Check out the pic­ture gal­lery. Even though it was all cat­egory the­ory, and con­sequently I can fol­low almost none of the other talks, it’s still a won­der­ful con­fer­ence to go to. It’s a nice atmo­sphere, a good mix­ture of grad stu­dents, pro­fess­ors and pro­fess­ors emeriti.

After the con­fer­ence I stayed in Cal­gary for another couple weeks work­ing on my thesis and going through bounds infer­ence in detail with Brian. Unfor­tu­nately, and excit­ingly, we found a big prob­lem with the mix­ture of coin­duct­ive and induct­ive recur­sion which can take one out of poly­no­mial time. I may write on that more at some other time, but only after I think of a good way to describe it, at which point the first place it will appear is my thesis.

Check out the picture gallery. Even though it was all category theory, and consequently I can follow almost none of the other talks, it's still a wonderful conference to go to. It's a nice atmosphere, a good mixture of grad students, professors and professors emeriti. After the conference I stayed in Calgary for another couple ...

The fol­low­ing ffffff­fuuuuuuuuuuuu describes most of my life for this week:

I’m fly­ing out to Cal­gary Sunday morn­ing and then head­ing to Kana­nas­kis for FMCS. My code is already work­ing for many cases, but it’s not as com­plete as I’d like it to be. I’d like to do a proper demon­stra­tion of bounds infer­ence when I give my talk. It’s a pretty laid-​​back con­fer­ence so, truth be told, even if I don’t get it totally work­ing by then I can still just demo what I have, or just not demo at all.

I went to FMCS once before, in 2004 at the end of my under­grad. It’s a very nice con­fer­ence, less formal than most, which makes it a lot more fun and a lot more pro­duct­ive, I think. After the con­fer­ence I’ll be hanging around in Cal­gary for another week or so work­ing on my thesis and hanging out with the par­ents. Good times.

The following fffffffuuuuuuuuuuuu describes most of my life for this week: I'm flying out to Calgary Sunday morning and then heading to Kananaskis for FMCS. My code is already working for many cases, but it's not as complete as I'd like it to be. I'd like to do a proper demonstration of bounds inference when ...

I bought a new laptop a couple days ago. For the past 6 years I’ve been using Macs just about exclus­ively; for the past 3 years or so it’s been my Mac­Book that’s been my main machine. How­ever, for the past sev­eral months I’ve been increas­ingly annoyed with the Mac­Book: the case is crack­ing; the track­pad but­ton is stick­ing; and, some­thing which mat­ters to very people other than me, Apple has been slow in fix­ing some bugs and the source code wasn’t avail­able for me to fix them myself. So, after much delib­er­a­tion, a couple days ago I picked up a Toshiba Satel­lite, on sale and marked down even fur­ther because it was a demo model. Accord­ing to the spe­cific­a­tions it’s bet­ter than a mod­ern Mac­Book in pretty well every way, and at about one quarter the price. The only down­side was it didn’t run OS X, which I was becom­ing dis­il­lu­sioned with anyway.

I inten­ded to run OpenSol­aris on it because I quite like the tech­no­lo­gies in OpenSol­aris. Unfor­tu­nately OpenSolaris’s hard­ware sup­port is very poor, but the laptop I bought looked like it had the highest chances of work­ing, and it was very highly rated by Con­sumer Reports as well. After try­ing vari­ous OpenSol­aris dis­tri­bu­tions and developer builds, I’ve come to the con­clu­sion that it’s not going to work, at least not yet. It was prob­ably naïve of me to think I could get my wire­less card work­ing under OpenSolaris.

(more…)

I bought a new laptop a couple days ago. For the past 6 years I've been using Macs just about exclusively; for the past 3 years or so it's been my MacBook that's been my main machine. However, for the past several months I've been increasingly annoyed with the MacBook: the case is cracking; ...