Today I received a letter from the University. As I suspected, my thesis examination was delayed as my examiners weren't yet selected/confirmed. As it's a conflict of interest for me to know who my examiners are I don't know much about the process of selecting/confirming them, so I can't speak to the reason for the delay.
The letter I received today explained that the examiners had now confirmed and my (dead tree) thesis had been sent to them. This was resolved a lot quicker than I expect so I should hear back within a couple of months what the outcome is. All I can do is continue waiting. I'm expecting the whole process from submission to graduation to take about 12 months.
Fingers crossed.
Tuesday, January 29, 2013
Wednesday, January 16, 2013
Friday, December 28, 2012
History of Mercury
I've been converting the Mercury CVS repository to Git. Here is the final report by cvs2git with some interesting statistics.
Note that cvs2git sometimes calls itself cvs2svn.
Note that cvs2git sometimes calls itself cvs2svn.
cvs2svn Statistics: ------------------ Total CVS Files: 8224 Total CVS Revisions: 101243 Total CVS Branches: 84055 Total CVS Tags: 1956649 Total Unique Tags: 661 Total Unique Branches: 65 CVS Repos Size in KB: 465766 Total SVN Commits: 19206 First Revision Date: Thu Oct 14 09:57:46 1993 Last Revision Date: Mon Dec 24 08:37:31 2012 ------------------ Timings (seconds): ------------------ 625 pass1 CollectRevsPass 1 pass2 CleanMetadataPass 0 pass3 CollateSymbolsPass 85 pass4 FilterSymbolsPass 0 pass5 SortRevisionSummaryPass 2 pass6 SortSymbolSummaryPass 80 pass7 InitializeChangesetsPass 16 pass8 BreakRevisionChangesetCyclesPass 16 pass9 RevisionTopologicalSortPass 45 pass10 BreakSymbolChangesetCyclesPass 67 pass11 BreakAllChangesetCyclesPass 62 pass12 TopologicalSortPass 53 pass13 CreateRevsPass 3 pass14 SortSymbolsPass 3 pass15 IndexSymbolsPass 89 pass16 OutputPass 1149 totalThen I import it into git with git fastimport:
git-fast-import statistics:
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Alloc'd objects: 155000
Total objects: 151932 ( 78357 duplicates )
blobs : 81245 ( 15332 duplicates 70383 deltas)
trees : 51602 ( 63025 duplicates 44099 deltas)
commits: 19085 ( 0 duplicates 0 deltas)
tags : 0 ( 0 duplicates 0 deltas)
Total branches: 728 ( 238 loads )
marks: 1073741824 ( 115662 unique )
atoms: 6930
Memory total: 11001 KiB
pools: 3735 KiB
objects: 7265 KiB
---------------------------------------------------------------------
pack_report: getpagesize() = 4096
pack_report: core.packedGitWindowSize = 1073741824
pack_report: core.packedGitLimit = 8589934592
pack_report: pack_used_ctr = 10379
pack_report: pack_mmap_calls = 944
pack_report: pack_open_windows = 1 / 1
pack_report: pack_mapped = 144052290 / 144052290
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Thursday, September 27, 2012
No photos yet.
Currently in Venice and loving it. No photos yet as our camera is not
my phone and there fore can't get wifi in the hotel's restaurant.
Every thing is good, sitar the highlight for me is Venice. Rome was
nice too.
my phone and there fore can't get wifi in the hotel's restaurant.
Every thing is good, sitar the highlight for me is Venice. Rome was
nice too.
Friday, September 14, 2012
Interruptions
Lately I've been writing, writing and correcting. I'm at 79K words and I'm about to crack 150 pages. It's tedious and so I have not felt like doing any other form of writing such as this blog. Therefore, for this entry, I will mainly refer to other's work.
The other day, The Joel Test came up in conversation, so I looked it up. The infamous Joel Spolsky wrote about 12 checks for a software development team. I've always been interested in interruptions and how they affect one's productivity (such as stopping to write a blog article), so when I saw items 2 and 8 in the joel test I found it interesting. I've long known that a 30 second interruption can cost you 15 minutes of productivity, Joel however cites this as the minimum loss of productivity. He also links this phenomenon to working memory.
Working memory is the set of things your thinking of right now. If you want a computer analogy think of the registers in a CPU, (RAM being short term memory and disk being long term memory). Most people can remember roughly 7 plus-or-minus 2 things (if I remember correctly). When you're interrupted you forget everything out of your working memory so that you can help your colleague with his spelling, even though it only takes you 30 seconds to remember how to spell something, you spend the next 15 minutes trying to get back into the zone. Had your colleague used a dictionary it would have cost him a little more time, and would not have cost you that 15 minute minimum.
I was talking with a friend about this, he suggested that the problem is not just working memory, but that it also applies to any creative work. He said that humans seem to need 8 minutes of rest before they can be creative. however, we do not have a citation for this statement and my friend isn't sure if he recalls it correctly. We did find another interesting article on the topic of thinking time and reflection.
