I bought a condo in Kirkland, woohoo! I got my keys earlier today. The whole process took about a month. Too lazy to upload many pictures right now, so here's one that was auto-uploaded to Google+:
Maybe I'll post pictures of my empty place later, or maybe I'll wait until I have stuff in there. Or both. Two bedrooms, two bathrooms, 1300 square feet and a good view. I expect a more scenic view in better weather with the Olympics being visible.
It's been precisely a year since my last post, so I guess it's time to make another one! I really wish there was a blogging platform with Google+ sharing controls. Wordpress has a great post editor but only supports public/private. Blogger has neither, and it still doesn't support paragraph tags. Google+ posts are too simple formatting-wise and aren't easily searchable. It's 2012, where's my perfect blogging software?
Time really does fly as you get older. At the beginning of 2011, I was still in school, living the life of an unhealthy grad student. May rolled around and I graduated. I slacked off for a few months and road tripped across the US to Seattle. It was surprisingly more fun than I imagined a road trip would be, but I'm not going to blog about it here. There are pictures on Facebook and Google+, for those of you that can see them.
I started work at Google on August 1st. Easy to remember, but I'll probably forget anyway. Life has gone by pretty quickly since then; I've almost been working for half a year! I definitely miss the copious amounts of free time and nap time that I had before, but I guess working makes me use my time more efficiently.
I definitely feel happier working. I can't quite explain why, but it certainly helps that Google treats its employees very well. I think taking better care of myself has put me in a better mental and physical state. Some parts of grad school were quite stressful at times, as my last post mentioned.
Unfortunately, my life just isn't that exciting where I have so much I want to say about it. I'm content with not being super exciting. What am I looking forward to in 2012? Hmm, hard to say. Releasing my first big change should be "interesting" to say the least. Since I'm approaching six months of work, I should take interview training so I can visit Purdue some time. Oh, and I guess that minor detail of potentially buying a condo. More on that later...maybe.
Oh, and have a new template. Wee.
New years aren't actually that exciting to me. In fact, I may or may not have missed 12am, due to playing video games. This New Year's Day was going to be more interesting, since it was the official deadline for me to decide on whether or not to accept my offer from Google – the one I apparently didn't write about. I ended up deciding several weeks ago to accept the offer; most people who will read this probably already saw my Facebook status from the day I mailed my offer letter back. The decision didn't end up being easy (hurray life-altering choices), but I ended up making it based on the fact that I didn't progress to a point where I would be comfortable spending the next few years working on a thesis. Stopping at a Master's now makes the most sense, since I'll finish my requirements in May. At any rate, a new phase of life begins this year. I guess that phase is called "growing up." It should be...interesting.
In other news, my family went on a cruise for winter vacation this year. The respite from cold and snow was great and I think everyone had a good time. In hindsight, I think I really needed a break from the Internet and work. Despite taking a leisurely one class, toward the end of the semester, I think stress and frustration with various things/people were starting to take its toll on my well-being. The best ship entertainment was easily Second City. I didn't see them when they came to Purdue and now I regret it. Oh What a Night! was also a great act – a tribute to the music of The Four Seasons, interleaved with comedic banter. Eating cheesecake every night was also good entertainment. I made a Google Map to show where we went and put some details on the markers. Unfortunately, I didn't use my camera at all, so I have no pictures.
My post entitled "Apparently computer science at Purdue sucks" is by far the most popular on this blog. Most of the views seem to come from searching for some combination of "Purdue", "computer science", and "sucks". There's a boatload of negativity in the comments and the post itself is over 3 years old, so I thought I'd give a refresh.
Disclaimer: I am no longer an undergrad at Purdue. I'm a grad student now and have experienced the other side of some of the things mentioned in the comments. However, this also means I'm less in touch with what other people are saying about the undergrad CS program. Most of these opinions are my own.
A few years ago, Professor Mathur took the helm as head of the CS department at Purdue. Let me just say to the naysayers that I believe he has taken our department in a very positive direction and that I would have counted myself very lucky to have some of the things that have been introduced under his watch. To name a few:
Of course, we're far from a perfect CS department. If we were, people would stop commenting on my blog and I wouldn't have to write this post. Here are some ideas:
Lastly, here are things I will argue vigorously against:
There's one big factor in the equation that I haven't (and won't) address and that's people. How can we make students motivated to learn and faculty motivated to teach? Who knows? Not me. Nevertheless, I think the undergrad CS program has progressed in a positive way. I'm interested in hearing what undergrads that are able to experience the changes have to say.
