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.

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.

I’m going to be going to attend­ing FMCS 2010 in Kana­nas­kis — not far from Cal­gary — in a couple weeks. I’ll be giv­ing a talk on the imple­ment­a­tion of Pola in some capa­city, though I haven’t figured out how broadly scoped or what to focus on.

I’m get­ting pretty psyched about it. The con­fer­ence will be fun if it’s any­thing like I remem­ber FMCS 2004 to be. The loc­a­tion is amaz­ing. Plus after that I get to spend some time in Cal­gary with my par­ents and hanging out with Brian and, prob­ably most import­antly but least awe­somely, work­ing on my thesis.

I still have a few minutes before 2010 so I thought I’d write a little some­thing while Jasna and I are sit­ting on the couch watch­ing cel­eb­ra­tions on TV with her parents.

Well, first off I think I need to take more pic­tures, the evid­ence for that being that the above is my favour­ite pic­ture I took this year. It’s our fat­test cat, Pin­cho.
(more…)

I’m cur­rently hanging out at my gate in Pear­son air­port. In a couple hours I’ll be on my way to Paris and tomor­row morn­ing I’ll catch my con­nect­ing flight to Ams­ter­dam and then I take the train to Utrecht to see Jasna’s sis­ter, Ana, and her hus­band, Andre.

Jasna and I aren’t very good with sep­ar­a­tion, though I think this time went bet­ter than most. It could be that it’s a shorter sep­ar­a­tion this time — five days, in con­trast to Jasna’s recent two-​​month trip — or that we’re too tired from last night’s Hallowe’en party to get as worked up. Maybe we’re just get­ting bet­ter at it, though. It’s not like no tears were shed, but I think we did rel­at­ively well.

Unfor­tu­nately today my cam­era bat­tery decided to crap out on me. The upside to this is Jasna lent me her (very awe­some) DSLR cam­era for the trip. I’ll try to keep pic­tures of blondes down to a min­imum. Mostly I’m excited to see Ana and Andre, but I think they’ll be busy most of the time, so I’ll prob­ably ven­ture into Ams­ter­dam at least once to enter­tain myself. I brought the cam­era cable with me, so watch my photo gal­lery in the next day or two for pic­tures to start appearing.

The con­fer­ence — and my present­a­tion there — I haven’t thought a whole lot about yet. I’ll have to dis­ap­pear to Eind­hoven, which I think is only about half an hour from Utrecht — but then again maybe everything’s half an hour away from everything in the Neth­er­lands, who knows — and see what’s going on there. I’m fairly excited to see what FOPARA ends up being like since this is the first year the workshop’s being done. I’m espe­cially excited to see the Hume pro­ject people, like Kevin Ham­mond, since I’ve never met any.

I should say there’s still a lot of work that’s going on behind the scenes, work even on what I’m going to present to FOPARA. While I was in Cal­gary we decided to put in a new typ­ing sys­tem based on bunched logics which deals eleg­antly with a lot of the prob­lems with peeks that we’ve been sort­ing out in Pola, plus some new features.

The paper I sub­mit­ted to FOPARA, a work­shop in Eind­hover this Novem­ber, has been accep­ted! We got some really amaz­ing com­ments back from the ref­er­ees. The really evil part of the paper, near the back, didn’t get as many com­plaints as I was expect­ing. Maybe I need to present it bet­ter so people can fully appre­ci­ate what hor­rible things I’m doing, ha!

So yes, fix­ing up the FOPARA paper will hap­pen before long. I also need to make a trip to Cal­gary soon to work with Brian and Robin more. In the mean­time I’m work­ing on my thesis pro­posal which has been drag­ging on for too many months now and work­ing with my super­visor, Jamie, on a cleaner and — with no shame about being nerdy — more excit­ing for­mu­la­tion. It’s mak­ing us rethink about things we haven’t thought about in a long time, too, which is good.

And while this is all going on I’m still slowly work­ing on the imple­ment­a­tion where time per­mits. Pro­gress is being made on the bounds infer­ence. I’ve also put up some bin­ar­ies of the inter­preter — as it exis­ted a couple months ago. Not sur­pris­ingly no one’s down­load­ing any of them except for me (to test).

I am off to Los Angeles for LCC tomor­row morn­ing! I’m get­ting sur­pris­ingly excited about this!

I know tomor­row will be hell trav­el­ling. I just got a con­firm­a­tion call from the shuttle to say they’ll be com­ing by at 3:30am to pick me up and take me to Detroit Air­port. I was actu­ally hop­ing to sleep in until 3:30, but I guess I’ll have to get up earlier; not a big prob­lem since I’ll prob­ably be too excited to sleep much any­way. I always have really hor­rible travel times, I sup­pose because I don’t want to lose entire days trav­el­ling. Any­one who has to leave cats at home to fend for them­selves prob­ably under­stands the desire to stay away from home for as little as possible.

The work­shop itself will be a tonne of fun, though. There are lots of cool people going and, if noth­ing else, Brian — my part­ner in crime on Pola — and I will get a week­end to work together.

I sub­mit­ted the paper to FOPARA this after­noon. It’s not a fant­astic paper, but it’s not too bad. I prob­ably say that about every paper. The scheme we came up with for bounds infer­ence was slightly hair­ier than I’d hoped which means there were a lot of loose ends to track down while stay­ing within the page limit.

In any case I’m pretty excited about that being done. I can relax a bit and do more imple­ment­a­tion work before LCC.

On a note of annoy­ance, I put a link in the paper to the Pola pro­ject home only to find that Red­mine stopped work­ing about two days ago. Dream­host may have done an upgrade of Rails or some­thing, I’m not sure, but it’s a prob­lem I didn’t fore­see. I’ll have to try to fix it tonight or tomorrow.

From a chat with my friend Marla, edited for brevity:

Marla: did you work on the paper?
Mike: haha
Mike: a little bit
Mike: I came across a rather excit­ing prob­lem with it
Mike: I hope I can still get it done in time
Marla: :-O
Marla: excit­ing and prob­lem don’t often go together
Mike: of course they do!
Mike: that’s what research is all about, silly :P
Marla: >_​<
Marla: this is why I’m not a grad student

Yes, I’m hard at work on the paper for FOPARA, still, as the deadline’s been exten­ded. And yes, I have come across a rather excit­ing prob­lem, deal­ing with infer­ring size bounds from safe recur­sions (folds). I think if I can get a solu­tion to the prob­lem, even a rel­at­ively naïve one, for the paper I’ll be happy, though I think the prob­lem as a whole has a lot of poten­tial for clev­erness down the road.

First things first: the paper sub­mit­ted to LCC has been put up on the Pola pro­ject page.

Secondly, one of my super­visors informed of the loom­ing dead­line for FOPARA (Found­a­tional and Prac­tical Applic­a­tions of Resource Ana­lysis), a work­shop of FM2009 in Eind­hoven. The work­shop seems like a bril­liant fit for my work and there are a lot of inter­est­ing people attend­ing (for instance Mar­tin Hof­mann as well as Hume people like Kevin Ham­mond and Greg Michael­son and many others).

The only stick­ing point is the dead­line, less than 3 weeks away. I think this would be a good oppor­tun­ity to write up the more prac­tical aspects of Pola, how it’s imple­men­ted and how a pro­gram­mer could use it. I’m already a little back­logged with imple­ment­a­tion details and, in my mind, fin­ish­ing up the new imple­ment­a­tion of bounds infer­ence is more import­ant than writ­ing another paper.