QVM Word Clouds

Here's some more word cloud joy, now for the QVM OOPLSA'08 paper.



and for the QVM Chameleon PLDI'09 paper

Algorithms for Concurrent Data Structures

Word clouds seem to be all the rage lately. Playing with some clouds for a recent talk, I found them to actually provide an interesting summary of research papers. For example, here's a word cloud for our PLDI'08 paper on derivation of highly-concurrent linearizable data structure algorithms.

Apart from the emphasis of terms like "true", this is a pretty decent summary of what's going on in the paper --- concurrent algorithms, linearizability, and a lot of dance around atomic blocks, restarts, and the pointers curr and pred.

Irad Yavneh: Megilat Hamuamad 2005

A recent visit to Israel exposed me to this brilliant piece (in Hebrew). There are a few subsequent performances by Irad that are equally good. You can find them all at http://www.youtube.com/user/shaulm

SAFE Tech Fair Posters

QVM Tech Fair Poster

(click to see full size image)

Vista Pains

I really wanted to like Vista. When I got my Thinkpad X61 Tablet, it came with Vista installed by default. Ignoring the negative Vista press and applying wild optimism, I was sure that this is the beginning of a wonderful friendship. Unfortunately, this was not meant to be. Not only that Vista crashes left and right, it is always somebody else's fault: "Problem is caused by Intel Graphics Driver", "Problem is caused by Cygwin", and my all time favorite "This problem is being researched".


The utility may be called "Solve problems on your computer", but in the several months I had Vista, it did not help me find a solution to a single problem. All it really does is allocate blame, elsewhere.

To see how bad things are, here's a report from the performance and reliability monitor.

As you can see by the red markers, almost no day goes by without some sort of a failure. In some days, there are multiple failures. I already started booting to my Ubuntu on most days, but even for my sparse use of windows, I will probably roll back to XP soon.

Carl Sagan on the Importance of Scientific Research, May '93

Mark Wegman gave an interesting talk on the upcoming grand challenges in CS. In his talk, he used a snippet from this Carl Sagan clip. I thought that the message in this clip is worth echoing by posting it here.