I think historically I've posted at the beginning of each summer with goals/plans, etc. Oops. I don't think I had a whole lot to say at the beginning of the summer anyway. Last year was pretty uneventful aside from OOPSLA, which I posted about. I don't think I'll be returning this year, unfortunately. There were only minor details like, oh, I got a summer internship at Google.
Okay, not so minor. I didn't have much to say on the topic, though, since I didn't know exactly what I'd be working on. I'm on the last week of my internship now and I still can't say what I'm working on. I'll just say that I can't be (much?) happier than the project assignment I have. If you combine this with the blog title, I'm sure you can tell the direction in which this is heading.
I'm nearing what appears to be a fork in the road that is my life. It "appears" to be a fork because, in reality, neither road is actually completely open. The first path is to stay in grad school until I get my PhD; the second is to leave grad school with an MS and go to work at Google. In order for me to stay in grad school, I have to pass my qualifier. The second part has proven more difficult than anything I've experienced in school so far. Obviously, to work at Google, I would need to get a job offer.
Staying in grad school has some benefits. Many PhDs work at Google, so the industry option is never eliminated; many compilers/PL people have PhDs, which is still my field of interest; a PhD is basically essentially for teaching. Of course, it's not without cons, either. Actually, I just have one big, big con right now and that's research. I was always unsure of how well I would adapt to a research environment. The answer so far has been, "not very well." The reasons range from finding many papers to be boring to not enjoying my research work. For the latter, I have nobody to blame but myself. My advisor is always open to other ideas. I just don't have any. This problem will only compound if I stay in grad school, since I'll have to produce a thesis.
As for Google, let's just say that if working there would be like my internship has been all the time, then it would be great. I don't think I really need to evangelize working at Google. As for leaving grad school for Google, there are definite cons. Starting a job will be the next big shift in lifestyle. In school, my schedule is very relaxed. Working pretty much blocks off most of my day every weekday, which I'm definitely not used to. Even if work is really fun, this has proved to be taxing. In addition, leaving grad school basically eliminates the option of ever getting a PhD. This is mainly problematic since most of the PL people I see at Google have PhDs. Most of these PhDs seem to get their expertise during school. I feel like I have gained no such knowledge so far and that learning this stuff while in school is optimal. I also just hate having options cut off from me, but I can get over that. Eventually.
So where does that leave me now? If I'm "lucky" then the decision will be made for me. Otherwise I have lots of introspection to do. I think if I can successfully steer my research career in a direction that I enjoy, I may stay in grad school. I'm not optimistic about this, but there's no way I'll feel good about the decision if I don't try.
Today was nearly all research talks for me. I skipped the keynote by the director of engineering at Facebook, which I guess turned out to be a bad idea, since most people seemed to think it was interesting. The first session was on static analysis and types. I finally got to see the presentation on Doop, after reading the paper on it awhile ago. Doop is a pointer analysis tool written in Datalog, which is a subset of Prolog. Since I was interested in pointer analysis for SCJ annotation verification, the Doop paper was one of the few that I read, since it particularly targets Java.
I opted out of the second morning session and spent the time between the Thorn demo and the student volunteer room instead. The Thorn demo was amusingly, heavily dominated by Purdue representatives (there was a demo yesterday that I suppose satisfied most people). It was nice to see example code. Thorn seems to have a ridiculously large amount of operators at this point, and I made remark about comparing its operator count to Perl's.
The first afternoon session was on memory. The first two presentations were rather difficult to understand, partly due to language barrier. The last paper was on object graph versioning, which is the paper that I'll be presenting at the Purdue PL seminar. The system is basically object version control. It sounds like they store each changed variable in a list when a snapshot is requested, which means constant time for most operations, but logarithmic time for snapshot retrieval. David Ungar said implementing in this into a debugger would be of great use, which reminded me of historical debugging, which will ship in Visual Studio 2010. I think having this for other languages would be great, but not at all relevant to me if implemented in Smalltalk, as they did for the initial system. A Java implementation would be ideal, but I don't actually ever use JDB (I use Eclipse for most of my work, so I use whatever Eclipse uses — don't think it's JDB).
The last research session was on language implementation. I didn't find any of the three terribly exciting, but it was cool to see Bjarne Stroustrup do a presentation. The third presentation on error recovery in parsing was semi-interesting, but I'm not familiar with SGLR parsers.
