Embedded in Academia

Month: May 2013

  • 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…

  • MSCS

    A masters of science degree in computer science can mean two very different things: The research MS where the student works closely with an advisor on a research project that culminates in a thesis and ideally a few papers. This kind of student is generally paid as a TA or RA and can be expected…

  • Computer Science Culture Clash

    It’s not uncommon for an empirical CS researcher to get a review saying something like “Sure, these results look good, but we need to reject the paper since the authors never proved anything about the worst case.” Similarly, when I interviewed for faculty jobs ten years ago, a moderately famous professor spent a while grilling…

  • Foothill Sunset

    I went for a hike last night to celebrate being out from under whatever virus made me more or less sick for most of the last month. The foothill wildflowers are more subdued than the ones that will cover the big mountains in July and August. Four mountain ranges and the Great Salt Lake. Looking…

  • Procedural Decomposition

    While teaching a CS class I spend quite a bit of time looking over the shoulders of students whose code doesn’t work. Sometimes they have a simple mistake and I’ll either point it out or ask a question that will lead them to the problem. However, other times the code is just generally not very…