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Straight Man
Hank Devereaux, chair of the dysfunctional English department at a small university, is having a midlife crisis. His wife, leaving town, fears he’ll be either in jail or the hospital before she returns — and she is not disappointed. Straight Man is hilarious, I had to stop reading it in bed because it was too…
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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,…
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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,…
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200 Compiler Bugs
This morning I reported the 200th bug found by our compiler testing tool. It is a new way to crash GCC. The failure-inducing input is not pretty so I won’t give it here, but it can be found in GCC’s bugzilla. Although the testing tool is now entirely developed by some excellent PhD students, I…
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How to Evaluate a Computer Systems Research Paper
Some excellent resources exist about how to write a good systems paper. This post is about a slightly different topic. In a typical recent year I review about 100 papers, mostly conference papers 8-14 pages long in 9 or 10 point font. People in similar positions — mid-career computer systems professors — are generally in…
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50 Vertical Miles
A little over a year ago my family moved to a house near the north edge of Salt Lake City. Although access to real mountains is not great — it’s about a three-hour walk to the nearest 8000′ peak and a major slog to a 9000′ peak — the foothill access is excellent. At the…