There was an ice cream social at the end to celebrate the upcoming change from OOPSLA to SPLASH. Or at least, the overall title will become SPLASH, which is Systems, Programming, Languages, and Applications: Software for Humanity. What a crazy title. Apparently OOPSLA has shifted away quite a bit from the OO, which is why the name changed. The research track remains as OOPSLA, but I guess to satisfy the other events hosted under OOPSLA, they changed the name.
It's been a fun week, albeit ridiculously tiring. I'm definitely ready to leave so I can sleep more, but I suspect things will get somewhat mundane again. After all, corn fields can't compete with Mickey Mouse. I didn't really meet anyone new, which is unfortunate, since OOPSLA is a great opportunity for that. The large Purdue presence ended up clustered together most of the time, making the most ridiculous comments about everything, as well as laughing at anything and everything, so I guess people may have thought of us as a clique. I'm also not very good at picking people's brains on their research topics, so I find it hard to approach anyone. I should probably read more papers to expand my horizon a bit more, since most of my computer knowledge seems to be industrial (and not related to programming languages), rather than academic.
Today's session began with a keynote from Jeannette Wing. It was a kind of pep talk to encourage collaboration with other fields, as well as high-risk, high-yield research topics. It was moderately interesting to hear things about NSF, since she's currently the assistant director of the CISE directorate, but otherwise, I'm not entirely affected by speeches that are calls to arms and whatnot. The presentation itself wasn't all that bad, though someone commented to me that the higher level position you are, the more vague your answers get. Totally amusing, yet totally true.
Following the keynote was the morning research track, which focused on reliability and monitoring. None of the papers really stood out to me, so I won't go into it, but you can see the research track papers here.
After lunch was another invited talk by Gerard Holzmann, who discussed the use of formal methods in software development (particularly in spacecraft, where correct software is obviously vital). For some reason, all of the larger rooms have their lights dimmed, so I was dozing off, but the basic idea was that after the initial setup, formal verification software is easy to use and helps a lot, but people are scared to use it for some reason, when they shouldn't be. When asked about the tradeoff between testing and formal methods for non-safety-critical software (such as GNOME desktop), I don't think he gave a very straight answer. He of course knows that the answer defaults to testing, but as to whether or not formal methods are truly beneficial and worth the time to understand, that was left unanswered.
The research track in the afternoon was on software tools and libraries. The sound of that to me just doesn't sound particularly researchy, but I was one of the volunteers assigned to it, so it didn't really matter what I thought.
The first talk was on IMP, a project from IBM to greatly simplify IDE development. Extending Eclipse is supposed to be comparatively complex, which is why the project was born. Essentially, you must implement a lexer/parser at minimum, and then add IDE services in at will. I know little about either project, but it sounds somewhat like Visual Studio Shell, which was released with Visual Studio 2008. It was an interesting talk, but not really from a research perspective.
The second talk was about bridging the gap between Java and C debuggers in order to debug JNI code, which essentially provides a unified stack in order to get a full stack trace when debugging problems that occur in JNI code. The content was mildly interesting, but I don't exactly deal with JNI, so it wasn't all that applicable to me. On top of that, the presenter was a little overbearing, and I'm certainly not the only one who thought the same.
The last presentation was presenting C#'s task parallel library. Even if my research is mostly in Java and I otherwise mostly try to use Python, I still consider C# to be a good language (and it's unfortunate that most researchers opt for the JVM). I never really read into the parallelism that is shipping with C# 4.0, so it was interesting, but again, it didn't feel very research-like to me. Seeing Parallel.For and futures in C# is nice, but I can't imagine it being very complex, conceptually. Rather, it was somewhat like Sunday's tutorial, where they were implementing already-known techniques in a pure OOP language.
This evening was the big, Hawaiian OOPSLA dinner. Unfortunately, I think Disney got their ethnicities mixed, because about half of the food was Chinese and the other half was American. Oops. For the curious: pork dumplings, crab rangoon, fried rice, vegetable stir fry, pulled pork, lemon chicken. Yeah, what part of that is from Hawaii? Apparently there's dancing at every OOPSLA, which was a pretty amusing thing to see. Other than that, the evening wasn't all that exciting. Since it was difficult to find a table, all the Purdue people ended up at the same tiny table with Tyler, from Iowa State, whom I met at the summer school. Not being a social butterfly and all, I feel awkward just walking up to strangers to talk to them, so I guess I missed out on a good opportunity. In fact, I haven't really met many new people at all at OOPSLA, just talked to some Purdue people more than I had at campus and meeting several of the summer school attendees that made it to OOPSLA.
