Itkovian.net

Two MTI students made a website where people can register the delays they incurred when traveling on the Belgian railroads. For now the website resides on the ELIS servers, and can be reached at http://trappist.elis.ugent.be/~kmillet/. The idea is that the commuters drive the content which should result in an accurate image of the actual delays, rather than the statistics the NMBS gives, as they tend to drop delays smaller than five minutes and prefer to give a more optimistic picture in general. So if you are a commuter, and you use the railroad in Belgium, register and start logging your delays. Spread the word.

Oh joy. After installing a bunch of sun protection screens on the building windows, they decided to turn the power breaker off. So, during what is probably going to be one of the warmer weeks this year, the entire installation is quite useless. So much for good planning.

We have an appointment. With the architect. Next Thursday.

Let's hope he has a plan, an affordable one, and one we like on top of that.

There's a cool video clip of NIN's song Only on the NIN website. Go check it out. It's not new, but I had not seen it before.

I've traded my old amplifier for an Airport Express with Kenneth. Yesterday he also provided me with a power plug, because the Airport comes from the USA, and thus came with the wrong power plug. And I cannot seem to locate mine that came with my PowerBook, nor the one that came with Veerle's MacBook. Sadly, I seem to misplace a lot of stuff lately ;-)

With the release of the Mollom API, I have cleaned up and documented my Python wrapper for the API.

You can get the code from the darcs repository at http://itkovian.net/darcs/python_mollom. Alternatively, a packed tarball is also available.

On April 300, 2008 I successfully held my public PhD defense. You can find the PDF of my dissertation here. I have also put the presentation slides online in PDF format.

In December 2007, we had a long talk with the guy who was to become our architect for the reconstruction and renovation of our attic. He had a number of good ideas, and seemed confident that we could do things within the limitations of our budget. We were told that we should not expected to hear back from him before February, which seemed fair. I understand that he's a busy man, and such. However, we never heard anything, and had to call him twice ourselves. Today, he confirmed that he had too much work, and he would try to get something prepared by next week.

On April 30th, I am holding my public PhD defense.

Title

Three Pitfalls in Java Performance Evaluation.

Abstract

Executing a Java application is a complex matter when looking at what happens under the hood. The virtual machine (VM) runs the operations and takes care of class loading, compiling and optimising code, and garbage collection. Due to the interaction going on between the VM and the application and the non-determinism (e.g., due to time-based sampling) within the VM, no two executions will ever behave exactly alike. Performance analysis in this context should not be underestimated. In this dissertation, we uncover three pitfalls that have not been taken into consideration prior to this research.

All south-facing windows in the building where I work, have been equipped with sun screens. That is, against the outer wall, technicians have installed electrical sun screens. The idea is that by keeping the sun out during the summer (it can get really warm in here) we would somehow be saving energy. Yet the only air-conditioning devices are located in the server rooms. And they lie next to a cool hallway.