Like last year, we again stayed in Zell am See for a week to have some skiing fun. Given that we numbered 12, we rented 3 apartments in the Appartmenthaus Edelweiss, which is located near the edge of the town (on the road to Saalfelden, the second last building). The train had a 1 hour delay, so we arrived in the afternoon, barging into our rooms at around 13:45. The second half of the party was by then deep entrenched in gridlock, due to heavy snowfall and avalanche warnings throughout the area.

After a few years, I once again managed to attend the FOSDEM conference. It was a good experience, and I enjoyed most of the talks I attended.

The opening talk was preceded by an overview of the conference, the beer fest of the previous night and the FOSDEM dance, where geeks showed off their skills. The room was quite packed, with people moving in all the time during the first minutes of the talk given by Mark Surman on a Free.Open.Future.

Mark's main points were on the successes of Open Source thus far, especially the adoption of open applications and platforms in the last year: WordPress, Firefox and the Linux powered netbooks. He stressed that the rise of multiple browsers has helped getting rid of websites that are only willing to serve pages to the Internet Exploder. Of course, code also needs content to make things interesting for people. The main example Mark talked briefly about was Flickr and the mass of Creative Commons licensed images.

Yet the road ahead seems to be one where Open Source is heading into a very closed environment: the mobile world. It seems that the mobile environment will need a different conceptual map from what we have been using in the non-mobile computing world. Pressure points to get past the closed ecosystem, where mobile phone operators dictate law, are still largely unknown. Mark claimed we need better and bigger maps to gain an understanding of how the mobile world moves, who the payers are and how we can break through misconceptions. Several things probably ought to be on the map: strong values, freedom beyond just code; free software that empowers people (even those who do not agree with the free and open idea); users as hackers.

In the wake of my PhD research come this awesome xkcd cartoon:

I just received this awesome mail this morning:

"Hi there!

The announcement will be made today on the blog, but I just wanted to let you know that you are one of the winners of the Peter V. Brett contest! As such, you will receive a signed copy of THE PAINTED MAN delivered right to your mailbox! Expect the book in the next couple of weeks.

The only thing I ask in return is for you to leave a comment to the post announcing you as winner. That way, everyone can see that "real" people actually win these contests!

Congrats!

Patrick
www.fantasyhotlist.blogspot.com"

Thanks Patrick! Rock on!

The opening keynote at OOPSLA was given by Mark Lehner, in which told us about the building blocks of the ancient Egyptian society from the time the Giza pyramids were constructed.

When I was with Dries at OOPSLA last year, we presented a poster during the opening reception. The reception had a decent share of food, good food too, as far as I can recall, and plenty of it. There were quite a lot of people and I did not regret making the poster, even though it took quite some time to make.

Had I made one this year, I would have thought the time spent was a waste. Not only did the number of posters this year drop significantly (I know, a dangerous word to use, given my emphasis on decent analysis), the number of people wandering seemed a lot less too, as did the quality of the works that were presented. Of course, the latter might be a subjective statement, but I did (for once) force myself to actually look up closely at most of them, and what I saw did not seem very novel, advanced, or otherwise hot in any way.

Some posters described a way to redefine the syntax to improve readability, but had no real conclusion, as it was ongoing work. Others presented the work done in some workshops today and yesterday, and well, I think that most of the computer scientists I know might have come up with the same stuff without having to think too hard. It all seemed quite obvious, even to me, and I am certainly no expert in that field. On the other hand, I was told my work was obvious to by a member of my PhD. jury, while the other jury members argued back that this assuredly was not the case - it was not, trust me, although in hindsight ... Anyhow, I did not find much I thought worthwhile, and given the fact that the crowd was starting to slip out around 7 p.m. - half an hour before the end of the reception - other people felt the same way.

Of less professional importance, but quite important reception-wise, was the fact that most of the food on the platters was ingested by 6:15 p.m. I tried the warm food as well, but the girl heating my chicken (a good thing it had been baked thoroughly prior to heating) did not do a good job, as most of the pieces were still cold. No decent selection of beers: they served Heineken and some others that were probably as bad. No coca-cola, but bloody pepsi. If you are going to give people a sugar shock, at least use the right tools available for it, I'd say. No orange juice, only (cold) water. And wine. I did not dare try those. So, I walked out with to drink tickets left in my pocket, the desire to share them with some poor sod hooked on Heineken had drained somehow.

All in all, a disappointing hour spent. I hope the conference proves to be better, but I suspect the number of participants will be lower than last year. I also checked out the hall where I am going to talk on Thursday, and the gear is going down a notch every year. In 2004, I spoke in the main hall, where two large screens projected my slides and myself (they filmed the whole thing), last year they had a decent screen in the middle of the room. This year, the screen (at least today) was standing on the right side of the room, and had once more decreased in size, along with the room where the research papers are to be presented. Sadness.

