Vacation

Now I'm the only one in the cubicle. I have to come to Sigma because my laptop has been down for months.

riki arrived at Beijing on Friday from New York. He should be enjoying sunshine at Haikou. Have a good time, dude. :-) nowhereman said he would be back in Jan or Feb for vacation, after his visit to Stanford.

I have to wait for a while and further plan my vacation for the Chinese New Year in Feb. Frankly speaking, I don't feel good about the CCTV New Year's Gala. They would usually say that "we Chinese would eat Jiaozi at Chinese New Year eve; we Chinese would bla bla bla...", but I'm afraid it's nothing for a southerner. It's even worse for the ridiculous words and artificial smiles that pervade.

Some wild thoughts.

While writing some text processing scripts in Python, I was again annoyed by the poor performance due to the stupid global interpreter lock on a multi-core server. The threading problem is painful for scripting languages like Python and Ruby. I cannot believe that scripts could only be executed in such an inefficient way, just for compatibility with C libraries, even if it's claimed by some famous language designer. If it would not be, why not make something to be?

I have been trying to dive into program analysis for some time, only getting some initial ideas. It looks to me that graph reachability presents a general framework in reasoning about program behaviors, while modelling and solving the constraints in a graph would be fun. Maybe I should focus on mining the high-level systems semantics that can be manifested from the constraints. It has been a fairly long time since I shot photos. I didn't even take any photo this fall, the best season in Beijing, instead busy with coding, debugging, writing, which never ends.