May 31, 2004
World Non-Smoking Day
Today is World Non-Smoking Day and Norway just passed a law making it illegal to smoke in public places. Another strike against this horrendously annoying and unhealthy habit. There are restaurants and bars in Europe where breathing is completely impossible, due the extreme amounts of cigarette smoke. As an avid nonsmoker, I am hoping that I will one day be able to go out without having to throw away my shirts the next day because of the terrible stench of...
Posted on May 31, 2004 01:01 AM
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May 30, 2004
My Blogger Blog
I just got a Blogger account in order to be able to post comments to Blogger blogs, such as Greg's. My Blog is titled Being CS (as this will probably be in the future), and will almost certainly not be used much. Since I want to remind myself of where it is located, I still want to link to it, so here it is. Blogger does not support RSS feeds in their free version, only Atom, which I can now...
Posted on May 30, 2004 05:46 PM
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May 30, 2004
Safari & Undo
Safari really needs undo capabilities for text fields, especially when used to edit weblog entries, such as this one....
Posted on May 30, 2004 05:33 PM
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May 29, 2004
The Use of Categories
The categorization of information is a hotly debated topic in semantic web circles. Modern weblogging software usually comes with categories that allows you to separate things into different topics or themes. But to what degree is it really possible to categorize ones thoughts into a small number of topics, and is this really useful? Everyone of my posts is inherently personal, and though some of them are more technical (the CS category), nearly everything that I think could possibly fit...
Posted on May 29, 2004 09:59 PM
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May 27, 2004
P2P at Stanford
Apparently there is a lot of P2P research going on at Stanford, which is highly interesting. P2P is an issue which is highly important to me, but that I know far too little about (especially discovery and security). Professor Garcia-Molina and his PhD students Neil Daswani and Beverly Yang are doing a lot of research on this issue, and I will keep up with their work in the future. It turns out there is even a website about people at...
Posted on May 27, 2004 01:12 AM
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May 26, 2004
Trading Latency for Bandwidth
Walking back from ISIS yesterday I realized the importance of Mazières LBFS paper to my research. The LBFS associates hashes with file chunks, and before a client requests a chunk over the network, it asks the server for the hash of that chunk. If the client realizes it already has this sector (since many files share chunks), it is done and has saved bandwidth, otherwise it requests the sector, thereby taking twice as much roundtrip time. By selectively using this...
Posted on May 26, 2004 10:06 PM
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May 25, 2004
Finished 108B & Skipping 154
I just finally finished my EE 108 B Project, after falling asleep yesterday and therefore not finishing it as planned. Unfortunately I finished it too late in order to be able to finish CS 154 on time, so I decided to take the option of dropping the problemset. Now I am working on finalizing the details of my second president's scholar project, which I will talk to Julie about tomorrow morning. This will include a large number of books and...
Posted on May 25, 2004 11:37 PM
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May 23, 2004
The Draw: Naranja
My draw group and I will be living in Naranja again, this year. So will 9 other people who lived in Naranja this year. And Max and Chris will be staffing next year, which makes for another 2 returning residents. 5 former Naranja residents who are living in West Lag, will also be living here. Second floor will be amazing, but first floor is looking out to be very quiet. Unfortunately, two staff members, who in my opinion have done...
Posted on May 23, 2004 01:02 AM
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May 21, 2004
Too Much Food
I somehow managed to survive this week. The only thing I still have due is CS 157 on Saturday, and though that might be stressful, I am pretty confident we will finish it on time. Next week should be a lot more manageable. I just got back my CS 240 midterm, and definitely will good about it. I thought I did badly and ended up doing well, not as well as on the first one (compared to the rest of...
Posted on May 21, 2004 02:50 PM
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May 18, 2004
3rd Try
This is the third time I'm writing this entry. I have three problemsets and a midterm in the next three days, which worries me a bit. I am also worried about getting into coterm and about how CS 199 Independent Study for Fall quarter is going to work out. But instead of worrying, I will now concentrate and get it done. I can do this. In other news, 8 of my 12 books from Amazon arrived, and 7 of them...
Posted on May 18, 2004 10:20 PM
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May 16, 2004
Meeting Miguel
Last week I met Miguel de Icaza at VM'04. Miguel gave Friday's keynote, about how the idea for Mono was conceived to make Gnome programs language and library independent. One of his best examples for this was Tcl/Tk, a scripting language that was extensively used for GUI design, only because Tk, its GUI toolkit was so easy to use. Prior solutions like Bonobo (also started by Miguel) failed (that one due to the cruft of Corba bindings, though I know...
Posted on May 16, 2004 08:20 PM
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May 08, 2004
Receive Livelock
Travis got a new CPU last week and just sent me a large file over AIM. This almost sent my computer into Receive LiveLock. Receive Livelock means that user programs are not making any progress, and packets are being dropped due to the large number of interrupts when the computer is receiving large network loads. More about this can be found in the original paper Eliminating Receive Livelock in an Interrupt-Driven Kernel by Mogul and Ramakrishnan. Though my computer was...
