Category Archives: work

The Spring

By zach | Published June 8, 2010

It’s hard to believe that it has already been three months since I visited Zürich. A lot has happened in the meantime. After returning from Zürich, I dove into work on finishing up a bit of research to round out my dissertation. I think it turned out rather well, and I’m currently in the process of deciding whether to submit the last piece of the puzzle to POPL or PPoPP. POPL has a deadline in mid-July, which is good to shoot for. If the paper isn’t ready by then, it’ll certainly be ready by the PPoPP deadline at the beginning of August.

April was also an exciting month. I visited MSR in Seattle, gave my dissertation talk, and went adventuring with Christina. In mid-April I made a visit up to MSR, and did my song and dance for the fine people there. I had a good time, and had lots of good conversations with people about research-y things. I think it would be a good place to work someday. In the end, though, by the end of April I had received and accepted an offer for a post-doc from the folks in Zürich =)

A few days after returning from MSR, I gave my dissertation talk. In a surprising stroke of luck, I managed to get my whole committee to attend. Unfortunately, I only managed to do that by scheduling the talk at 8am, so the only other person who showed up was the indefatigable Leon, who was up that early anyway to teach a recitation section at 9.

The following Monday, Christina showed up in America and we traveled together from San Francisco to Pittsburgh, and had a good time there for a week or so. After that, during the first week of May, we traveled back to San Francisco, met up with Christina’s parents, and drove down to Paso Robles, and then back up Highway 1 stopping in Big Sur for a couple days, and passing through Carmel and Monterrey before spending some time in San Francisco. It was a really fun vacation!

Immediately after returning from vacation, I spent a couple of days running around campus trying to get signatures and last-minute feedback from my dissertation committee. By late Tuesday afternoon everything was finished, and my dissertation was successfully filed, and by Wednesday morning, I had discovered the first missed-typo =) Wednesday was also the first day of the yearly OSQ retreat in Santa Cruz. The weather there was beautiful, and I had a good time.

By the time I got back from the retreat that Friday, my family (my mom and dad, Andrew and Christy, and my aunt and uncle, and cousin Ben) had already arrived in Berkeley for my graduation. On Saturday we drove up to Napa and visited a few wineries, Sterling and a couple others. On Sunday I got up early and graduated. In the afternoon we all went to a barbecue at Ben and Juliet’s place in Lafayette.

On Monday morning we got up early and drove to Yosemite. We rented a 4-bedroom cabin in Wawona, which was pretty nice. Unfortunately, I managed to catch a cold, and was stuck in the cabin for part of the trip, but my family had never been there before and enjoyed it a lot. After Yosemite, we drove down to LA for Ben’s graduation from Pepperdine, and spent the weekend at the mansion of his Great Uncle Steve. I flew back to Berkeley on Sunday afternoon.

By this point, I was pretty exhausted from lots of travel and adventure and excitement, and still recovering from my Yosemite cold, and so I skipped the ParLab retreat (also to Santa Cruz), which took place starting the day after I got back from LA. Since then, I have been working on some research things, hanging out with Ben and Juliet and other folks who have not wandered off yet, and starting to pack up my apartment to get ready to sell things/ship things home/ship things to myself when I have someplace to ship things in Switzerland.

I have also made plans to visit Christina in July, which I am very excited about. I’ll be there for about a month, and we will be going on some new Japan adventures =)

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Deadlines Approach!

By zach | Published November 16, 2009

Some are externally imposed, and others are self-imposed. This Friday is the PLDI deadline. In addition to my own paper, over the past few weeks, I’ve been spending more and more time at the lab working with the people there on a second paper. All of the implementation work and experiments have been done by someone else, but I’ve been contributing ideas, and now I am revising the paper, since mine is in pretty good shape.

I suppose that is the only externally imposed deadline. The self-imposed ones are as follows. 1.) This coming weekend after the papers are finished, I want to finish working on the pictures from my brother’s wedding. I have most of them posted to Flickr already, but there are still a number left to do. 2.) By this Monday, I need to send email to the Professor in the Systems group at ETH Zurich who wants to host me for a post-doc, or whatnot. Mostly to introduce myself, but also to figure out what the process is for applying and getting myself over there, and so forth.

There was a third thing, too… Oh, yah! That whole dissertation thing. I can say that it is coming along well because my PLDI paper is more-or-less the last real content I have to develop for it (whether or not the paper is accepted). I am waiting until early next semester to file, but I want to finish all of the actual work on it between the PLDI deadline and winter break. It’ll be a bit of a slog, but I’ll have vacation in Florida with Christina and her family to look forward to, so I think I’ll be able to make it =)

Other than that, things have been pretty slow. The weather is getting colder. The Steelers aren’t doing so well, but the Penguins are still awesome. I’ll be sticking around here in Berkeley for Thanksgiving since plane tickets got to be too expensive, which I am a bit sad about, but hopefully there will be some potluck sort of deal to go to.

Hopefully I’ll be able to make more interesting posts after all this work is finished!

