Isaac Jones Blog
Welcome to the Future

As I mentioned before, I went to Tallinn, Estonia for ICFP, and to Berlin, Germany to hang out with Anna.

To see photos of Tallinn, Estonia, click here, and to see photos of Berlin click here. If you see a photo you like, click on it to see the larger version. Some of the photos there are from Ganesh since I mostly wasn't carrying my camera with me.

All in all, I had a great time. Berlin and Tallinn are both beautiful and interesting. The conference was really good. I gave two talks. People were much more interested in and enthusiastic about Cabal than I realized, which is nice. I'm happy that people appreciate and know my work. My talks went pretty well, especially the 2nd one, where I think came off as energetic and interesting; I got the group to laugh a few times. Mine was almost the last talk of the whole conference (in fact, it was supposed to be, but they added one person after me), so people were pretty tired and relaxed by the end.

I hung out a lot with folks from the Haskell chat room, and with Simon Marlow and David Roundy. There are some photos of them all in the photo section. I had about 1.5 days of free time, and so I took a tour of the old town with Ravi, Ganesh & David. We also did a bike tour, which is a great way to tour a place, and we saw some museums.

The technical aspects of the conference were great as well, but this isn't the forum for that :)

Berlin's culture and history are fascinating since they've had so much impact on our own culture and recent history. It was really neat to get to see The Wall, or what's left of it. The whole city has a marker where the wall used to be, just some bricks instead of concrete that make a line to show you. Be sure to check out the photos.

It's so bizarre to think that you're sitting, reading in a park, in a spot where you would have been shot 20 years ago for being there. I remember that time, but only very little, and of course, I didn't understand much about it at that age.

I had never actually seen the photo of the boarder guard leaping over barbed wire (seen here) but it's all over the place in anything that talks about the cold war.

I spent a bit of time at Checkpoint Charlie. There's a museum there which has been there since before the wall fell, just documenting everything. For instance there's the VW bug that had a smaller engine put in so it could be used to smuggle people out. Anna and I also I took a bike tour that was all about the wall. She was working some days, so we specialized in romantic dinners. There are a lot of great places to eat in Berlin.

The Reichstag is another fascinating bit of Berlin. It was burned (probably by the Nazis as an excuse for cracking down on communists) and not really used I guess until a few years ago. The new glass dome that was built recently is quite different from the rest of the building, but very symbolic of the transparency of democracy

There's a really neat club / artist studio called Tacheles that was started by squatters in a bombed-out building in east Berlin just after the fall of the wall. Scroll about half-way down for the English, and take a look at the photos. Andy Adams-Moran had recommended visiting this place, and Anna had already been there, of course.

It also gives you an idea of what East Berlin was like before all the renovation. Eastern Berlin is just now starting to finish up renovation. I guess it has basically been one big construction sight for a long time.

I spent some time at the musical instrument museum. It was awesome.

I'm in California this week. Have been traveling for work. The hotel I'm staying at has wireless internet access, which is nice. I am staying in Monterrey and had a side trip to Santa Barbara yesterday. It's a long drive.

I'll be in Ohio between the 24th and 29th of December. Some days I'll be in Columbus, and some I'll be in Youngstown. Let me know if you want to get together :)

After 3 weeks, I'm home safe & sound. My cell phone is broken, but send me more email :) Details on my trip soon.

I'm back safely from my walk, I successfully completed the Cleveland Way the other day, and spent a few days in Scarborough. Now I'm spending a few days in Oxford before heading home. Feel free to drop me an email :) peace, all.

Tomorrow I'm heading toward the Cleveland Way (I finally settled on that walk). I managed to shop today for most of what I need, including fuel, importantly.

Getting to The Way is going to be a bit logistically difficult. Heading to Oxford in the morning (via London) to drop off my stuff with Ian L. who I'm going to be staying with for a couple of days on the way back.

Then to Scarborough where I'll hopefully find a camp site. From Scarborough, I'm going to the start of the Cleveland way the next morning, since busses are hard to come by on Sunday. I'll pass through Scarborough again about a week later.

