Pics are Available

I have the pics from yesterday's adventure. I saw 4 kangaroo total, the only thing cooler would have been if I saw a kangaroo poo. Guess I'll have to save that for another time.

http://www.flickr.com/matt-davis

-Matt

They do exist!

So I've been in Australia for about 9 months and have yet to see a kangaroo. One might think it's a total sham. Kangaroos are like Bigfoot, a mythical cryptid that only lives in stories and some plaster footprint casts. Well, today, my advisor and friend Harald, along with his wife and son, took me out on a long road trip, some bush walking, and all around fun time. We went way north of Melbourne, a little more than an hour away, to a few towns and met up with their friend, a vet, who owns some farmland out in the bush. We spent some time in Castlemaine and Daylesford. Way cool! The stars were so bright and vibrant, it was amazing. The Milky Way was beautiful! There is so much beautiful foliage around here, the hills, it's totally not the outback image people think of when they ponder on Australia. Oh yeah.... I saw kangaroo, they are not mythical creatures! Frikkin' beautiful, kinda intimidating. While at their friend's farm, she let me pick an apple and eat it. The largest and also best-tasting apple I've ever had! It was the size of a small baby, a delicious, baby.

-Matt

Flyin' Solo and Ships of Scholarness

While I didn't mind living with housemates, I am kinda used to living alone. Heck, I was doing that for 5.5 years before I came out here. Sure, being that I was moving to a new place/continent/country, I do not think it was bad to be living with others. The house was friendly, but I felt on pins and needles afraid I was going to be confronted by a housemate about doing something that did not satisfy their definition of proper "housemate." Not to mention, I had a very tiny room (I do like quaintness) and the house was in an awesome location of Fitzroy (between Smith and Brunswick streets near Victoria Parade). Well, I finally found a 1 bedroom place to move to in Brunswick, not toooo far from Uni, but near the change-over from Royal Parade to Sydney Road. I have just left Heath, Paula, Zoe, Louie, and Rex. And have signed a lease (and just moved) to Brunswick.

On the other front, I was just awarded two scholarships! One covers tuition for my PhD. Well, it covers all starting since 2011 (so I get a refund for what I have paid this year, but no refund for the 1 semester last year). I'm not complaining! That is so exciting. Thanks to all who sent in scholarship recommendations for the Uni regarding me. The other scholarship was constructed by my advisors. This other scholarship covers some living expenses, a stipend. It is provided by NICTA. It is only for 18 months, but capable of being updated! This should not limit me if I want to come home. I do want to come home to do some research while also working.

-Matt

Troll

Last night was frikkin' awesome. After I did some research towards my PhD, I went to two Ruxmon lectures given by some people I know, Silvio and Laurent. Great talks. After that, I went to Billboards to catch Finntroll's first tour down here in Australia. They played Brisbane last night. And one word ARRRRRRRRGgggGGGHHHHHH. It was frikkin' nuts. Hummpa/folk/black metal from Finnland mostly sung in Sweedish! Lots-o fun, and the two opening acts, the local Obsidieth provided some nice modern thrash with some folkiness to it, while the Perth-based Claim the Throne played some great battle metal/folk metal.

It was the first time I had ever been to a concert, whereby I first give the venue my ticket, a crappy-printed out ticket, and after the gig they hand out true-printed-out tickets, as if you were to have bought the tickets via mail-order... great memorabilia!

-Matt

Region Based Memory Management

Aside from listening and witnessing some of the most righteous of music (I'm listening to Gogol Bordello right now), and caught some Iron Maiden, Primus, and Slayer at Soundwave last week, what have I been researching, is a question one might be asking themselves. Ok yeah that is one nasty grammatically incorrect piece of English. Well what have I been researching?

Region Based Memory Management! That's right, that is what my PhD is focused on. Sure RBMM is not fresh, but my goal is to implement it for Google's Go language. What I think will be the real unique pieces of research will be how we allocate our regions, dealing with parallization (a'la goroutines) and carrying information across multiple modules (cross-module analysis).

