More FCRC
Still in San Diego. I'm here until sometime Friday afternoon, when my parents appear. It finally got nice; it's apparently 70 degrees out and sunny. PLDI, the one conference I was here for, ended this morning. I only went to two sessions of it, oh well. I did go to two sessions of ISCA, which included a very interesting talk on quantum computing and a talk comparing MIT's, Stanford's, and Berkeley's current in-house architectures.
Networking here is irritatingly bad. There's open wireless, but the access points are all new "54g" Belkin-brand junk, and there are large classes of wireless cards -- including the one built into my laptop -- that just don't work. Assuming you can borrow an 802.11 card, you then discover that, for a conference with over 2200 registrants, they've cleverly set up their NAT to point to 192.168.1.0/24, meaning only about 250 people can conceivably use the network at any given time. I still haven't tried the wireless have-nots table (it has a wired-Ethernet hub).
I'm also just not great at people-networking. I talked to some people a couple of days ago who recognized me from the SUIF mailing list. I talked a little to the Addison-Wesley person this morning, but that's not necessarily an insanely useful contact. :-) Talking to people from Sun was interesting, except that I knew a couple of them from MIT beforehand.
What else? I have another day and a half here; I might go to some of the LCTES workshop talks, even though I technically shouldn't. I'm also considering trying to spend tomorrow in Balboa Park, since the museums sound interesting and I mostly failed last time I was here. Or people still here from my group might try to go to the beach. At least the weather's still holding up...
(FCRC == Federated Computing Research Conference; PLDI == Programming Language Design and Implementation; ISCA == International Symposium on Computer Architecture; LCTES == Languages, Compilers, and Tools for Embedded Systems. My group had two papers in PLDI and one in LCTES.)
Networking here is irritatingly bad. There's open wireless, but the access points are all new "54g" Belkin-brand junk, and there are large classes of wireless cards -- including the one built into my laptop -- that just don't work. Assuming you can borrow an 802.11 card, you then discover that, for a conference with over 2200 registrants, they've cleverly set up their NAT to point to 192.168.1.0/24, meaning only about 250 people can conceivably use the network at any given time. I still haven't tried the wireless have-nots table (it has a wired-Ethernet hub).
I'm also just not great at people-networking. I talked to some people a couple of days ago who recognized me from the SUIF mailing list. I talked a little to the Addison-Wesley person this morning, but that's not necessarily an insanely useful contact. :-) Talking to people from Sun was interesting, except that I knew a couple of them from MIT beforehand.
What else? I have another day and a half here; I might go to some of the LCTES workshop talks, even though I technically shouldn't. I'm also considering trying to spend tomorrow in Balboa Park, since the museums sound interesting and I mostly failed last time I was here. Or people still here from my group might try to go to the beach. At least the weather's still holding up...
(FCRC == Federated Computing Research Conference; PLDI == Programming Language Design and Implementation; ISCA == International Symposium on Computer Architecture; LCTES == Languages, Compilers, and Tools for Embedded Systems. My group had two papers in PLDI and one in LCTES.)