Friday, May 23, 2008

Zeno's Tortoise and Achille's Hare

I finished up my class paper on some symbolic execution stuff on Monday and am very close to the end of the web continuation paper for tomorrow... but I also got an email from Roger wanting to make another stab at the ioFRP paper. This is after coming back from Santa Cruz for my mini web talk. Ai ya.. no more! I need to work! I stink at this grad school thing.

A couple of weeks back, I had the chance to hang out with Charlie Reis and talk shop. While presenting his web tripwire work later in the day, in his evaluation slides, he showed that https was something like 5x slower than http (perceived response time) under typical latency conditions. This is because not only does content need to be decrypted, but multiple trips must be made to establish the connection. My basic thought was: can we concurrently transmit encrypted content - linked media / scripts seem like they'd be tricky - and then use a GPU or something to decrypt? How should we really do encrypted content with respect to perceived response time?

Still trying to figure out the summer. They moved us par lab folk into the Wozniak lounge until the new lab space is built. I was skeptical at first - lotsa people in one room, with the room being the Woz - except we have a *lot* of sunlight, I get to see a trees, we have a sunny deck we can hang out on, there's a grill, the volleyball court is nearby, and most people don't show up anyways. A little awkward sitting next to professors, however - I wonder how they're feeling about it. Being near Ben, Heidi, Jacob et al is fun though :) Tentative summer projects:

1. web spec/benchmarking -> some sort of language
2. finishing & writing up symbolic execution in reactive systems (+ trying our DPO trick) -> secret project. sounds like some google folks can use it for their security projects - collaboration might make everyone's lives easier.
3. fixing the back button (dovetailing into the real language work?)
4. prelim readings
5. formalizing iofrp

Some of the above definitely isn't happening. Thankfully I don't have a job nor significant other (does Napa Valley count?).

Of the papers I posted last week, Automatically Restructuring Programs for the Web was smooth, and I also really liked Continuations from Generalized Stack Inspection (I hope to do something very neat using these two over the weekend!). Ben & I are a little confused by the last section on implementing it all lazily on top of C# - is it the same function code that gets resumed, or a defunctionalized etc duplicate? [So is ANF sufficient?] Jay's Interaction-Safe State for the Web was fun as well (note: useful to read all of the other papers to put it into context). This was the first time I really took a look at reduction semantics (context grammars are genius!), and realized they're *really* nice for describing anything to do with continuations. I suspect that was a motivation, but I haven't had a chance to sit down with Matthias's papers on them. Reading papers in preparation for prelims this summer should be fun :) I went through one light classic today (lambda-lifting by solving recursive equations) and a bit of another, but I really need to be reading more (of benefit today would have been Landin's J operator paper, SECD machine..).

Finally, and I can't really explain why, every few days, to boot up my laptop, I need to first put it in the fridge. Lame.

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