Perry's ITTC Blog

Why I live in Lawrence...

2011-06-23T10:05:00.001-07:00

The fact that this article appears on the front page of the online Journal World is a pretty good indicator of why I live in Lawrence.

Logicomix

2010-07-14T11:30:00.001-07:00

On a whim I picked up a graphic novel called Logicomix that is a biography of the early life of Bertrand Russell. It outlines his quest to formally define mathematics that lead he and Whitehead to write Principia Mathematica. Are you bored yet? Don't let that run you away from this incredible book - it is currently the New York Times #1 selling graphic novel. It is not in any way a tutorial on mathematics or logic, but in fact a really fun story to read. It was so compelling that I read the entire book in three sittings. Yes, it does outline a period in history where logic and mathematics were redefining themselves for the 20th century. You will get a good dose of history, but it is more a story about people than about logic. Anyone who knows what I do technically knows that I love studying the work of early 20th century logicians. I even give public talks on what Hilbert, Godel, Russell and friends were up to. Putting that love aside, I can honestly recommend this book to anyone.

RIAA loses one

2010-07-09T15:22:00.001-07:00

Finally, it looks like the RIAA is being forced to accept reasonable compensation for file sharing damages. Still excessive according to the judge, but the message has been sent. The same law that protects large companies from excessive verdicts applies to individuals as well. No doubt that copyright violations should be prosecuted, but the RIAA and friends have simply been given far too much power. Here's hoping we can come up with something reasonable when this is all said and done.

Happy Birthday Alan Turing

2010-06-23T10:05:00.001-07:00

I learned last night that today is the 98th anniversary of Alan Turing's birth. As anyone who's taken my Honor's Tutorial knows, I am rather a big fan of Turing and am looking forward to Turing Year in 2012. There is much I can say about this, but much of what I know is summed up quite well in this blog post from Wolfram.

I am reminded that Turing was only 41 when he died. One has to wonder what else he would have achieved had his life been longer. I am also reminded that his work was not widely recognized in his own lifetime.

RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us

2010-06-12T09:40:00.000-07:00

Very cool video on motivation. Both in terms of what it says and in terms of how it is said. Definitely worth a watch.

ITTC Director

2010-06-10T18:05:00.001-07:00

It's pretty much official at this point that I am the new ITTC Director. After a successful advisory board meeting, it's time to charge ahead and grow ITTC.

Summer is here

2010-05-31T15:45:00.000-07:00

So summer is officially here and I'm looking at my last post on January 31. Wow. What the heck happened to last semester. My class was a blast, I had great fun at ITTC, lots of things happened except writing on the blog. I know I'm committing blogging heresy by talking about not posting in a post, but I'm doing to do it anyway. Just remember, AT LEAST I'M NOT POSTING IN ALL CAPS WITH LOTS OF EXCLAMATION POINTS!!!!!. I will try to do better.

Dave Matthews

2010-01-31T19:49:00.001-08:00

Dave Matthews Band just performed on the Grammies. Man's got serious chops. Made watching the rest of the drivel worthwhile.

Autotune should be banned

2010-01-31T18:50:00.001-08:00

Okay, so I'm watching the Grammies with my wife as I do every year at this time. I'm a bit out of touch, but I've seen almost all of the bands. What I've definitely decided is that the greatest threat to the music industry is not illegal downloading, but this new insidious technology called Autotune. The Black Eyed Peas did their act and use it as a musical effect. Okay. I'll buy that. Then Jamie Fox. Yuck. Then another, then another. How about just singing in tune?

If every living human being can buy studio time, crank up the Autotune technology, and produce an album that sounds like Jamie Fox, is there a need for a recording industry? Barf.

Okay, while I'm typing this Taylor Swift is singing with Stevie Nicks. Maybe Autotune is not so bad after all...

Leaders and learning

2010-01-26T07:30:00.001-08:00

“Leaders are more powerful role models when they learn than when they teach” -- Rosabeth Moss Kantor

Cool quote on leadership. The greatest leaders that I have worked with are compulsive learners. I have had the privilege of talking a Nobel Prize winner and three Turing Award winners. They are all very different people, but they all shared this trait.

Farewell to Amir Pnueli

2010-01-14T08:13:00.001-08:00

I just learned from Comm ACM that we recently lost Amir Pnueli to a brain hemorrhage. Dr. Pnueli coined the term "reactive system" and revolutionized program verification through his work in temporal logic. That is not what I will remember. I had the privilege of meeting Dr Pnueli while working on a task force on formal methods education. He gave a talk and managed in 5 minutes to clearly cover what takes me 2 lectures in my formal methods class. When I had the opportunity to speak at length with him, he was gracious and valued what I had to say. In his obituary in Comm ACM, one of his students described precisely what I felt - "people loved working with him because he made them feel smart." That is what I will remember.

Choosing your network name

2009-12-19T19:04:00.001-08:00

So we're driving to a birthday party in KC today and Pam turns on her iPhone. She gets asked to join and network and the only one available is called "THENEIGHBORSSUCK". Pretty creative. I wonder what message they're sending??