Backup just one second cowboy, neee hawwww! What in the name of doo dah is a region? Region based memory management is a way of managing memory at compile time, one might think of it as compile-time garabage collection. However, that is just not correct at all. At compile-time, via static analysis, dynamic memory allocation calls are located. The compiler can then emit code that will allocate objects that have the same lifetime into regions of contiguous memory. So its a neat little tango between compile-time and run-time communication. Anyways, this grouping of objects with similar lifetimes can benefit cache locality, as well as provide a fast way of deallocating objects, all at once, by just killing the region. That is fast. No need to visit each object individually and free it.

Since Go utilizes a garbage collector, we would like to leave it in place for dealing with cases where regions would live for a long, if not infinite time. Such a case would be when a global object aliases something that is dynamically allocated (in Go that would be via a call to 'new' or 'make'). Garbage collection is traditionally a "slow" process. In addition, collectors can be a burden to real-time systems, as they can slow the program's execution (or even stop it) allowing the collector time to clean-up objects that are no longer being used. Of course, there are parallel garbage collectors, which should not require a stop-the-world approach that traditional collectors implement. But, I am unaware of their actual processing capabilities/limitations.

TL;DR my thesis at this time poses to provide an elusive seductive dance between garbage collection and region based memory management. OhhhhHhh yeaaa mmmmmm mm that sounds like the sexxy.

-Matt

That's a weiner!

Soooooo, I felt like I needed to score a new pair of pants, so I went to the closeout-store and got some cheap-o black corduroys. I need to get rid of my other pants that I do not wear too often, to keep things simple. I'm not a fan of acquiring new possessions. Anyways, so after I scored some pants, I decided to go to the little market store deal. As I made my way to the store, I heard some people cheering. Then.... yes.... then.... I saw two dudes pants-less riding their bicycles. Well, ya know, this is Melbourne, so I didn't think too much of it, other than, right on dude! All this craziness while I'm carrying my new pants, because I do not see the need for the store to waste a plastic bag on me. Then... more... a whole parade, women, men, some with pants, some without, frikkin' naked just riding their bikes down the road. I kinda cheered and waved my pants at them. Welcome to Melbourne. Turns out, today is Melbourne's World Naked Bike Ride. Way-cool. I guess it takes some balls to ride a bike in public.

-Matt

I went to church yesterday, SLAYERRRRRRRrrrrrrrrrrrrRRRR (Soundwave was my church)

Being a music fan, and a lover of attending concerts, I often check the music schedules of places when I travel. When I got to Melbourne I soon learned of the most-awesomest musical orgy in this area, the Soundwave music festival. Well, that was my holy-land, and I proclaimed my pilgrimage would start on March the 4th. Well, yesterday, I was successful. For I have witnessed/experienced once more the love of Primus, Slayer, Iron Maiden, and some Rob Zombie. I didn't see all the shows I wanted to see, heck, there were 6 stages, but I had a blast. Note: Soundwave was one way of forcing myself to stay here in Melbs, even if I didn't like it (I scored my ticket pre-sale). So, my bud Mark picked me up at my house, we then picked up our other friend Ian, and made the pilgrimage. While things were already kickin' (the shows started at noon, we arrived at 2PM), we basically saw: DevilDriver, All that Remains, Primus, High on Fire, Murderdolls, Ill Nino, Slayer, Rob Zombie (very little of it), Queens of the Stone Age, and Kylesa.... ohhh yeah almost forgot... Iron Maiden!!!!!!!!!!! Some of the shows I have listed we did not see in entirety. But it was a blast! When Slayer hit the stage, awe man, it was crushing! The likes of data compression would have been impressed on how much space was compressed in so little time. People cover big area, slayer, people now in tightly packed area. Like one giant pulsating organism. Slayer is magic.

Much love

-Matt