Awesome

I was feeling a little low today for some reason. Some of the observations here cheered me:-) [For example, #864]

5 Megapixel office

I've just been lucky enough to get hold of a third screen for my office. So I now have 3600*1600= 5,760,000 pixels to fill! It looks like this:

It really is very nice, and as one would expect it takes a little getting used to. Unlike with two screens, I'm now able to have my main focus always in the central screen, and use the other two for more peripheral activities. As you can see above, the central screen has a big emacs buffer (with OCaml code in it!) and the side screens have command prompts and outlook, along with misc other things. You can also see in the bottom right of the right-most screen that I'm running the webcam app so I can see who's at my door *before* turning round. (what a geek!)

Real Jo Tunmer

I forgot a link to Jo's website in an earlier post. Oops! Here it is.

We love Jo's art, so check it out!

Little Boots

Our household is very keen on Little Boots. We love her album Hands. The girls do very impressive versions of Meddle and Earthquake - normally singing along to my phone whilst we're waiting for the bath to fill! So, we were very excited to hear a few months ago that she was going to be playing the Junction in Cambridge.

We went last week. I'm happy to say that she's even better live than recorded. It was a fantastic gig - she's enormously talented and her songs work very well in a live context. It was essentially a huge disco! Victoria also wore some kicking outfits!

Lightspeed Pascal

Claudio and I were talking the other day about "coding in the old days". I mentioned my happy memories of developing the IC Hope interpreter using Lightspeed Pascal on a Mac.

It was a very nice experience - a nice IDE with very fancy (for the time) debugging support, including what one would call edit-and-continue nowadays. I found this review in the MacTech archives. Looking at the screenshots left me with a nice warm feeling :-) I like the concluding statement:

I personally think these products will
revolutionize how software is done on the Mac.

Clearly true, but not just for the Mac!

House porn

Finally, I've found a house in a part of London I like. Looks like I'll be saving for a bit longer!

Lily from the ashes

A long time ago now, I worked on an EPSRC grant that I co-authored with Andy Pitts. I was first an RA, but then I got a lectureship at Warwick, so I became a co-PI and we had the amazing good fortune of finding Claudio Russo, who took over as the RA. (Claudio and I are now colleagues at MSRC.)

The grant was on a linear lambda calculus (actually more like a linear PCF) that we dubbed Lily. We did quite a lot of work on Lily, but for one reason and another we never really published much - just a single workshop paper. (There's an A4 ring binder on the shelf above my head full of unpublished calculations of one sort or another.) Interestingly, this paper has had some impact and a number of people, including Alex Simpson and Lars Birkedal, have done some cool work following on from it.


Claudio actually implemented Lily - but we never released the code. In fact, I don't think we even documented the fact that we had implemented it!

Anyhow, I'm happy to report that Lily has risen from the ashes! Claudio and I have translated the code from Moscow ML to F#, and late yesterday afternoon, the familiar Lily REPL had returned:



Watch this space. Hopefully in a couple of months, I'll be able to explain why we're playing with Lily again. Either way - even if our experiments fail - I promise to release the bits!