I enjoy going out drinking with my colleagues, although it only seems to happen a few times a year. It should come as a surprise to nobody that professors are natural bullshitters and people always have good stories: nearly destroying a ticket booth at Alta while doing avalanche control work, barely sub-nuclear pyrotechnic displays out […]
Category Archives: Computer Science
Can I Stop Lecturing Now?
In Fall 2010 I’ll teach my Advanced Embedded Systems course for the fifth time. This is a class that I enjoy teaching and that students generally enjoy taking. I created it from scratch and am fairly proud of it. There’s just one problem: I’m ready to stop giving the lectures. First, although I tweak and […]
C Compilers Disprove Fermat’s Last Theorem
[Update: I wrote another post on this topic that may explain the underlying issues more clearly.] Obviously I’m not serious: compilers are bad at solving high-level math problems and also there is good reason to believe this theorem cannot be disproved. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Recently — for reasons that do not matter […]
Margin in Software Systems
Margin of safety is a fundamental engineering concept where a system is built to tolerate loads exceeding the maximum expected load by some factor. For example, structural elements of buildings typically have a margin of safety of 100%: they can withstand twice the expected maximum load. Pressure vessels have more margin, in the range 250%-300%, […]
Picking a Research Topic in Computer Systems
This post is a collection of observations and advice for people who want to choose a research topic in computer systems. I’m not claiming to be some kind of genius in this area, but I have enough ideas that they seemed worth writing down. This advice is probably most useful for graduate students in CS, […]
The Compiler Doesn’t Care About Your Intent
A misunderstanding that I sometimes run into when teaching programming is that the compiler can and should guess what the programmer means. This isn’t usually quite what people say, but it’s what they’re thinking. A great example appeared in a message sent to the avr-gcc mailing list. The poster had upgraded his version of GCC, […]
C and C++ Make It Hard to Read a Register for Its Side Effects
[ This post was co-written with Nigel Jones, who maintains an excellent embedded blog Stack Overflow. Nigel and I share an interest in volatile pitfalls in embedded C/C++ and this post resulted from an email discussion we had. Since we both have blogs, we decided to both post it. However, since comments are not enabled […]
The Dreaded LPU
In academic publishing, the “least publishable unit,” or LPU, refers to the smallest contribution to scientific knowledge that can be successfully sneaked past the reviewers at a conference or journal. Most often the term is used derisively, though I have sometimes heard it used as a modest complement, indicating that a researcher has astutely determined […]
A New Life Awaits You in the Off-World Colonies
As a recipient of research funding from the US government, I sometimes think about how this resource should be allocated. Wikipedia claims that for most developed countries, research funding amounts to 1.5% to 3% of GDP, so we are talking about a lot of money here. Appropriate focusing of this funding can change the world […]
Computer Science Fiction
Science fiction explores the effect of technological progress on society. It is ironic, then, that the majority of SF authors miserably failed to predict the impact of computers and information technology. Why does Google return no meaningful hits for “computer science fiction?” Is it not obvious that this term needs to exist, if we wish […]