Takeaways: from the research program, not much. I've had more interesting days. The formal methods talk leaves questions opened to be answered, but I have no real desire to enter that field, so I guess someone else will have to answer them. Though things like model checking are fairly interesting, I am certainly not one who indulges in formal methods and verification.
Tomorrow is the last day. It's been a tiring, but overall fun experience.
Tuesday is when the research track began. The morning started off with a keynote from Barbara Liskov, this year's winner of the ACM Turing Award. I think it was quite an interesting talk, since I don't often hear historical perspective on the earlier days of computing. She gave the same speech as the one when she accepted the award; essentially how she came up with the ideas that she did that led to her impact on our field, and subsequently a Turing award. I skimped on the morning research papers, since it didn't look entirely interesting to me, in favor of getting more work done.
Tuesday's volunteer duties consisted of working at an info booth for 2 hours. I think in most cases, the info booth is just for people who don't feel like pulling out their programs to find where things are, or can't look behind them to find registration/the bathroom. The last half hour overlapped with the Onward! keynote speaker, so I skipped it as well, after seeing slides that didn't look too exciting and people leaving early. Turns out, it was probably a good choice.
The afternoon research track was on concurrency. I highlight two of the papers:
Grace, a safe, multi-threaded programming system for C/C++ was an excellent presentation, with a good chunk of humor that all people knowledgeable of concurrency know about. The idea was something like spawning processes to perform "fork-join" parallel computations, using mmap to share computations. Interestingly, they actually get initially better performance from spawning processes instead of threads. The Linux scheduler doesn't migrate threads to separate cores on a processor for some amount of time, while processes are migrated instantly, taking advantage of available cores much more quickly. The reason for this is related to caching/processor state, from what I understand. Since threads are part of a larger process, this typically means that they share data with other parts of the program. Processes, on the other hand, are typically isolated from each other, which means that immediately dumping it to another core doesn't affect cache performance.
The other highlighted presentation was on Thorn. Thorn is a collaboration, mainly between Purdue and IBM, to design a robust, concurrent scripting language. Unfortunately, the presentation was more about robustness than concurrency, even though it was in the concurrency track, but it was nice to see slides on the language, rather than guessing through the "documentation" that I saw in Thorn as an undergrad.
I think today's lesson is that computing history, unlike national history, is actually interesting. Hearing Barbara's perspective on things was very cool, since I think it's the first person who I've actually seen present their view on computing history, while actually having lived in and participated in that era. Most historical perspectives I hear seem to be peers that just know a lot more about history than I do.
On Monday, I spent most of the morning trying to get some work done, in order to not completely screw myself over upon return. Since my job that morning was to be a "floater", I couldn't do anything anyway (a floater is someone who just sits around unless the volunteer captains need them to do something). I missed my advisor's keynote at the Dynamic Languages Symposium (DLS) as a result, but I'm pretty sure I've heard the material many times before.
I was able to attend the afternoon session of DLS, which had some interesting talks. A paper on type reconstruction of dynamic languages looked like an idea that had briefly crossed my mind awhile ago, but it was fully explored, so it was interesting to hear about it. There was also a talk on running a VM on a VM (mind blowing, right?) to take advantage of the host VMs JIT, in order to eliminate the need to write a JIT on the guest VM. I find [nearly] all things JIT exciting, so it was a good talk, even if their performance benchmarks were extremely slow.
The Ruby Intermediate Language was presented as an easy-to-analyze intermediate form of Ruby. It was mildly interesting, but personally, I don't find Ruby's hard-to-parse intricacies very interesting, as I ended up ditching Ruby for Python a few years ago. RIL basically eliminates the hard-to-parse syntax from Ruby, converting them to their easier-to-parse equivalents, with the goal of making analysis tools easier to write.
There was a complaint at the end where someone questioned the necessity of RIL instead of just providing a standalone parser (which RIL may have, since none existed at the inception of RIL), which I tend to agree with — even though I think source transformations that simplify the AST are common, I don't think they're usually as game-changing as the ones presented in RIL. For example, the Java compiler collapses concatenation of string literals down to one literal, and it's completely transparent (and irreversible, as far as I can tell) to compiler plugins. However, this isn't the same as eliminating the ambiguities in Ruby that make life "pleasant" or "natural" for Ruby developers. It would be equivalent to a "JIL" that converted Java for-each loops into the ugly for-loop equivalents, for example, only Ruby offers many more conveniences than Java.
