Another problem is the Danish outlets (I hope for your sake that things are better in your country!). They have been designed mostly with the same mindset, except they are even worse, several of them do not even show anything but a page of brand names they sell! Kaufmann and Din Tøjmand are among the worst, Tøjeksperten barely climbs above them by actually having a PDF version of their catalogue available online.

Please, design shops and clothes outlets, the web is not another TV station showing commercials 24/7 where consumers passively gawk at your magnificent creations. We want instant feedback, we want to be able to easily link to apparel so we can show it to friends, get opinions, easily find stores that carry the clothes, so we can go to those stores and try the clothes on to see whether they fit us. It would be absolutely perfect if you could see whether the apparel is in stock in a specific store so we don’t have to wade all the way across town to find another outlet that might or might not happen to have it in stock. It is time you join the digital decade, it’s the thing in fashion.

Japanese tea cup. White tea. Life is good.

The day was joyously spent together and with all our best friends and family. Thank you to everyone who has sent greetings and their best wishes. For the curious there are a lot more photos up here.

It has, unfortunately been pretty much overcast constantly since we moved in, so you’ll have to do with a slightly dark image from the back side of the house. We’ve bought this lovely house in a nice suburb north of Copenhagen, just next to a school and a stone throw from a nursery, so the stage is set for the next aspect of life.

We’re still getting settled in, so until we’re finished with that, I’ll postpone the indoors pictures as everything is a bit cluttered. My desk is still in a temporary position in the middle of the living room so I can do some work. Hopefully everything will have gotten in order within long. We’re fortunate that there’s also a lot of nature around, so I’ll be sure to take a few snapshots from the lake nearby as well if I can manage to remember to bring the camera when we go for a walk.

Apart from us moving, then Microsoft has released Internet Explorer 7 unto the world and since it fixes a lot of issues with formatting the layout of my website I have taken the chance to do a nice spring cleaning and make my site look pristine on IE7 and FireFox. If you’re on an earlier version of Internet Explorer and my site suddenly looks very strange then… well, that’s why.

Lastly, I’ve written another fascinating project in partial fulfillment of my masters degree in Computer Science, which you can see here (PDF). It is about creating a language for specifying typefaces (fonts) for the computer. If you want bit more of a description of the project, look at the research page.

So, to a new time…

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?

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…

Not to rest on my laurels, I have commenced a new project with Noah Adler to wrap Xlib in C#. Expect some updates on this in the future (yeah right, like that’s ever going to happen).

Otherwise things seem to be going like a clockwork – Ida is busy studying, I’m busy working, the weather is getting warmer, picked up biking again, it’s sunday. Life is sweet.