Graduation thoughts and leisure time

I returned my master's thesis for inspection last Friday. Finally there's some leisure time ahead.

We'll stay in Sanna's summer cottage on a Sipoo island from today until Sunday. I need mail access for checking if my inspectors have sent any comments about my thesis. My cellphone's email application will suffice. I cannot afford to miss any comments because we are unsure if we can get the inspection process done before the deadline of May 28th. It seems improbable now. Missing the deadline will move my graduation date to September.

Not graduating this spring has both cons and pros. If I had my degree now, the TKK summer trainee salary would be higher than for not having the degree. On the other hand, should I graduate next autumn, I think I may pay my HYY membership fee for the whole student year 2009-2010, which in turn would grant me the public transportation discount of 50% for one additional year, which means a lot in savings! But having the degree now, again, would perhaps help me in search for the next job - a quest that I must begin during the summer.

Ok, that's enough pondering. Now, in which books I want to lose myself on the island? I'll take two works from Pekka Himanen: HIMeros and "The hacker ethic", Steppenwolf from H. Hesse and Hofstadter's GEB, that I've been slowly reading for a couple of years.

"Did you mean 'mature'?"

Google is sometimes amusing. Google proposes 'mature' for 'mathurl' that I discussed in my last post. Also, the sponsored link is funny in this context at least if you understand Finnish.



One more thing about the search. Peculiarly the mathURL site itself isn't appearing as the top result but my post about it.

mathURL

This is the greatest tool for a long time. Writing complicated equations in LaTeX can be syntactically tricky. Reinforcements have arrived. MathURL auto-compiles the equations while you write them and shows the result on top of the source code.

Additionally, you are permitted to embed LaTeX equations in your web page. You are provided with a URI to the image. For example, <img src="http://mathurl.com/?img=5euwuy" alt="" /> will emerge as

About the summer job

Just a few notes to document my initial feelings about the approaching summer job research project at TKK.

I'm going to work in a group where the broad subject of interest is computer aided verification and testing, CAV. My work will be based on Koushik Sen's doctoral thesis Scalable automated methods for dynamic program analysis. More specifically, based on Sen's thesis, friends at TKK (and elsewhere) have developed an automated testing tool LIME which is used to build useful automatic test cases for Java programs.

My job is to experimentate if we can easily build a similar tool for programs written in C - using LLVM. Incidently, or not, the very same tool I'm describing in my master's thesis.

I'm definitely looking forward to the job. I also believe LLVM is the right choice for implementing the tool due to its extendable C++ interface for analysing and transforming LLVM code.