Since Thursday night, I've been staying with simonMar (had been staying with simonPJ since Sunday). It's very comfortable here, and he and his wife are both very friendly, and they have a lovely baby daughter.

Last night, I met a bunch of Debian Developers at a pub called "County Arms" in Cambridge. Very cool. All in all, I met:

Martin Michlmayr (DPL)

Daniel Silverstone (Who I met on Wednesday)

Colin Watson (Colin Walters' arch nemesis)

Rob Bradford

Dave Swegen and

Steve McIntyre

I had a nice walk around town tonight. Wandered out of the Peyton Jones house-hold at around 9:00, and just arrived home at 11:15. Seemed longer. I saw a lot, including the place I plan to have dinner tomorrow.

Day after tomrrow I'm planning to cook dinner for Simon & co. Of my recipies, they've chosen my "peanut-butter spirals". Which should be fun.

Haven't had a lot of time to explore, except for the last few hours. Mostly I've been working w/ the GHC folks. Tomorrow, I plan to head to town right after work, wander around a bit, have some dinner, maybe buy some gifts... we'll see. I still haven't found a book on the Pennine Way, sadly, but there are a lot of bookstores in Cambridge.

Mon Apr 26 10:22:14 2004

I arrived safely in Cambridge. Yesterday I had a relaxing afternoon, went "punting" with Simon Peyton Jones and his family. Slept early, woke up mostly recovered from jet lag.

Had a wonderful time at Zaleski National Forest last weekend (weekend of the 16th). It was the most perfect weekend so far this year, and we had already planned the camping trip. We hiked a lot, camped outside two nights (beautiful weather). There were five of us: me, Richard (my tent), Jenn, Jacqueline, and Vanessa (in Jenn's tent).

What a great crew this was too! Everyone was very friendly, cooperative, funny, and interesting. We all tended to share the same politics, and so every so often we'd start talking politics, but then everyone would agree, and it would peter out. I found both Richard and Vanessa to be particularly clever and amusing all weekend.

I got a bit sun-burned, especially on my neck. Otherwise, I faired OK. Vanessa hurt her knee a bit, Jenn had some foot problems (breaking in new boots), and Jacqueline had water seep through her boots. All very minor discomforts (I think).

I got to try out two very important pieces of equipment, my new stove (see previous entry) and my new tent. These pieces are, as I type, in my backpack somewhere in the guts of the airport. They both worked great. I'm very pleased.

Greatly looking forward to camping this weekend at Zaleski State Forest, especially since it's beautiful outside today. This will be a dry-run for my upcoming longer-trip, which I haven't mentioned here yet. I'm heading to England for some work with the GHC Compiler Team (in Cambridge), and some backpacking. Whoohoo! Probably I'll post more later, but lately I've been busy planning things.

peace.

Anna got me a camping stove for my birthday (which is the 3rd of April). It totally rules. I'm so excited. I had complained that it's difficult to get a stove that can work both here and over-seas, while not having to transfer fuel on an airplane (which of course, you cannot do). This stove solves those problems. It's also very compact. Check it out:

Update: Brian has put some pictures online on his blog entry here. You can see my little gallery with captions here.

My friend Brian and I have a shared interest in rock climbing, and I was intrigued when he mentioned caving (known by some as "spelunking"). Last Saturday, (January 17th, 2004) we went to Kentucky with a friend of Brian's, a guide, and her friend: Rick, Kim, and Colleen.

Brian helped make the trip possible for me by lending me a bunch of equipment. It really doesn't take much to go caving, but I didn't want to lay out the money for a helmet and a head-lamp. I love buying gear, but it's hard to put money into a "sport" I haven't even tried yet.

So we drove down to KY, which is a pretty long drive, 3 or 4 hours, and I quickly realized that I was in the car with a group of exceedingly awesome people. It reminded me of one of those parties where you are instantly friends with everyone there.

Once we reached the site of the cave, we had to stop at a rather obscure little store to pick up the key so the van could get in. I understand that this is typical; whoever owns the cave wants to have some control over who comes and goes, but pretty much anyone who asks for the key will get it. We didn't get the key this time, actually, because someone was ahead of us.

