depressing paper. The study shows that: 92% of peer reviewers deteriorated during 14 years of study in the quality and usefulness of their reviews (as judged by editors at the time of decision) The quality of reviews that I write has definitely decreased over the 12 or so years that I’ve been…
-
Computer Systems Evaluation Mistake #1
Tonight I wrote this in a paper review: The results section of this paper contains what is probably the most elementary and most annoying flaw that could possibly plague a computer systems paper. All of the numbers are relative and we’re never told the absolute values. It’s great that you can achieve a 30% reduction…
-
Independence in N-Version Programming
N-version programming is a way to reduce the impact of software bugs by independently implementing the same specification N times, running the implementations in parallel, and using voting to heuristically choose the right answer. A key weakness of N-version programming is that the increased reliability is predicated on faults occurring independently. As Knight and Leveson…
-
Compiler Bug-Finding Project Milestones
Despite the Fall semester being crappy for me (double course load, and I keep getting sick) this project has made good progress: Xuejun gave a talk at the LLVM Developer’s Meeting We submitted our 300th compiler bug report (up from 200 in March 2010) We submitted a paper to PLDI 2011 summarizing our methods and…