Stuart's Soliloquy to the void

Love, poetry and romance

Thursday, February 23rd, 2006 | Personal | No Comments

I’m slowly getting used to having time to focus on studying again without having to work all the time. It’s bit of a strange sensation, really, and quite pleasing. I had forgotten how great it feels to be a student. Now, as the topic might suggest, this post isn’t about me studying (if it was I’d have a serious problem with my priorities, I think).

Those of you who know me or read regularly know that I’m engaged to a wonderful woman, Ida, and that she bakes some awesome cakes. Ida is very remarkable in that she manages to deal with my odd interests and seemingly unlimited interest in boring computer stuff. She deals with it so gracefully that her only complaint ever has been that I don’t seem ready to declare my love to her more publically, so being the geek I am, what better way than to say it with my latest poem to her on my blog?

Considering I don’t get a lot of female readers (apart from my mother and Ida) the rest of you, go do something nice for your significant other. We don’t need a poor commercialised excuse to do so, right?

Tags: life

In the world of the living

Friday, February 10th, 2006 | Personal | No Comments

Over the past two years I have worked as an intern for a realtor company doing systems analysis, design and education of developers. There have been the usual ups and downs with fun projects and some not-so-fun projects. But there are other things in this world than working, namely trying to finish your degree. For those of you who have been following for a while then you might mutter it’s about time, those of you who haven’t been following will probably mutter the same as those pesky kids who just study are annoying, or something. So, goodbye work, and thanks for all the cake.

So what am I doing back at the ol’ university? I don’t think I’ve written about that much lately, so let me bring you up to speed. I’m working on my masters degree in computer science, specialising (so far) in programming language theory. As part of one of my courses we were required (more or less) to write a paper on a topic within types and programming languages and make a presentation on it. I chose to write a paper on static verification of downcasts in an object calculus that vaguely reminds of Featherweight Java by Igarashi, Pierce and Wadler, which is a minimal, functional core of Java (and C# for that matter). I try to portray further uses of the static verification in my paper, namely on how you could potentially use the static verification as a guide to translate from a monomorphic program into a corresponding polymorphic program without the downcasts – that is translated into a program in a language that has parametric polymorphism. This means, for C# 1.1 to C# 2 translation, for instance, that there are a lot of places where we can remove boxings and unboxings of value types and hence improve performance radically. Furthermore, as far as I can see there will be further analyses that can be useful with the subtype expression flow modeling that is being used in Smith and Wang’s DCPA algorithm (if all of this cannot be done as easily by reduction to let-polymorphism, I’ll have to look at that sometime). But, I digress. You can find the paper here in PDF format, if you are interested.

Finally, Ida and I have started to look around to buy a house, so I’m sure there’ll be some fun updates on the tormenting trials of buying a house, getting a mortgage (particularly with the amount of increase in value of houses there has been lately, it’s crazy!) and whatnot sometime in the not too distant future.

Back to Hoare’s CSP algebra…

Tags: life, university