We were theorizing that the people ahead of us would be a loud, annoying boy-scout troop, but that's probably not the case, someone pointed out that one of the license plates of the cars was "rope tight" or something. Presumably a professional. We never saw this other group. They must have been in a different part of the cave. As far as I could tell, we were alone.

We searched around for a particular entrance that our guide, Kim, was interested in, but we couldn't find it at first, so we went in another. My first impression of a cave was that it was really just a crack in the earth that we could fit in sideways, mostly, with some scrambling here and there. It took me some time to convince myself that this was the entire thing. Somehow I kept imagining that there would be large rooms, and that it would be more like hiking and exploring.

I was surprised by how comfortable I was in the cave. There was a certain level of anxiety for everyone in the group, I think, including me. We chatted for a little bit beforehand about what limits we each had, what we would and would not do. This was a good idea, and the entire experience was characterized by this kind of frankness and honesty. That definitely helped me to trust these folks.

That said, I was very comfortable in the cave. It reminded me a lot of some of the storm-sewer exploration that me and my brother did when we were kids. Lots of ducking, crawling, etc. Very few large rooms, though when we found some, it was very exciting.

After some time in this part of the cave, we exited for a break, and Rick found the entrance we were looking for before. We chatted for a while, ate, and went in. This part of the cave stared off with a long crawling section, which was really intense. I think that my height was a great disadvantage here. I noticed that the women were able to crawl on hands and knees, but I pretty much had to drag myself since I couldn't keep my knees under me.

It's difficult to keep the order of things straight at this point. We explored for a long time, and each piece of "terrain" was unique; each moment presented a unique set of problems. Sometimes, I would get to utilize my climbing skills (not exactly a "practical" application, but still, it's nice to know they come in handy) for vertical work. I think these were my favorite parts. Truth be told, however, it was much, much different from climbing.

There were lots of hibernating bats in the cave, which turned out to be an extra challenge. Kim infused us with a sense of responsibility toward them, and we all acted as good stewards. As each of us passed a bat that could possibly be in our way, we warned the person behind us so as not to disturb them. The bats were actually really cute.

The other notable occupant of the cave was so-called "cave crickets". I, personally, didn't feel that they looked in the least like crickets. They looked like ugly spiders with big, pointy, stinger-looking tails. The kind of thing that would freak you out if you found it in your apartment in Ohio. Not the friendly, hopping, silly things that you see in tall grass. Anyway, they weren't so bad, but if you don't like dark, closed spaces, and creepy-crawly things, I recommend staying out of caves.

One fun point was where we decided to rest and get some snacks. Each of us was carrying a flashlight on their helmet, two backup-flashlights in our packs, and some food and water. So we dug in with the food, chatted for a while, and agreed to try to turn off our head-lamps.

This was really cool, because it was pitch black. Probably the darkest thing I've ever experienced. My eyes kept trying to see light in my peripheral vision, but found none. We chatted in the dark for a few minutes before we decided we were ready to move on. After this, I usually tried to bring up the rear so that once everyone else had made their moves out of an area, I could remain for a moment, turn off my light, and feel the space as it would be without me in it.

Not to get all religious on you or anything, but I found this part of the experience to be very moving, and to help me see creation (I call it that even though I believe in evolution) from a very different angle. I knew that within the earth this powerful and delicate system of life also existed, just as it did on the surface. It made me feel, though, that no part of "creation" is neglected.

Toward the end, Kim decided to try to find a particular cavern that she hadn't found in her previous trips, and we did manage to find it. This was so exciting. Her enthusiasm was definitely infectious, and it helped that getting to this new spot was a lot of work. After a short, but difficult crawl, there you were in this large room that stretched up really high, with all kinds of formations on the ceiling and walls. I explored this area with my flashlight for quite a while. Kim found a podium made of a rock, but she wouldn't give us a rousing speech.