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Last Semester

By zach | Published August 30, 2009

The past few weeks have been pretty unexciting. I have been chugging right along. I’m still on track to file my dissertation in December. I actually started piecing it together from papers last weekend. It’s going to need lots of merging and reformatting, but all of the hard work (the research, that is) is done. I won’t need to write very much new text other than expanding on related work and writing some stuff about the work I’ve been doing with the ParLab OS group. I guess there might also be revisions from my committee, but I’m not too worried.

Actually, things have been unexciting except that I found out on Thursday night that my credit card information had been stolen. Of course, I didn’t notice until I tried to use it and the charges were declined. Luckily the credit card company noticed suspicious charges before I did! Unfortunately, I now have to wait a few days for a new card to arrive.

I also went to a housewarming/birthday party last night for Kevin, one of the guys in the OS group. There were lots of German speaking people there. I can follow the gist of things, and I like hearing people speak German, but it was a little annoying sometimes not being able to join in. I should find some German study website thing, maybe. Of course, when some people switched to French, I decided that would be a good time to find other people to talk to.

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Dublin

By zach | Published June 22, 2009

Last week I was at PLDI, which was held this year at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland. Initially I was exhausted due to the long trip and jet lag, and nervous about giving my talk, but after getting some sleep, and getting a good response to the talk, I had a really good time. I also had the chance to get lots of good feedback on my work from some of the big names in the field, and good suggestions about where to take my research next. (One of the tricky things about Computer Science is that negative results don’t get published, so usually the only(and easiest!) way to find out about things that don’t work is talking to people at conferences.)

The major tourist attraction in Dublin is Trinity College itself. It sits right in the center of the city surrounded by a high stone wall. On the western end of the campus, the buildings are very old, and then as you go east, they become increasingly modern until you reach the far eastern end where there is a brand-new-looking computer science building. Every bit of space on the campus is used, except for a few patches of grass that you’re not allowed to walk on. We ate lunch every day in an ancient looking dining hall lined with huge portraits of past provosts (think Hogwarts.)

I also had a chance to visit other tourist-y things in Dublin including Dublin Castle, which was a strange mishmash, and not very castle-like; Christ Church Cathedral, which had some very neat stained glass windows, and a crypt filled with strange artifacts; and the old Guinness Brewery, which is now a museum about the brewing process. Part of the museum is shaped like a Guinness pint glass several stories tall at the top of which is a bar with a very nice view of Dublin. If you pay for the tour of the museum, they give you a complementary pint of Guinness there, which was the best Guinness I’d ever tasted =) Dublin also has some nice shopping areas, and has lots and lots of Irish pubs, as you might expect, that serve tasty lamb stew, bangers and mash, fish and chips, and other similar dishes.

Getting home was a bit of an adventure. I missed my connection in Philidelphia, and had to spend the night there. The lady at the customer service desk told me that my checked bag would probably beat me to San Francisco the following morning, but when I arrived my bag wasn’t there yet, and there was no record of its location in the computer. The man at baggage claim said they would find it eventually and deliver it, but I had the slight problem that my apartmet key was in the missing bag! Luckily, the building manager was home and let me in, and later in the evening my bag was delivered with all of its contents present.

This coming week, I will likely slack off a bit. It has been several months since I’ve had no imminent deadlines, though if I am feeling especially motivated I will probably work on doing a new release of my compiler, or beginning an outline for my dissertation =)

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ParLab-ing

By zach | Published June 5, 2009

I had a good time at the ParLab retreat. It was at the same hotel in Santa Cruz as the OSQ retreat a couple of weeks ago. The weather was beautiful, and there was down time in the schedule, so I got to enjoy the beach and the hotel pool and hot tub. This is the third ParLab retreat I’ve been on, and the talks and conversation have gotten better with each one. This is doubtlessly because people are starting to make progress, and write code, rather than talking about proposals and visions, which are sometimes difficult for me to take seriously.

Last night I went to the CSGSA bar night, which was held at a new sports bar called Miranda near University and Milvia. We watched the Penguins win game 4 of the Stanley Cup final, which was exciting. The series is now tied at two games apiece. It would be really cool for both the Steelers and the Penguins to win national championships in the same year! After the bar night wound down, the OS group dragged me to Triple Rock for monkey beer, which is tasty, but strong, and we had interesting discussions about all sorts of things. I am happy to be getting to know them better since I think it will make working with them for the next few months more fun.

However, it was a late night, and I am conspicuously the only person in our cube in the ParLab even though it is past noon. Luckily, last night was probably the only bar night we’ll have this summer, and now we’ll be able to get some work done =)

I’ll post some pictures from the trip to Santa Cruz this weekend sometime!