The last talk of the day was about object heaps on manycore (56) hardware. David Ungar from IBM presented experimental results using a Smalltalk VM. It's always interesting to hear about VMs and concurrency (and this is both!), since the topics are often at the threshold of my knowledge. However, this presentation was less "controversial" than the RIL paper, so I don't have much to say about it, aside from feel free to read all of the mentioned papers, if they sound interesting.
An interesting day overall. After all, who doesn't like dynamic languages?
Sunday's activities for me consisted of going to the VMIL workshop, which was quite interesting, and a tutorial on "realizing the benefits of functional programming in object oriented code." I was only able attend the morning session of VMIL, which was basically their invited talks on the VMIL website. They were all decent talks. It was especially interesting to hear about Maxine, which I had seen briefly mentioned on reddit some time ago.
Unfortunately, though I was looking forward the tutorial (which I was obligated to attend as the student volunteer on duty), it turned out to be somewhat disappointing. The concepts were not new to me, so I was probably not the target audience. C# actually has a Func type that corresponds to the Java version presented in the tutorial, and I'd seen currying in C# from previous investigations. I hadn't seen Java-style continuations before, but after lectures by Olivier Danvy on continuations this summer, the code was not too surprising. Nonetheless, the code was still interesting to see, as I am always fascinated by how other people program.
I think the most disappointing part was how little discussion there was on the benefits of shoving functional-style code (which isn't exactly pretty, in Java) into an OOPL, and deeper case studies into performance/safety benefits, etc. There was the obvious discussion about referential transparency and so on, but I'm looking for more than just some buzzwords.
The presenter was a little bit disorganized and lacking in presenter skills (tangential expositions, extremely small writing), but we all have our faults, and I'm sure he can improve in time. It is clear that he likes the subject, but not immediately clear that he likes talking about it. I am, of course, not being literal, since if he didn't like talking about it, he obviously wouldn't have volunteered to do the tutorial.
Overall, I was satisfied with the first day, since VMIL was nice, and the tutorial wasn't a total waste.
As my professor graciously offered expense coverage to attend OOPSLA, several of my peers and I made it down as student volunteers. This is my first conference experience, hosted at Disney World's Contemporary World Resort. We arrived late Saturday night, and the program began the next morning with a joyfully early meeting at 7. So far it's been a good experience, but it's also been exhausting to continually wake up "early" (regular time for you working folks, I suppose). I ended up sleeping at 9:30 on Sunday, since I was so tired. I'm pretty sure I haven't done that in very many years. Since this post has gotten quite long, I'll be backposting a separate post for each day.
Not much content here. Just documenting the fact that I got my first paper accepted at a conference last week. Not a super prestigious conference or awesome paper, but happy all the same, especially since it's my first attempt. I may get to go to Madrid as a result, since my partner has an expired visa.
While I'm here, I got back a little over a week ago from my first grad summer school, which is more like a conference than undergrad summer school – seems I have to explain this to everyone. It was pretty fun, aside from the terrible 100+ degree weather with no air conditioning in the dorms. Fortunately, it only lasted a few days. Lots of cool people there and some good lectures, though some were a bit over my head. I got accepted as a student volunteer for OOPSLA too, so I may be going to that (in Disney World!), and I'm flying down to Orlando for a meeting with people at UCF as well.
It's that time of year again; summer has just begun, so it's time to make a list of things that might be interesting to do so I don't get bored out of my mind (mostly a list so I don't forget things). My first year as a PhD student has gone by somewhat uneventfully. I think I've passed my qualifiers, but this semester's batch has yet to be seen. I've been getting this weird, nostalgic feeling with more friends graduating and leaving Purdue. It's like those sports movies when the coach at the end is being all emo when he's shutting off the stadium lights. Awesome, right?
The only definitive thing I'll be doing this summer so far is research. Not something terribly interesting at the moment, but I'll probably be getting paid as a summer RA (that's research, not resident). This probably means I'll be working towards a workshop paper, but who knows. Hopefully my partner will be around, because the stuff we're doing now is a drag. I'll be going to a week-long summer school in Oregon, as well. The topic is virtual machine/compiler implementation, so I'm looking forward to it.