There was much more than this, of course, but it's hard to relay it all to you here. How can I describe each unique passageway, and the friendly and helpful conversation that the group engaged in on the way. When we came out of the cave into the darkness of the woods, I felt that the outside was not so much different from the inside, except by virtue of the light of civilization, but that was still some way off.

On Thursday, November 13th, I went to Providence Rhode Island to visit my high school friend Daphne.

The flight into Charlette, NC and Providence, RI were both rather bumpy. It was unusually windy that week. The guy next to me on the first flight was obviously very nervous, twitching when the plane shook, trying to take a sip from his drink, and always failing.

Thursday, we just stayed in since all the bars were closed. Amaizing. We'd RIOT in columbus if they tried to pull that on US!

On Friday, Daphne and I went out to Newport. We decided we were going to see The Breakers (a mansion), and walk along the cliffs. We drove up there and got tickets at the mansion, then went for a walk along the cliffs. It was really beautiful, starkly cold, with constant gusts of wind. The sun was in our eyes because it set so early. The cold matched the roughness of the sea and the rocks and the cliffs very well. We scrambled around the stones and skipped some rocks. There were snails Everywhere! When we went down to the waterside, we couldn't help but step on them; poor things.

The mansion was neat. Supposedly very understated in its elegance. It was built in a short two years. There was a huge foyer / ballroom, which was my second favorite room. We got to see the impressive kitchen and butler's room. My favorite room was a large porch that overlooked the sea. It was supposed to be open air, but they had blocked off the outside to save on heating during the winter months. They had a rubber snake to keep the birds away.

There was a funny story of the billiard room, which was originally endowed with a mosaic of a lusty, naked woman on the ceiling. The lady of the house apparently objected to this and forced the artist to cover her up, which he did over his better judgement. She apparently was very angry that it took him so long and kept accusing him of working like a turtle, so he put a turtle in the mosaic.

So we tried to rent a movie but it was already 10:00!! And the movie stores were all closed. So we watched The Jerk, which I guess Daphne's roomate owns.

On Saturday, we went to Boston to visit Mike & Co. It was a pretty good time. We drove up w/ a French guy named Paul, who is Daphne's friend. He had some sort of event in Boston. We had another great brunch (Daph, Me, & Mike) and went to the MIT Museum. There we saw all kinds of robots, old and new. We saw a LISP machine, a robot face whose main purpose seemed to be to explore facial expressions. We saw a cool video of different kinds of robots running like humans or like animals. They all seemed very cool. I suppose this is mostly an exploration of locomotion, though what advantage a walking robot would have over a traded robot, I don't know. The museum also had a bit about MIT itself, a video of some of the pranks and contests. Pretty neat. This was Me, Mike Benedict, Mike Berlain, and Daphne.

At around 7:00, we drove back to Providence and planned the evening. Jason and Mark came over and we went to this place called "The Cave" which is a 3D VR type environment; a research lab at Brown. I didn't get to try it out, though, because Jason didn't have access to load a simulation. It was pretty interesting, I got to look at the equipment, which consisted of some glasses, some gloves, and a magic wand that you could use to manipulate objects. The cave itself was three white walls, a white floor, some projectors and mirrors, as well as this transparent disco-ball looking thing. There were a cluster of Linux machines running the thing. Very neat project.

That night, we went to Scarface which was showing on the big screen. It is a pretty good movie, but really over-the-top. I thought I had seen it before, but i must have stopped watching about a half hour into it, because I didn't remember anything. I wonder why I stopped.

At some point, I tought Mark to play Go, he's a natural at it! We had a pretty good game that evening.

The next morning Daph, Mark, & I, we went to breakfast at a traditional diner. Then me & Daph went on a walk around the Brown campus. She showed me around, and we saw a really neat art installation which was a model of the artist's apartment made out of silk. Very cool. In the foyer was a set of silk steps and an entire ceiling of silk. The steps were out of reach and sorta conveyed the impression of a silk universe above; unreachable for now.

I climbed an awesome tree on the campus. A woman came out of her house to ask us if there was some kind of Brown tradition of climbing the tree. We assured her that we knew of no such thing.

Hey all!

I've processed all of my pictures from my trip to London and Sweden. You can find them here!. Please mail me with any corrections.

