I am . . .

bonus (dfw) !

And as an added bonus, here is pretty good commencement speech by David Foster Wallace. Its no "Wear Sunscreen", in that I don't see it being put to music and put on VH1 anytime soon, but its probably bettter than "No Sex in the Champagne Room."

David Foster Wallace, in case you didn't know, is the author of Infinite Jest, a book which I'm still not sure whether was worth finishing (other than to be able to say at dinner, "I finished Infinite Jest.", which is a great test of the people you're talking to, because the right response to this statement really is "Why?").

He has other books as well ("Interviews with hideous men") but those didn't grab me (and drop me) in the same way that Infinite Jest did.

self and virtual types

I've been listening on discussions in the lab lately on handling self types. Sam mentioned something called virtual types. I know nothing about them.

However, I happened to run into an article by Remy and Vouillon arguing that virtual types (or at least common uses of virtual types) do not need special treatment in O'Caml, and gives some example code.

So I want to go back over the article later and really digest what is going on. I followed the argument as presented when I read it directly, but I'm feeling I may have missed the point when they were talking about camels at the end.

larceny unleashed

Last week, Will finally decided it was time to "release" Petit Larceny (as well as the latest build for Native Larceny).

I don't have much else to add to the subject. (other than its not really what anyone is willing to call a formal release; Will calls it a "Developer's Alpha", and I call it "Potentially Unembarressing")

However, it is nice that we've hit this stage.

Next items on my agenda:

• Finish term paper on "Computability and Complexity of Type Inference" (this mostly consists of poking Carl with progressively larger sticks).
• Finish getting NASM support working for Larceny on win32 platforms (so that we can release for windows as well as the current Mac OS X and Sparc).
• Merge the Common Larceny and Petit Larceny (aka release_2) source branches in the CVS repository.
• Start planning out how to implement the Garbage First collector in Larceny's runtime.

garbage collection in cylone

I just read a nice lil' paper that gives me hope for my own research.

It sounds like they put a region system to good use in developing a simple two-space garbage collector.

However, this blog entry indicates that they haven't figured out how to do a generational collector yet, and that they think it might require dependent types. Yowza. I've been thinking about the problem as well, but I never got to the point where it seemed like something that sophisticated would be required. . .

before you die, i'd like to. . .

Here is a page of links on PowerPC assembly programming.

Yeah, I've taken my sweet time getting around to learning ppc asm, so now one must wonder, "why bother?"

No answer.

apple, suicide, and analogies

This is a "fun" posting from 2001.

No, the analogy doesn't entirely stand up on its own. But its still worth considering.

The other issue that some people are talking about is DRM. Is that a driving issue? Its certainly not one that Steve Jobs was willing to mention on stage. Maybe its just paranoia.

"i for one welcome our new intel overlords"

. . . but not really.

Yep, Apple is going to be a Switcher. And I'm somewhat pissed about it.

I really had bought into the argument that RISC processors were the right solution for the long term, and that PowerPC was more scalable than Intel, etc etc. If nothing else, Intel processors meager register set really sucks.

Perhaps the worst thing is that it is going to be very hard to convince anyone to buy a new mac for the next year, at least. Sigh.