Summer is when I get all of my recreational reading done. By recreational reading, I mean anything not school related, be it fiction or technical. I finished the Sword of Truth series last summer, and it was great, aside from the poor print quality of the books I got. Possible options:
I always want to do some recreational programming over the summer, but I end up getting lazy. Nevertheless, a possible list of things to work on:
If I had more things on the list, I guess I've already forgotten them. Knowing me, I'm forgetting something big. Hopefully I'll get things done this summer (I say this every summer, don't I?) and have more to write about. It's kind of sad that the few people from Purdue CS I knew blogged have all stopped, myself included. I guess we've relegated our ideas to 140-character messages now.
Side note: If anyone wants to play Civilization IV, I'll be participating in a potentially slow-paced multiplayer game with a lot of newbies in it. If anyone is interested...
"A syntax error occurs when the string of input tokens is not a sentence in the language." From Modern Compiler Implementation in Java, Appel.
I've spent a pretty frustrating 24 hours+ (sleep included) trying to grade a ridiculous exam, so I felt like doing something silly. From Eric Florenzo's blog (et al):
My quote was dumb. Too bad that book was the closest, instead of the Dragon book (or the only non-textbook in vicinity, Chainfire by Terry Goodkind)...I think it's time to rearrange my shelf.
It's been awhile, I can't sleep, and even though I posted this on Facebook, I think it merits repetition, even if it's late-night, drowsy, nonsensical repetition.
A post appeared on Slashdot today titled, "Students Are Always Half Right In Pittsburgh. A curious title, but what's truly astounding is what the article is about. Apparently, Pittsburgh public schools are, in a no-child-left-behind fashion, are going to be limiting the lower bound on grades to 50%. Seriously.
The reason is relatively obvious; the Post-Gazette article quotes a spokesperson saying, "We want to create situations where students can recover and not give up." Quite a noble reason, I suppose. Yet, the consequences seem to be alarming. Wait, no they aren't, because "it's not grade inflation." Guess that settles that. Or not. Slashdot commenter Jason Pollock explains just how bad this system actually is. Essentially, you can easily get a passing grade, with very, very little effort. The example is somewhat incorrect, since grades are done differently than simple overall percentages, but the effect is the same.
I don't know how this managed to come about, given the fairly obvious ethical concerns, never mind the fact that you only need a 20% in each grading period to pass a class. It scares me that so many high level officials in the Pittsburgh area seem to agree with institution of this policy. The solution to the goal thoroughly destroys the essence of a proper education. Incentive to actually learn material is diminished, when students are always "half right" anyway. There aren't many ideas that I can think of that would be less apt to striving for "Excellence for All."
It's not like trying to help students boost their grades is a new subject. Giving free points for no work is simply not the correct answer. One district made students redo homeworks until it was A or B material. While I think this could be a good idea, to some extent, it sounded like they actually were given an A or B in the end. While it's great that they learn the material, grades don't mean much if everyone gets an A or B. The basic concept, however, I agree with: Give students opportunities to make up bad scores, rather than just giving them away for free. Giving remedial homeworks, allowing a redo of homeworks for added partial credit, or some forms of extra credit are all better, logical, ethical alternatives. I just hope that this decision is contained, if not reversed.
This is not the next post I said I would write. It's more or less an update of my lazy life. I've mostly stopped playing games, but now I apparently still have no motivation to do anything productive. Great. There is really not much happening right now. Two weeks ago, I was on vacation with my family in Glacier National Park. Pictures will come eventually. Maybe.
Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog was "aired" on the Internet this week. Apparently it wasn't as widespread as I thought, since I assumed the people who were on top of their game (I'm looking at you, James) would know about it. It's Joss Whedon's latest creation (Buffy, Firefly, etc. fame), and I found it to be pretty amusing. So, if you liked his shows, you'll probably like this one as well. But you know, watch it anyway. The free viewing ends after tomorrow (or at midnight tonight, it's kind of ambiguous), so you should step on it, if you're interested.
The female actor, Felicia Day, in Dr. Horrible was new to me, though apparently not new to Joss Whedon fans. I stumbled upon a small web series written by her called The Guild, which was also pretty funny. I can relate to it a lot more than I can to superheroes, even though I don't play WoW.
On a less-fun-more-nerdy note, the newforms-admin branch of Django was merged to trunk last night. This is probably the one good result of me procrastinating so much—I don't have to convert any code to match the new admin module. I hope I can get motivation to start working with Django (and other projects) again soon, but I still have some other stuff for CS190M to finish up, and that's stealing all the motivation I can get.
Well, it's been almost 3 weeks since commencement; as usual, I've been in summer-time slacking mode. I'm still doing a bit of work, but most of my time has been allocated to playing games and sleeping. Hopefully I can come off this habitual productivity death (don't I say this every summer?). Of course, I have goals, but they're farfetched as always, given my work ethic.