I'm home at last. Call me!

I'm writing in the Stockholm airport, and I don't have much battery power left.

My talk at the meetingToday I spoke at the Haskell Implementor's Meeting, and I thought the talk went over pretty well. The thing I was most afraid of was that someone there would tell me that my ideas wouldn't work because of something in particular that is done by one of the Haskell compilers that I probably should have known about, or which I would have trouble understanding on the fly. Another thing I was afraid of would be that all those smart minds would start working on solutions and we would get bogged down in a lot of detailed discussion about what FreeBSD does, what xemcas does, what Debian does, the problems on windows, etc., etc.

Simon Peyton-Jones spoke before me to give a summary of the recent discussion on the Haskell libraries mailing list about module names and how to "graft" modules into the hierarchy. I was not up on to date this discussion because of my travels. Simon is a good speaker, and engaging. He did manage to fill in some of the gaps in my talk, I felt.

I opened with a picture of the stretching cat that looks like a lambda, and I'm not sure if I said that Lambda Mu is my cat's name, so it might not have made sense to them, but they did sorta chuckle when I said that his "middle" name is Mu because that's the sound he makes.

I intentionally made my first few slides overly verbose because I was counting on being nervous and more or less having to read from them, which was pretty good. I got over my nervousness once they started asking me questions, which was good. I actually got through my talk and discussion on time, which was not very common at that meeting. I even had time to grab some food at the school where the conference was held.

For the most part, people seemed to like the idea, and I even detected a bit of enthusiasm. I hope that we can get some more developers on it though. Probably the most fruitful thing was to bring the entire thing to their attention so that they could think about it and comment on it. I heard people talking about build systems during lunch, and people asked me some more questions, so that is a good sign.

They did laugh when I said that Haskell is better than make for reuse and abstraction :)

So over all, I'm really pleased with the talk! I felt like I communicated the ideas clearly enough for them to ask the right questions and point out places that I should watch out for complications. Hopefully they'll keep thinking about it. When I get home, I'm going to start working on a report of the project in latex or something for people to digest, and to iron out some details.

The Haskell Implementor's Meeting: HIM was really neat; I enjoyed listening to the discussion and seeing the tool demos. Simon has a great way of making himself clear when talking about the internals of the compiler, by letting you know small details. From the three conferences (ICFP, Haskell, and HIM) I can see that there are really great things on the horizon for GHC to improve code quality, and between the module name issues and the LIP, there are some nice end-user visible things coming along as well. Together with new tools for browsing haskell code and refactoring code, I hope that programmers can start to reap even more benefits from the design of the language.

Other: I really can't wait to get home at this point. I wish I didn't have to spend a night in London, and I have to ride the tube on top of that, with all my luggage. I almost told them that I would pick it up in Chicago, but they had no idea how this was supposed to work, or where I might find the supposed luggage, so I decided to pick it up in London and bring it myself to the airport in the morning.

I miss home, I miss Aetion, family, friends, church, cat. Of course i miss Anna too, but she won't be there since she's in Moscow.

The trip was great, though, and becase of timing really culminated in the talk I gave today.

So Shae and I just managed to check into our hotel, called IBIS, for the Haskell Implementor's Meeting nearby which starts tomorrow. We had some trouble finding the hotel from the train station. It was probably really close, but had a counter-intuitive way to get here. So we lugged our stuff around for blocks & blocks, then finally came across a map at a bus stop. Poor Andres accidentally left his laptop at the bus stop, so he had to run back there at great speed, and did manage to recover it.

Banquet: The banquet was pretty cool, I sat beside Peter Thiemann who told me about some of his work, which I knew almost nothing about. I also chatted with Bastiaan Heeren some more about music and Helium and such. They forced way too much alcohol down our throats. I left right at the end, but some people stayed and drank some more.