I am in Nashville for the OOPSLA conference. As there was nothing I paid for this morning, I went to check out the downtown area. It probably suffices to say that I walked for less than 2.5 hours, and I think I pretty much saw the entire area. The city blocks are mainly made up of churches and parking lots. I found exactly two gift shops, where they mainly sold Elvis Presley gadgets.

I found one reasonably decent shop where they sold breakfast, there are a few restaurants that might - might - serve decent food, and one Coyote Ugly saloon. I doubt one can have a quiet dinner there, but for a salad after the OOPSLA reception it might do ;-)

I was invited by prof. Ingrid Verbauwhede to give a talk at the Second BCrypt PhD Symposium. The idea was to explain a few things about hardware performance counters, and how they are used nowadays and how they might be used to attack implementations of cryptographical algorithms.

The abstract of the talk reads as follows.

What Can We Learn Using Hardware Performance Monitors on Modern Microprocessors?

Modern microprocessors are ingenious pieces of technology, delivering tremendous amounts of computing power. Because of the complex design of current microprocessors, it is hard to understand how programs behave on them, how they attain the observed performance and what possible bottlenecks need to be dealt with. Usually, exploratory architectural simulation is used prior to implementing a design. However, once the chip has been built, such techniques provide little help to quickly gain insight into the actual behaviour of a program that executes on it: (i) although it can be massively parallelised, simulation remain several order of magnitude slower than execution on real hardware, while the simulated programs grow ever larger (both in memory footprint and in the number of instructions that are executed) during a (typical) run, (ii) getting a simulator to be cycle-accurate is a very complex problem. Moreover, to deliver high performance, a microprocessor contains a lot of components that are not necessary to ensure correct functional behaviour, such as caches, branch prediction, etc.

Benchmarking is one of the fundamental concepts in experimental computer science. Assessing the performance of a microprocessor running a number of benchmarks -- or vice versa, understanding the performance of programs -- is very important to enhance technology and validate research. For this reason, modern microprocessors are equipped with performance monitoring hardware. These monitors count the events as they occur in the processor during the execution of a program, for example the number of data cache misses, mispredicted branches, etc. This allows a researcher to identity commonly occurring events, and adapt his programs, tool chain, etc. to improve their performance in that aspect.

In this talk we will focus on the design of a modern super-scalar out-of-order processor, and the various components that allow it to operate with high performance. We will explain how the performance monitoring infrastructure can be used for gaining insight in the execution of a program. Because performance counters can leak information about the behaviour of a program, they can also be used as a side-channel to attack implementations of cryptographic algorithms. We will briefly outline an example of such an attack.

It will be clear to everyone who followed the news media the last few weeks that a major troublesome issue has risen in the financial world. Next to the fact that the economy seems to be grinding to a halt, idiots have been gambling with the money people have trust into their care. The Belgian government - insofar as we can call it one - has invested large amounts of money - or at least the promise to pay those amounts - into two large banks: Fortis and Dexia.

Traditionally, the fall marks the start of talks between unions, employers and the government, to decide if the wages should be adapted, i.e., if people should be given a raise, and under which conditions this should happen. It is usually a time when tough language is used, threats are outed and knives are sharpened - if not literally, then certainly as a manner of speech. Given that the purchasing power supposedly is on the way down - and looking at the piece of month I have left at the end of my paycheck, I must agree - the unions want a raise, such that employees can increase their purchase power. This seems reasonable, up to a certain point. But this year, the unions have announced preemptive actions (thank you Mr. Bush, to convey that notion). They do not call it a strike day, but actions will be held. If you can read between the lines, it obviously is meant as a national strike day. Even though I fully agree with the right to go on strike when all other options are exhausted, I still wonder what the rationale is behind this action.

It is clear that the economy will take another hit. The public transportation sector will most certainly join the strikers (they are well known for their solidarity in this aspect). So, a lot of people who do not have the luxury, or the common sense to have two cars per household will be barred for going to work, or at least from getting there on some reasonable time - let alone getting home before midnight (they are expected to show up the next day though - so much for rewarding people who are willing to work). But, the education unions have now also called for their members to join the action. This means, that people with kids, i.e., me, will not be able to go to work, even if I would have had a second car (which I don't). So, will I get paid for the vacation day I will be obliged to take? I could of course sign up and join a union and get paid by them because I am on strike, but I find that to be immoral given my position, wage and freedom at work. So, next Monday, I'll be home with two kids.

Idiots. Or am I the idiot?