Last summer was mostly spent looking at Pylons as a Python web framework; Bennett and I started a project that progressed at a reasonable pace until school resumed. After awhile, I started looking at Django again, so hopefully I can come up with a good project idea that would use it. Since my last experiments with Django, they've made some great progress in development, as well as the release of a new book, which is a good reference; something I feel that Pylons never really had.
I have a few project ideas in mind, but they're all personal. I'm more or less hoping some others will be interested in some sort of group project (and have ideas!); unfortunately, most of my friends are starting "real life" mid-summer at their jobs all over the country, so I don't know how feasible this will be.
Django aside, I feel like it might be time to learn another language—Erlang is a possibility, but at this point I'm thinking that JavaScript is a good candidate. It's in the theme of web development (I guess you could argue that Erlang is too), and isn't something I've touched since middle school. Undoubtedly JavaScript would be much easier to learn than Erlang, so maybe restricting myself to one language is not a good idea. Suggestions are welcome.
Getting away from web development, shaim is still up in the air as to if I'll start working on it again. An IRC plugin is scheduled for the 0.5 milestone, and since I've made IRC clients before, this would be my area of expertise. What I really need to do is manage my time (stop playing games), but I don't foresee that occurring—at least not completely.
I also get to introduce one of my brothers to C this summer—as the next family member in line to go into Computer Science, he's one of the programmers for the high school's robotics team. This will be interesting, given that I've been so used to teaching Java (and hence gotten used to programming in Java, not C). I was just going to throw K&R at him, but I can't seem to find my copy.
Researchy type things are still ongoing; the same stuff as this last semester. Professor Vitek is out of the country for the entire summer, so I'm kind of on my own as far as real-time Java goes (P.S., I got a free Macbook Pro), but I hope to make more progress than I did during the semester, without any class obligations. I've nearly completed the labs for the new class, currently offered as CS180M, but subject to change. It will be interesting to see how multicore programming will pan out for freshmen; I would like to see how I would have fared in such a course. Of course, now something like that would be a cinch (given that I'm writing the labs).
I'm also apparently under obligation to be flying around again this summer to visit people. I haven't quite made a schedule for it yet, since I am technically working already, but I guess the unnamed will drown in a cup of sorrow if I don't fly out.
Next semester should be interesting. I decided my schedule with Professor Vitek before he left, and it looks like I'll be taking:
The first two have qualifiers, which will probably suck a lot. As someone who's gotten away with not studying for exams (predominantly), qualifiers will probably destroy the notion of me getting away with laziness. These next years will be quite an adventure.
Next time, a blog post at request of a future Purdue student.
I've been incredibly busy lately (and still am in the middle of a homework due in less than 12 hours after having worked on it all night), but I guess this is some sort of historical moment, even though it's not CS-related at all. Around 4:30, Phil and I were doing our Parallel Computing homework when I noticed my leg was shaking. It came to be no surprise to me that my leg was jerking since it happens on occasion, but I couldn't get it to stop. Then, as cliche as it sounds, I looked over at my water and it was rippling. It started seriously vibrating the room after awhile, which was really freaky, since I live on the 10th floor. About half of our floor noticed it and came out of their rooms, wondering what happened. Of course, it had to be an earthquake or a bomb. Bomb didn't seem likely, and sure enough, it was reported a few minutes later. A 5.4 earthquake in the middle of the United States seems absolutely incredible.
In other news, school has been wreaking havoc on my health. Phil told me yesterday that Parallel Computing was allegedly the second hardest graduate CS class offered at Purdue, which is insane, yet I wouldn't doubt it at all. Our professor is a good teacher, but tends to consider things to be much easier than they actually are. This homework was supposed to be "easy", but I've worked on it over 12 hours so far and am still not finished. Of course, I still have plenty of work in other things coming up and will be until finals are over. Sometimes I wonder why I chose to stay in school. Actually, I guess I never actually posted about that. I accepted Purdue's offer, so I'll be staying here for my Ph.D. There's only one other person I know at the moment that's doing it, and I'm surprised that I even know one.
Back to work, anyhow.