On a related note I found another article from Joel on a similar topic of 'context switching'. Here he discusses that switching between multiple tasks can also be a problem for efficiencly.
The other day, The Joel Test came up in conversation, so I looked it up. The infamous Joel Spolsky wrote about 12 checks for a software development team. I've always been interested in interruptions and how they affect one's productivity (such as stopping to write a blog article), so when I saw items 2 and 8 in the joel test I found it interesting. I've long known that a 30 second interruption can cost you 15 minutes of productivity, Joel however cites this as the minimum loss of productivity. He also links this phenomenon to working memory.
Working memory is the set of things your thinking of right now. If you want a computer analogy think of the registers in a CPU, (RAM being short term memory and disk being long term memory). Most people can remember roughly 7 plus-or-minus 2 things (if I remember correctly). When you're interrupted you forget everything out of your working memory so that you can help your colleague with his spelling, even though it only takes you 30 seconds to remember how to spell something, you spend the next 15 minutes trying to get back into the zone. Had your colleague used a dictionary it would have cost him a little more time, and would not have cost you that 15 minute minimum.
I was talking with a friend about this, he suggested that the problem is not just working memory, but that it also applies to any creative work. He said that humans seem to need 8 minutes of rest before they can be creative. however, we do not have a citation for this statement and my friend isn't sure if he recalls it correctly. We did find another interesting article on the topic of thinking time and reflection.
On a related note I found another article from Joel on a similar topic of 'context switching'. Here he discusses that switching between multiple tasks can also be a problem for efficiencly.
Monday, May 21, 2012
I still exist!
So I've been busy. Since my last post I attended Multicore World 2012
in Wellington. It was good to go back there. We spent Easter with my
parents and I gave my completion seminar.
Now I'm spending most of my time writing. It is pretty tedious but I'm
making progress. I'm due to submit in about 6 weeks, I'm concerned
about how much I can get done before then, as there is still more
programming to do and experiments to run.
in Wellington. It was good to go back there. We spent Easter with my
parents and I gave my completion seminar.
Now I'm spending most of my time writing. It is pretty tedious but I'm
making progress. I'm due to submit in about 6 weeks, I'm concerned
about how much I can get done before then, as there is still more
programming to do and experiments to run.
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
POPL Invited talks
POPL was the main conference running during the week. It ran from Wednesday to
Friday with 2 streams.
Friday with 2 streams.
There were three invited talks, the first was an award, speech and interview.
I forget the name of the award but the purpose was to recognize a paper 40
years after it's publication based on that paper's impact in the last 40 years.
The recipient was Sir Charles Antony Richard Hoare for his paper An axiomatic
basis for computer programming. I'm sad to say that I wasn't aware of Sir
Hoare before POPL; now I'm very interested to read a few of his papers. The
interview referred to several of his papers during his career, and if I'm not
mistaken the interviewer was one of his students.
The second invited talk was given by Jennifer Rexford; this is probably the
invited talk that spoke the most to me. Jennifer had seen a problem in network
administration and operations. The problem is that each router has it's own
configuration and that this is fine if the network has a single router. But
once there are two or more routers the configurations have to agree about
certain things, and that the software that coordinates large networks doesn't
always do a good job - let alone ensure that the configurations are consistent.
Jenifier wrote a domain specific language to solve this problem. I like this
because it's a problem that many people have, and the solution is
straightforward (at least on the surface). And by providing such a solution
her work has a large impact.
The third invited talk was also very good. J Strother Moore demonstrated a
theorem prover. Moore is the same Moore as in the Boyer-Moore string search
algorithm, a very influential researcher. Theorem provers are increasing in
popularity. I felt like the only person in the room who hadn't used one (let
alone written one). So, for me it was good to see this used and demonstrated
in front of my eyes. The anecdotes of this talk where also very interesting;
for instance, AMD used Moore's theorem prover to check the soundness of
floating point division in the K5, after Intel were dealing with the famous
floating point division bug in the newly released Pentium.
(AMD have continued to use the theorem prover).
I still have more notes to write up.
Monday, January 30, 2012
The PADL Report
I arrived on Philadelphia on Thursday (2012-01-19) evening. This was,
deliberately, two days before POPL and it's co-located events where due to
start. Hopefully this would give me a couple of days to recover from jetlag
and the general tiredness associated with flying for 20+ hours across 8
timezones (actually over the pacific you cross 16 but 24-16=8 count towards
jetlag) This seemed like a good idea, I was outside during daylight hours where
light would reach my retinas and produce the right chemicals in my brain to
reset my body clock - this is how all humans work, it's not related to my poor
vision.
deliberately, two days before POPL and it's co-located events where due to
start. Hopefully this would give me a couple of days to recover from jetlag
and the general tiredness associated with flying for 20+ hours across 8
timezones (actually over the pacific you cross 16 but 24-16=8 count towards
jetlag) This seemed like a good idea, I was outside during daylight hours where
light would reach my retinas and produce the right chemicals in my brain to
reset my body clock - this is how all humans work, it's not related to my poor
vision.