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End of the Semester

By zach | Published May 26, 2009

The talk I was working on during down time in Japan went over well at the OSQ retreat in Santa Cruz even though I was mostly zombified. (A couple of people from Microsoft Research seemed really interested in the project, and were asking lots of questions.) I just need to add a few more pictures, do a better job of highlighting the key points, and rehearse it a few more times and it will be ready for PLDI. Aside from that, between now and then, I just need to move a few features of my compiler from the development branch over into the release branch, and do lots of testing. It’s kind of boring, really, but it occurs to me that if I’m going to finish in December, then I’m running out of time to do exciting new things before I have to start writing the dissertation. Hopefully the OS kids make a lot of progress in July and August so that they can use the features I built into my compiler this past semester.

Enough about work! This past weekend I went hiking with Alex, Louis, and Leon near Mt. Tamalpais. We hiked along a stream bed that begins on the northern slopes down into a valley. There were several nice waterfalls along the way, and we ended up at Alpine Lake, which is where some of the drinking water for Marin County comes from. Afterwards, we had dinner in Walnut Creek at a tapas place called Va de Vi, and then visited Ben and Juliet in Lafayette for a game of Settlers.

This week will be mostly boring, but the first half of next week is another retreat in Santa Cruz, this time with the ParLab. I am looking forward to another trip to the beach with lots of tasty food, even though I’ll be stuck inside listening to talks most of the time.

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Back to the daily grind

By christina | Published May 20, 2009

Zach has been gone about a week now, and life has mostly gotten back to the dull daily baseline. Even though I’m in Japan, I’m still going to work every day, coming home in the evening and not having much to do.

I think, when it comes down to it, daily life most everywhere is just about the same. You wake up, work, eat food at the right times, go out a few times, sit at home and relax in the evenings, that sort of stuff. I think I might benefit from having some friends outside of work, or some English-speaking friends/acquaintances, but I haven’t quite gotten to the point where I’m feeling the need. Perhaps it’d be better to find them before I do, though.

However, unlike my sister, I don’t have the built-in network of local JETs to socialize with. I guess there probably are local JETs, but I’m not sure if I’d really fit in, being as I don’t have any students to gripe about.　I’m not in Tokyo, so there aren’t as many other conveniently located Americans around. Fukuoka is an hour away, so not exactly the most convenient.

Getting out there and meeting new people is tricky.

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A More Substantial Post Will Follow

By zach | Published April 26, 2009

The three most unpleasant things about grad school for me in decreasing order:

Initial culture shock, and finding a research advisor.
Condensing two years of work into a 20 minute powerpoint presentation.
Waiting for long-running experiments to finish.

I have been working on the presentation I’ll use for various retreats and PLDI this summer. Coding and even paper writing I find to be much more satisfying. Hopefully I can have a first draft of my slides ready before I head off to Japan so that I can make revisions and practice before the OSQ retreat in Santa Cruz. Other non-work things have been going on as well, but I’ll save those for a different post.

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Coding

By zach | Published April 16, 2009

Ocaml is a great language. The only major drawback is the lack of a cheap way to do shared memory multiprocessing. The Netshm module lets you share non-aggregate data types among separate processes, which would be sufficient for most of my purposes, but if you want to share something complicated you have to marshal to a string first, and then un-marshal on the receiving end. Do that a lot, and it wipes out whatever speedup you might have gotten.

Anyway, I was trying to get my compiler to process separate functions concurrently, but with only two CPU’s both can be kept busy by simply doing a ‘make -j’. When people have hundreds of cores sitting on their desks it will make more sense to spawn threads for each function, and hopefully by that time the concurrent Ocaml GC will be working.

Other than that little boondoggle, this week I’ve been sitting in the ParLab getting good suggestions from the OS kids about features to add to my compiler (and bugs to fix!), and coding them up as quickly as possible. Next week I should probably start working on my PLDI talk since I might have to give it the first time the day I get back from Japan. Oh, right: I’m going to to visit Christina in Japan for two weeks, in two weeks =) You can probably tell from this post that a vacation will do me some good since all I can seem to think (and post) about is work!

Posted in thoughts, work | Tagged ocaml, work | 2 Comments

By zach | Published March 31, 2009

fbp Facebook has posted some coding puzzles as part of their recruiting program. I have no interest in a job at Facebook, but the coding puzzles are much better designed than the problems one encounters in contests such as the one run by the ACM. The facebook problems tend to be NP-hard in the general case, but you have to find the trick that lets your program do well on the smaller number of cases that are described in the puzzle. Sometimes they are not so easy to figure out! I also like how you can put a widget in your facebook profile to show which puzzles you’ve solved.

Anyway, I’ve been working on a few of those in the past week when not working on the camera-ready version of my PLDI paper. Apparently I get restless if I don’t write so many lines of OCaml in a day. Given that the paper is finished now, I’ll probably go back to the sort of coding I’m supposed to be doing (on the Ivy compiler, for my dissertation) rather than coding for silly little puzzles.

This past weekend I also ate Pho and played Settlers with Ben, Juliet, Alex, and Louis, and rode down to San Jose with Alex and Louis on the following day to eat at Shiva’s and see Watchmen, which was pretty entertaining.

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