Haskell Workshop: Today was the Haskell Workshop, which was really interesting. There were two talks about Quantum Computing, which I hardly understood, but some people seem to think that functional programming is a great way to do quantum programming, which would be really cool if we built quantum computers and everyone had to admit that the functional programming people were right all along ;)

There were at least two great tool presentations for tools that I really didn't know about before, and a presentation for Helium (a programming language for learning haskell). The tools that we learned about were for refactoring source code, and for browsing source code. The refactoring tool did some program analysis so that you could move around chunks of code and propagate the effects of moving them. For instance, if you wanted to move a constant into a parameter to the function, you could highlight it and tell the refactoring tool to move it. It would add the variable to all the function definitions, and alter the call site to pass in the variable. Very Cool!

The code browser for the , Pragmatica Project, also did some program analysis and type checking, and allowed you to look at dependancies between modules, and click on symbols to find their definitions, etc. I'm not clear about _everything_ it offers over Emacs, but it was specific to Haskell, which is nice. Haskell-Mode in emacs could use some work.

Another great talk was the one about building a Space Invader's game in Yampa, which is the lastest Functional Reactive Programming framework from Yale. I really want to understand FRP and this game in particular, so I hope to be able to build Yampa really soon.

We also had a discussion about the future of GUI toolkits in Haskell. There's some disagreement about whether or not we should try to be completely cross-platform, or try to implement platform-specific features and allow there to be different tools. It was an OK discussion, but there wasn't enough time to really get into it.

Actually, all the talks were great, and there's a lot of cool stuff happening, which is exciting. This was definitely the day I've gotten the most out of the conference so far.

Today was the 2nd day of the ICFP. Last night, Shae, Igloo, and I went over today's papers. Tomorrow's papers seem to be a bit easier than today's but we'll see; Mark joined us today for these, and I got a photo of those three. I'm pleased that I have a good idea at least what each papers is about, and I have people around who I can ask about the terminology which is often for things that I could easily understand if I just knew what they were referring to. It always makes me happy when that happens. In fact, I think there are a number of papers that I'm going to read more carefully because I think I can understand all of them! I am learning a lot.

I've sorta decided that when I get back, I'm going to write the Tiger Compiler (from Appel's book which is in ML) again, but in Haskell. I want to implement a toy compiler and keep it around to try out different things on, like different parsers, different ways to structure code, optimizations, analysis, etc. I want to write it from scratch, because I want to know the entire thing through-and-through.

I think I also may implement a lambda calculus interpreter and maybe a very simple expression language. A lot of papers give examples of simple expression languages (with things like let and a few simple built in functions) for traversals, or how to structure interesting things, or parsers, or what-have-you. This would also be a useful tool to have around.

Tour of Uppsala: So today we got an hour-long tour of Uppsala, or at least a few buildings near the Cathedral and university. It was pretty interesting, but I was very cold, having not worn a jacket (but it was warm in the morning!) and it also started raining a bit.

Anyway I learned a bit more about the Cathedral, which has been in a constant state of flux for hundreds of years. In the first place, it took a few hundred years to finish it, and a lot of work was not done because of the plague and what-have-you. It was redone in a more Gothic style, it was de-catholicized at one point, and in 1998, someone decapitated one of the statues. They moved all the statues inside now. Part of it was re-done w/ bad concrete and so was crumbling and all that had to be removed, and it basically burned out at one point.

There was also the original hall for the university, to which a strange dome was added. You can often see this building in pictures of Uppsala w/ the cathedral in the background. The dome was supposedly reminiscent of a church style, and was designed as a place for human dissection, with an observation area. This was a pretty interesting part of the talk: our tour guide explained that the human body was considered to be extremely holy, and it was considered somewhat dangerous to dissect it, since God seems to have wanted to hide all that detail from us in the first place, who are we to disagree, 'eh?

So dissection was attended to with a great deal of care, it was a big deal, and happened over the course of several days, with all of the important people of the town attending. Also, everyone who attended the dissection was expected to attend the funeral, and the family members of the subjects could choose to not allow the dissection. Only executed criminals, babies born out of wedlock, and people who committed suicide were allowed to be dissected, and afterward, they were burried on church grounds, because the gift they gave to man after death made up for their supposed transgressions in life, which is a somewhat perverse, though reverent way of looking at things.