In high school, I used to wonder how people managed to get senioritis—the mythical disease contracted during graduation year with the symptoms of being really, really lazy. I was actually the opposite way; senior year is probably when I worked the hardest, since I was taking calculus classes at Purdue, as well as AP French and Physics C (for both kinematics and e&m). Now that I'm on my way out of college, however, things appear to have changed. Not only do I procrastinate madly on my homework, which has resulted in all-nighters for both of my parallel computing assignments, I've also picked up a habit of not going to a significant percentage of my numerical methods class. I don't think it will ever become a serious problem, though it makes me feel like a serious slacker.
Fortunately, this whole slacking business seems to have an upside. Since neither of my classes has a "real" programming component (yet), I've been doing more extra-curricular programming than I thought I would have time for. RITA has made decent progress, and some people use it for monitoring purposes even though it's technically not production ready. The key items that still need attending to include cleaning up the terrible mess I've made out of the code, as well as implementing a few more options. That aside, I was able to code up some other needed features, such as syncing to ResNet's traffic stats on the hour (which can still be tweaked some, I suppose), displaying the traffic graph, and creating a task tray icon with gauges to determine how close you are to the bandwidth limit. The tray icon was probably the most tedious, but it ended up being the most interesting. At first I had static icons set to display at low, medium, and high levels. The granularity of that is highly dissatisfactory and the icons weren't even displaying properly, for some reason, so I ditched that. In the end, I just dynamically drew the icons as necessary. This saved me the trouble of drawing 196 icons and calculating 14 different colors to use; even though the middle area turns to an ugly brown color, I'm still happy that it actually works.
The other project I've been working on starts with Ragel, which is a state machine compiler. I was interested in seeing how efficient an IRC library parser, which is really quite simple, could be in C#. SmartIrc4Net is one obvious benchmark to compare against; the single regular expression in Parse::IRC is another. Ragel is supposed to be really fast, so I wanted to try it out. The problem is that Ragel only supported Java, not C#, so my first task was to implement C# output for Ragel. This didn't turn out to be very hard; instead, it was mostly fixing errors that surfaced because of differences between C and C#, such as type safety rules.
Implementing a simple parser for IRC is not so hard; the syntax is pretty easy to break down. By "simple" I essentially mean that it's like a single regular expression. I was able to implement it at the end of the week, though I had trouble getting Ragel's scanners to work. Instead of using scanners, I used one of Ragel's cool features, embeddable actions, to mark tokens on transition enters and exits. I finished my first "benchmark" comparison against the giant Parse::IRC regular expression as well, after sticking it into a C# Regex object. The benchmark was simply to parse a few IRC commands a million times; as it turns out, Ragel is about 33% faster than a compiled Regex object in this measurement. It's kind of fun to suddenly start worrying a lot about efficiency, even though parsing is probably a small task compared to, well, what the rest of an IRC client would do. There is still more to be done with the Ragel parser, before I start trying to actually incorporate it into a library, though. More on that later, maybe.
Along the way, I got kind of annoyed at switching between Vim, a DOS prompt, and Visual Studio. Lucky for me, I discovered custom tools, which are basically processors that take a file and spit out code in a certain language. I implemented a custom tool processor for Ragel yesterday, so now I can use Visual Studio for everything. Using cmd.exe gets pretty annoying, especially when you're used to bash.
There's still much that could be done—I haven't done anything with Django this semester, which is kind of sad, but I guess you have to prioritize at some point. Hopefully this motivation sticks around long enough for me to eventually get to more web programming. Even though I've always been more of a desktop/non-web programmer myself, Django is a pretty cool piece (pieces?) of software, and I guess the web is the future and all that jazz.
Awhile ago, I posted about a problem that I started coming across when I took software engineering with C#'s properties. Even though it was a great improvement over Java's get/set methods, there are still problems to be had (you can read the article here.
Interestingly enough, the release of C# 3.0 has fixed this problem, and in a much better way than I had thought of. I discovered this while working on RITA in Visual Studio 2008, whose property snippets (prop and propg) were updated. The syntax of the language remained the same, which is great. In C# 2.0, you can declare an abstract class to have a property with the following syntax:
public int X { get; set; }
In C# 3.0, a new feature called "automatic properties" allows you to use this syntax in concrete classes, as well. The compiler automatically creates the private variable for you, but you don't see it, all access is forced through the property, which solves the problems I mentioned in the previous post. You can prepend the get and set with access modifiers as well. For example:
public int X { get; protected set; }This is a very clean way of doing things, and I feel rather silly for not thinking of it myself. It's a pleasant surprise in C# 3.0, since only the main features ever seemed to be touted (LINQ). It's also backwards compatible, so when I compile RITA to be compatible with .NET 2.0, it works just fine.