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.

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 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.

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.

Personally—and I never pass up an opportunity to talk about myself—the year surprisingly turned out really well. I taught my first university course, Networking, and had a lot of fun with it and actually won an award for it. I’m actually regretting a little bit not applying to lecture again, but I suppose it would be better choice to try and graduate if I can. I got to meet Jorge Cham at the Western Research Forum (where I also won an award, since this paragraph is devoted to bragging). I also started officiating (Canadian) football this year, which has been a long-time dream of mine, though I can’t explain why it never occurred me before to do it. I ended up winning Rookie of the Year for that. Of anything happening next year I’m definitely most excited about reffing again: it’s really a shame you can’t make a career out of it.

The downside to getting on with my thesis is that I have to think about what I’ll do when I’m done. Next to “how are the cats?” probably the most common question I get is about what I’ll do when I’m done, and the official answer is that I have no idea. The current plan is to avoid thinking about it for as long as possible and pick the most awesome option when forced to (or the least annoying, for the pessimists). I might have to revise that plan at some time.

If I can avoid talking about myself for a little while, the highlight of the year was definitely going to the Netherlands and especially to Utrecht to see Jasna’s sister Ana and to meet her husband, Andre. Regardless of whether I made him into a Haskell convert it was pretty awesome to meet him and stay with them and help move their furniture.

As seems to be a common trend lately, I feel fantastically optimistic about the upcoming year, and I expect life to continue getting better. The most important thing in my life, of course, is Jasna, and our relationship is better than ever.

It’ll be a good year and decade to come.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.