22 Jan 2001

Mon, 22 Jan 2001 05:44:01 GMT

My thesis is nearly complete. I defend tommorrow, and as usual, I let the deadline run up until the end. I just finished my slides for the defense, and practiced once. I have some time in the schedule tommorrow to practice at least once, although I have to find some empty room up at the University to do it in.

I'll be glad to be done. It's been annoying to spend three or four weeks here sitting around writing about perljvm, and not hacking on it. I have a Cosource deadline coming up this week, so now's a good a time as any to release the first version of the Kawa-based perljvm.

I am really excited about how Kawa works, and how easy it is to massage perl's IR into Kawa's IR. I got more excited about it as I wrote my thesis defense talk. I really think great things can happen with Kawa in the future.

Larry Wall is here, and we've had two dinners for the Cincinnati GNU/Linux Users' Group (who paid Larry's way to come here). I was there, and Larry was asking some hard-ish questions about Kawa. Not hard exactly, just things I didn't know. I began to realize how much I have focused on the Kawa API, and I haven't really been digging in the internals. I told him I'd try to have some answers about it for my defense, and I will likely reread Bothner's papers on the subject tommorrow to get familiar with how he deals with various issues.

It's odd having Larry on my thesis committee. I otherwise wouldn't be nervous in the least, but I am quite worried with him on the committee. It doesn't help that Larry is hard to read---I am never sure if he's happy with an answer or not. Actually, I do know---when he repeats it as an answer to someone else. But, he rarely does that with my work; but I've seen him do it with things that Jon Orwant or Nat Torkington has said.

Anyway, so I defend tommorrow, then it's into perljvm hacking again right away on Tuesday to make the Cosource deadline, and then I have to finish preparing my Perl tutorial for LinuxExpo Paris.

18 Jan 2001

Thu, 18 Jan 2001 05:20:57 GMT

Tonight, I finished the actual document of my Master's thesis. I had to vet it by reading it out loud, about three times. I have a real hard time finding subtle grammar errors. I believe that when I read, I parse them out in my head. Reading out loud usually helps, but it wasn't working so well this time. (The first draft had many errors, even though I read it out loud.)

This time, I went through it twice, reading it out loud while bouncing the mouse along each word. This seemed to help a lot, as I was catching errors left and right. I hope I got them all.

I sent the final document off to the committee. I haven't heard from Larry Wall, whose an external member of my committee, at all. I haven't heard from since we set up the plane tickets months ago. I am sure he's insanely busy, and that's likely why. No big deal, I suppose, I am just overly nervous.

I really need to get to the actually hacking on perljvm. I have lost three weeks working on the thesis document, which is really only describing things, not hacking. While I'll be glad, I'm sure, to have the Master's thesis done, but perljvm needs some hacking done on it, especially considering that I have a Cosource deadline to meet soon.

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22 Jan 2001

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