Posted on May 8, 2004 05:03 PM
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May 07, 2004
This Conference is Great
I was just reading the reference list for one of the papers presented here, and the name P. Dinda sounded familiar. It turns out, that he is currently sitting behind me. Carl Waldspurger (see my post on ESX Server), who won 2 out of 5 of the best paper awards at OSDI is sitting in front of me. Miguel de Icaza is on stage, preparing for his keynoe. This is amazing....
Posted on May 7, 2004 09:05 AM
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May 06, 2004
End of Tech Sessions
The technical sessions for today just ended, and the next events are a reception and birds of a feather sessions. As far as I know the latter are discussion sessions, were people can bring up topics they are interested in, and then have people talk about the topic. Depending on how many people stay around I might leave a bit early, in order to relax and prepare for tomorrow, or stay until 10pm. We will see, at least I now...
Posted on May 6, 2004 05:49 PM
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May 06, 2004
A Terrible Mix Up
I just got an email saying that my PS grant was only approved for $540 instead of the $1015 I requested. What happened is that I update my project after about a month, and I guess they got the old request. This is quite terrible, since now that I have attended the conference, there is almost no money left for books. I hope that I can somehow get this fixed, but I feel bad about having completely messed up the...
Posted on May 6, 2004 04:40 PM
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May 06, 2004
Analyzing Java Apps with Hardware Monitors
This very much reminds me of what Professor Rosenblum is doing with Operating Systems in his summer CURIS research....Actually, this is different than what the title makes it sound like. They use Hardware counters in order to track their performance, and then use a program to analyze this information. Hm, definitely not CS 240 material....
Posted on May 6, 2004 03:12 PM
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May 06, 2004
Towards Scalable Multiprocessor Virtual Machines
From the description alone, this sounds amazing. The basic goal is to schedule physical processors in a multiprocessor machine, to virtual processors in several multiprocessor, virtual machines. They are trying to maximize physical processor usage, while minimizing waiting times due to locks. They use something called time ballooning, which is similar to the memory ballooning in VMware ESX Server, I am not entirely sure how exactly this works, but it seems like a neat idea. Of all the papers yet,...
Posted on May 6, 2004 02:32 PM
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May 06, 2004
The First Keynote
Professor Rosenblum is giving his keynote right now. Miguel de Icaza registered at the same time as I did (as the last person). Right now I am still feeling slightly lost, but things should improve soon. Update: The keynote is quite interesting, mostly material I already know from CS 140 and the recent reading I have been doing, but I am just fascinated by how exactly conferences work, and how people interact. And I really need a new battery....
Posted on May 6, 2004 09:34 AM
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May 05, 2004
More on VM'04
I told Dawson Engler that I could not attend class on Friday because of VM'04. Unfortunately I phrased it rather poorly: "We can miss up to 2 classes without being downgraded, right?" instead of "Is it OK if I miss class because I am going to a USENIX conference." Once I clarified that, everything was OK, and Prof. Engler said that if I see any interesting papers, we might read them for class, which is absolutely amazing. I am now...
Posted on May 5, 2004 04:10 PM
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May 05, 2004
Going to VM'04
Yesterday I got confirmation that my grant request was approved, and that I can proceed with my project as planned and attend the VM'04 conference. Due to the amount of work, and other meetings I have today, I've decided that it is probably better not to go to today's welcome session, and finish everything and get up early tomorrow, in order to account for the fact that I will not have been to the San Jose Hyatt. Though I am...
Posted on May 5, 2004 10:29 AM
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May 04, 2004
The Original Nachos Paper
While browsing through the best papers from all USENIX conferences starting 1990, I found the original Nachos paper. It turns out that it won best conference paper at the USENIX Winter 1993 Conference. There is very little in the paper that I have not read about before, but it was nice to see some of the ideas that went into the exact makeup of Nachos. I can also see the reasons for the decisions the Stanford professors made in giving...
Posted on May 4, 2004 12:01 AM
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May 03, 2004
Too Many Midterms
Having 6 midterms in a quarter is not the worst thing in the world, but it is not the greatest either. While my first 2 (Math 51 and CS 240) went exceptionally well, the latter two (EE 108 B and CS 154) could have been a lot better (I have not gotten grades for those yet). I was able to answer most questions on CS 154, but could not answer parts of 2 questions, which were worth a lot of...
Posted on May 3, 2004 05:48 PM
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May 03, 2004
This is How Rap Should Be
I am now listening to Jaspora from the album The Carnival by Wyclef Jean. This song reminds me of why I liked Rap so much when I was in high school and cannot really stand it anymore now. I think that having to listen to stuff like 50 Cent and Ja Rule spoiled my appetite for Rap forever, but I will try to listen to some good Rap music, to not completely ignore this type of music. Having said that,...
Posted on May 3, 2004 12:03 AM
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May 02, 2004
More About BlogTalk 2.0
I just heard that Loic Le Mur, a European Social Entrepreneur, who's weblog I've been reading for quite a while now, is also attending BlogTalk 2.0. Though it seems like David Weinberger is not attending this year, there is still going to be a large group of very interesting people, and I am looking forward to the conference a lot. It is good to see that social innovation is starting to affect Europe, and that Austria is a part of...
Posted on May 2, 2004 02:45 PM
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