Misc:So then we went out for pizza and Shaun (from Australia) told this really funny story about how he accidentally got picked up and went to a gay bar, and stayed for quite a while even though he was rather uncomfortable, because he wanted to experience that culture, and because he was drunk. (I'll post a link to the story when he puts it on his blog.) This led us to a pretty frank discussion about sexuality and men and women (there were no women present of course), about how it can be seriously difficult for women to have men attracted to them, and different societies' views toward relationships. Anyway, there wasn't much time for the discussion really since we had to get back and read about functional programming, but I enjoyed the conversation.

Email: I am not able to send email very well at the moment. Our mail server's certificate expired and I don't have enough internet time to fix it. I'll try to email you all, but hopefully you're reading my blog anyway.

Well, today was the first official day of the ICFP. The last few days I've been reading papers and today I listened to the talks on those papers. Same for the next few days, but lets go in order.

August 24, 2003

Yesterday Shae & I studied Arrows and some of the papers, and then at 7:00PM, there was a reception where I got to meet some of the folks that I've been corresponding with and working with these last few months. I had some very rewarding conversations with some of the speakers, and got little previews of their talks, and got to ask them questions about their papers. I decided that I won't be afraid of being stupid. There's the old saying, "It is better to keep your mouth shut and _seam_ stupid, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt." Ah well. I don't subscribe to that.

But this has allowed me to interrogate people a little bit about their work, and I'm glad for it.

We heard a little bit about the history of Uppsala University, which was great; the speaker was really funny, and told us about one of their early professors who was a professor of math, architecture, engineering, philosophy, etc, as well as being the harbor-master somewhere, and some other titles, and fathering 17 children. Busy guy.

After the reception a bunch of us 20-30-somethings went out for a drink. It really was exactly _one_ drink too because drinking here is expensive. Everyone was really friendly and we had some great geeking-out about functional programming. The biggest geek part was just trying to find a place for our group of 13 at 9:30 on a Sunday. Not easy.

After that, we headed back to the hotel en masse, and in the lobby was Simon Peyton-Jones. Everyone was sort of standing around and pointing at him, which was really silly, and muttering "ooh, that's Simon." "Simon?" "Simon." Simon Marlow isn't here, so everyone knew it was SPJ.

So the group left him pretty much alone, but I came back a few minutes later to introduce myself and Shae to SPJ. I had a very friendly conversation with him for 5 or 10 minutes.

I had a related experience when I was checking in. It old the lady my last name, and she said, "Hmm... OK, are you staying with Peyton?" I guess she didn't realize that 1) Jones is a pretty common name, and 2) Peyton-Jones is his last name.

August 25, 2003

So today was pretty great too, but there is less to say. The talks were interesting and I plan to study tomorrow's talks as soon as I get off the internet. I guess there's wireless internet, but I don't have a wireless card :( I saw some people surfing during the talks, though so maybe thats a good thing.

I just had dinner, where about 10 people tagged along, and then they all followed me to the internet cafe. If you are reading this, please remember that I draw the line at my room, you must stop following me then. (Actually, that's not quite true. I already agreed to meet Shae & Igloo to go over tomorrow's papers.)

So anyway, lots of work to do! Talk to you all later.

peace.

In Uppsala and having a nice time. This morning I went to church at Uppsala Cathedral which is incredible. If you see pictures of spires above Uppsala, this is the cathedral. Its really hard to photograph too because its really tall and there are buildings all around it. Shae and I have been mostly reading papers for the conference. I went to the National Museum in Stockholm the other day, which was really neat. I walked around and took pictures also for Anna since she had forgotten her camera on her day in Stockholm. Its a realloy beautiful city. Anna and I got a tour of the old town, which was great. Having trouble w/ my mail configuration :( will hopefully fix this soon. Anna is safe & sound in Moscow now, and I miss her a lot! I'm glad she's there and probably speaking russian like a pro, though. She's so cool! More later.