So on the Friday and Saturday (of which you can see many photos) I felt awake,
but on Sunday and Monday when the conference begun and I was sitting down
indoors; I found myself falling asleep in many of the presentations. Sadly I
don't remember any of the presentations from VMCAI on Sunday, I don't even
remember what VMCAI was about! I also felt unwell and had a sore thought, I
think I had caught a cold.
On Monday Practical Aspects of Declarative Languages (PADL) begun. While I
sometimes fell asleep in the presentations I remember some of my favorites:
Vincent St-Amour, Sam Tobin-Hochstadt, Matthew Flatt and Matthias Felleisen
Typing the Numeric Tower
This paper described how to use a strong type system such as Haskell's with a
numeric tower such as Scheme's. It may have been my favorite from PADL but
that's not a fair statement since PADL ran on Monday and Tuesday but I was too
sleepy on Monday to pay attention to the speakers. I have the book of
proceedings (which is how these things work) so I can read any of the papers.
Other papers that deserve a closer look are:
Pablo Chico De Guzm?n, Amadeo Casas, Manuel Carro and Manuel Hermenegildo
Segment-Swapping Approach for Executing Trapped Computations
This paper fixes a problem with and-parallelism in Prolog. As I understand it
the problem is caused because of Prolog's nondeterminism. As such this is a
solution to a problem that we don't have in Mercury - and I'm not concerned
with parallelism in Prolog.
Christian Theil Have and Henning Christiansen
Efficient tabling of structured data using indexing and program
transformation
Another Prolog paper. This paper showed that tabling can lead to quadratic
behaviour in linear-looking code (such as append/3). I spoke with the author
about the problem, and now understand it. The author noted that Mercury
doesn't have this problem and asked me to explain why, which was pretty
straight forward.
I'll write-up my notes from POPL and DAMP later.
Sunday, January 29, 2012
Thursday, January 26, 2012
Very annoyed!
So POPL ran a student presentation session. This is much like an
elevator pitch session, these are normally good, this one was ran as a
competition and included a prize.
elevator pitch session, these are normally good, this one was ran as a
competition and included a prize.
The catch? You were restricted to 12 slides and 20 seconds per slide,
a total of 4 minutes. A time limit is not normally a problem, but the
rest is just too restrictive. It gets worse you may not use prose or
billeted lists, just pictures.
This means using 12 pictures that are relevant, which is difficult.
While all this is bad it's not the worst part.
I fucking missed out on dinner. By the time the qualifying rounds were
over all the food at the reception had been eaten!! POPL! You owe me
a dinner!!
I'm tired of this patronizing attitude to student's effort! "hey you
student! Jump through this hoop and maybe you'll get a pat on the
head!". Seriously, is a small bag of pretezels and a ballpoint pen
adiquite compensation for this effort and missing out on dinner!?!
Sunday, January 22, 2012
Joan of Arc
this with a grain of salt though.
Snow!
trucks full of salt and plows ready to clear the roads. The footpaths
were also cleared, well most of them. A couple of times I crossed the
road to find no path on the other side. One time a police car pulled
up to tell me to cross back over, He assumed that I couldn't see that
the footpath was burried in snow and that I would find myself walking
in traffic instead.
Liberty bell
symbol after becoming cracked. It's popularity further increased after
the American civil war.
American history.
in the country's early days. The declaration of independence was
signed in the room below.
Saturday, January 21, 2012
I'm in Philadelphia!
I'm here, and breakfast potatoes are great! In Australia we've only
just caught up on the USA's hash brown technology. But the Americans
have discovered a way to infuse more fried-goodness per volume of
potato! Also they can make bacon from turkey; I had to re-read that
entry on the menu to.check I wasn't mistaken.
just caught up on the USA's hash brown technology. But the Americans
have discovered a way to infuse more fried-goodness per volume of
potato! Also they can make bacon from turkey; I had to re-read that
entry on the menu to.check I wasn't mistaken.
As I predicted QF93 took off late and I missed my.connection at LAX,
it would have taken too long for me and my bags to change terminals.
The staff were very helpful, and booked me onto US796 - direct to PHL.
My bags were with me too since I had to collect them in LAX
for.customs.
But that's not all. US796 taxied to the runway and then waited for 20
minutes before the pilot said he'd drive us back to the terminal as we
had a broken air conditioner that we needed to maintain cabin
pressure. We left on the fixed plane about 1.5h late. I got info PHL
at the time I would have with my original non direct flights, so
really I shouldn't complain.
The hotel is very nice. It's -2c outside and time to check our some
local places/historic things.
Friday, November 4, 2011
Friday, September 23, 2011
Thursday, August 18, 2011
Papers and presentations from ICLP
Three new papers about parallelism in Mercury have been added to the papers page. Associated with each paper is a presentation that was given at ICLP 2011. The presentations are also available on the papers page.
I am the first author for two of these papers. One of them has been published in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming.
I am the first author for two of these papers. One of them has been published in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming.
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