Well, I'm Back

On Monday I'm leaving for a two-week work trip. In the first week I'll be in England, specifically Cambridge, for the program committee meeting for the ACM Principles of Programming Languages conference to be held in January 2006. I've spent the last few weeks mostly reviewing papers in preparation for this meeting, where we will select the papers to be presented at the conference. It's been a lot of fun catching up with what's going on in the world of PL research --- and a lot of work, especially because I did some extra background reading to catch up on what's happened in the last several months. I'm looking forward to the PC meeting since I've never done a face-to-face PC meeting before.

After Cambridge I'm heading to Oxford on Friday the 23rd to catch up with a friend and give a talk about Firefox development.

Then I'm off to Mountain View for some face time with other Mozilla developers at the Foundation headquarters. I'm also planning to visit the Google campus on Tuesday the 27th. On Wednesday I'll zoom up to Berkeley to give a talk there about Firefox development and catch up with some friends. I head off back to NZ on Friday night. Along the way I'm hoping to meet up with a bunch of my old friends living in the south Bay. I'm really glad to have chances to travel and sort-of-keep-in-touch with so many people. It's also fun to be on my own without the kids, up to a point; my three-week trip in May was too long, but hopefully two weeks will be about right.

Just a few hours after I get back to Auckland I'll be whisking off again, to Queenstown for a few days with my family. Great! I'll be back at work on Thursday October 6.

A few years ago, while at IBM, I did some work on dynamic data race detection for Java, in conjunction with some colleagues at the Watson lab (hi Manu, Jong, Vivek, Keunwoo, Alexey!). It culminated in a "hybrid race detector" that combined two previously distinct methods --- lockset and happens-before in a nice way. The work was published in PPoPP 2003.

I'm pleased to see that some people at Microsoft Research have picked up the idea and extended it to analyse CLR programs. It's great that people are carrying on with this line of work --- it feels good to have your ideas built upon. (Although many of the extensions they describe in the paper were actually present in our detector --- I probably didn't get around to writing about them in our paper.)