Embedded in Academia

Category: Random

  • Crashy Compiler Flags

    This post is for fun, no deep thoughts will be presented. For a research project that’s not yet ready to write up, I needed a bunch real programs (as opposed to, for example, programs generated by Csmith) that cause compilers to crash. So I built a few hundred randomly chosen revisions of GCC and LLVM/Clang…

  • The Space Child’s Mother Goose

    I just noticed that this old favorite has been reprinted. A quick excerpt: This is the Theory Jack built. This is the Flaw That lay in the Theory Jack built. This is the Mummery Hiding the Flaw That lay in the Theory Jack built. This is the Summary Based on the Mummery Hiding the Flaw…

  • Peeking into the Trash

    Just to see what was there, I rendered a thumbnail for every URL in my email trash folder. Below are the first 250 (full set is here).

  • Blogspam Poems

    These are unedited excerpts from blogspam that I’ve received over the past few days. Sometimes it resembles a koan: s other words, how do you try to look for blogging that suit a few things i prefer to found out about? Truly does virtually anyone learn how to BROWSE through blogging by simply issue or…

  • Twenty Years of Linux

    Twenty years ago, almost to the day, my friend Jamie showed up with four floppy disks. Two of them were a boot/root pair for 386BSD (none of FreeBSD, NetBSD, or OpenBSD existed yet) and two of them were for Linux 0.96c. It’s pretty hard to overstate how cool and amazing it was to see protected-mode…

  • PLDI in Beijing

    [nggallery id=53] PLDI 2012 was in Beijing earlier this week. Unfortunately I had only one full day to be a tourist; it would have been nice to bail out of the conference for another half day to see more stuff but that didn’t end up happening. My student Yang Chen went to college in Beijing and…

  • Damn You, Zork II

    Some significant part of my middle school years (age 11-14, roughly) was spent struggling with a couple of text adventure games and none of them was more tantalizing or frustrating than Zork II. In particular, the bank and baseball maze parts of this game completely stopped me, despite my large piles of notes and countless…

  • The Photography Contest

    This is an old story, but perhaps worth repeating. My students have heard it too many times and I tell it to myself even more often. Since I have no idea what the original source is, I’ll just paraphrase: A local camera store announces that it’s holding a photography contest. This guy submits a panoramic…

  • How Many C Programs Are There?

    If I choose a size S, can you tell me how many valid C programs exist that are no larger than that size? I’m actually interested in the answer — it’ll help me make a point in a paper I’m writing. Shockingly, the Internet (or at least, the part of it that I looked at…

  • Fixing Computers

    Pretty often, a friend or relative asks if I can fix something that’s wrong with their computer. Because I’m very irritable in some respects, my first impulse is always to say something like “Sure! And I bet a brain surgeon would love to put a band-aid on that ouchie, too.” Usually, I manage to resist. Over…