Leadership Quote

2009-12-14T20:24:00.001-08:00

It's difficult to peg sometimes what makes a leader great. However, I love this description:

“When the best leader leads, the people say ‘We did it ourselves.’” – Lao Tzu

SEMAT initiative

2009-12-14T20:23:00.001-08:00

Finally. Some fine folks have recognized the perils of the current trend-of-the-week approach to software engineering. Check out the SEMAT effort:

http://www.semat.org/bin/view

Engineering is a combination of methodology and formalisms. It is not pure math nor is it pure process. Software Engineering in practice would seem to drift towards pure methodology. Be it top-down design as I was taught years ago or extreme programming that is all the rage today, the emphasis seems to be purely on methodology. As a good friend once said, software engineering as taught and practiced today is kind of an effort to enforce good "design hygiene". That's simply not enough. We need models with formal semantics and we need to integrate those models into engineering processes. Let's see what SEMAT can accomplish.

Mechanical proof in the news

2009-12-05T17:05:00.001-08:00

A really nice article on mechanical proof in mathematics:

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/38623/title/How_to_(really)_trust_a_mathematical_proof

The proof of the four color problem is available from the following article:

http://www.ams.org/notices/200811/

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

SEMAT initiative

2009-12-01T08:09:00.001-08:00

Finally. Some fine folks have recognized the perils of the current trend-of-the-week approach to software engineering. Check out the SEMAT effort:

http://www.semat.org/

Engineering is a combination of methodology and formalisms. It is not pure math nor is it pure process. Software Engineering in practice would seem to drift towards pure methodology. Be it top-down design as I was taught years ago or extreme programming that is all the rage today, the emphasis seems to be purely on methodology. As a good friend once said, software engineering as taught and practiced today is kind of an effort to enforce good "design hygiene". That's simply not enough. We need models with formal semantics and we need to integrate those models into engineering processes. Let's see what SEMAT can accomplish.

Quote for the ages...

2009-11-27T07:34:00.001-08:00

"Anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn’t the work he is supposed to be doing at that moment."

- Robert Benchley

Firefox and feely

2009-11-22T08:50:00.001-08:00

I've been having trouble with Safari, most likely an old plugin that I can find, so I made the switch back to Firefox. Found a new extension called feely that is really amazing. It creates a kind of newspaper from your feeds in Google Reader. I find using it much less daunting than going into reader and discovering several thousand posts I have not read. If you use Firefox and Reader, definitely check out this extension.

Bad blogger

2009-11-22T06:31:00.001-08:00

Wow am I ever a horrible blogger. Busy semester I suppose...

Updates to the music blog are coming soon. I have about 20 albums that I need to write up. So, watch for a flood over the holidays.

New on the Music Blog

2009-08-30T21:17:00.000-07:00

I’ve added thoughts on Spark Large from Marching Band and Canopy Glow from Anathallo on the music blog (http://wpa-music.blogspot.com/). I’ve thought about merging it in here, but I’ll keep them separate for the time being. I’m not so sure how well the audiences will mix.

Thank you Governor Parkinson

2009-08-26T10:16:00.000-07:00

Quote from Governor Parkinson to the Kansas Board of Regents:

“It’s far more important to me that we have a university academically in the top 20 than we have a basketball or football team in the top 20,” he said at the regents’ annual working retreat meeting.

Unfortunately he won't run for reelection...

Cool articles on stack-based attacks

2009-08-20T08:17:00.000-07:00

Forwarded by my friends at Galos (http://www.galois.com), here is a nice blog entry on various kinds of mitigations for common operating systems attacks. I was familiar with several of them (stack canaries, hardware productions and address space layout randomization), but this article does a great job of outlining these techniques in just a page or two.

In the article you’ll also find a link to an article entitled Smashing The Stack For Fun And Profit (http://insecure.org/stf/smashstack.html) that is a nice view from the “other side”. Lots of nifty code in there with significant detail on how stack-based attacks are perpetrated. Of course I don’t condone this kind of thing, but you have to know what the bad guys are doing if you’re going to stop them.

Happy Birthday PowerPoint

2009-08-19T05:46:00.000-07:00

Another birthday in the news, PowerPoint is 25 years old (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/8207849.stm). I’m not so sure how happy I am with this one, although one of the developers is supposed to be a KU alum. Having been numbed by crappy presentations over the years, I have always wondered if PowerPoint is the root problem, or just the tool of choice. It’s now ubiquitous and like Word, there’s almost no way to function in the professional community without a copy of it on your PC or Mac.

KU in the top 10!

2009-08-15T09:59:00.000-07:00

Wow. Just opened my copy of Mother Jones magazine to find the MoJo Mini College Guide of 10 schools that will “blow your mind, not your budget.” My first thought was, KU should definitely be there. Bingo! There we are. I’ll post a link when the list goes online, for now, you’ll have to head out to your favorite bookstore and check out the hard copy.

Update: Here’s the link to the MoJo rankings: http://www.motherjones.com/toc/2009/09

Happy Birthday PC

2009-08-12T12:00:00.000-07:00

It was just pointed out to me that today is the 28th anniversary of the IBM PC. Wow. Less than 30 years.

Google recursion

2009-08-12T06:06:00.000-07:00

A friend just suggested that I google for recursion. Try it and see if you get it.

History of programming languages

2009-05-25T20:24:00.000-07:00

Okay, let's start with something simple and fun...

This is by far my favorite history of programming languages. Definitely fun and more accurate than you might want to admit...