Trains are so civilized compared to airplanes. How else can you travel for 14 hours and still feel refreshed at the end of it? I'm looking out the window at the beautiful Swedish countryside onm my way to Stockholm to catch Anna's plane early tomorrow morning. Tonight, we're staying at a Bed and Breakfast in Stockholm.

Soon will begin my ICFP part of the trip; I still want to revise my talk a little. Shae and I went over it a few times yesterday and he had some good points. Looking at the schedule, I have 20 minutes to give the introduction, and then another 40 minutes to chair a discussion. I really have to figure out what decisions need to be made at the discussion. I think its likely that we will disucss the packaging issues since those are the issues that most closely touch the compilers themselves, and we'll need a consensus among the compiler authors. I still want to familiarize myself with NHC a little more.

Shae seems enthusiastic about the project and was working on getting Lambdabot to use the prototype DistUtils system.

I got a good picture of Shae and Bea with two of the cats yesterday at their apartment. Cool!

Tue Aug 19 06:45:07 2003

So we took an early bus (was supposed to be a train) to Gallavare where they had some degree of civilization and a tourist information center. We knew the general area that we wanted to hike in and had a few tourist maps from the Boden tourist center. Gallavare also had a tourist center so we got a little more information there, though the guys working were remarkably ignorant about the area and had aparently never gone hiking out that way. There were a lot of backpackers on the train with us, though, so we knew we were on the right track. I eventually got him to give us some information, but it turned out to be a little bogus. Remember that the place in Boden said that the cabins were free, and we explained to this guy that we didn't have a stove, so we'd have to get food every so often. He really had no idea, so I forced him to help me plan a trip w/ the bus schedules and the places to get food and what-have-you.

So we rushed around to get some food and money and had to pay way too much for a bus ride out there. It was a beautiful area, and I started getting really excited. We arrived at the cabin and intended to do a little hiking to the next cabin. The guy at the tourist place said that we could probably hike to the next cabin before nightfall (there are really only about 4 hours of night at this time of year), but we talked to some nice hikers and they said that it wasn't really feasible to make it to the next cabin, so we decided to stay there for the night.

Damn, as I hinted it turned out that the cabins were _not_ free, nor are they particularly great. They are really very expensive, as expensive as some hotel rooms in the US, and because it was full of swedish teenagers, we slept on mats on the floor. Also, there was a little stove, so it turned out that we didn't have to pack all that heavy food (food that you can cook is lighter than food that you don't have to cook), and the water in the area is good, clear, beautiful glacier water and excellent to drink, so we didn't have to carry much water. Well thats good news and bad news, at this point we really can't get any more food, so we're stuck w/ this heavy fruit and cheese and bread (weight matters, of course because we're backpacking) when we could have brought rice and instant meals which are yummy and light. Stupid tourist information centers.

The lady running this cabin was a bit rude too. Ah well.

The cabin was beside this incredable large lake with islands (you'll see pictures) so since me & anna had some time to kill we went down to the lake and played around a bit. The water was very cold, we of course didn't go in, but we threw stones in the clear water and watched them sink, and we took in the splendor. Really you can't believe how beautiful it was here. Then we went back to the cabin and had some dinner.

We left early in the morning, before all the swedish teenagers woke up. We were actually woken by a big middle-aged Swedish woman talking loudly and walking around in her underwear. What a strange country.

So we started our hike to the next cabin. I already know that its 15 K away, and over pretty rough terrain, but we have pleanty of food and equipment for this much hiking. Also, there was a cabin and a shelter nearby, and the shelter was free, so we hoped to be the first ones at the shelter so that we could claim it if it was good enough to stay in. It was so beautiful. I hope to get the pictures up soon. Anna was doing a great job too, having never hiked something like this before, she was very aware and intelligent about following the well-marked trail, and very excited about the beauty and the reindeer.

We climbed up to a much higher elevation where it got rather cold (did I mention we are above the arctic circle?) and started to even rain a bit, which we weren't well equipped for, but fortunately, that didn't last very long. Then we saw a few moving animals which we thought were moose at first, but of course they were actually reindeer, which are very beautiful animals! They rain from us and we realized that there was a large hurd of them there!

So they ran away and we kept hiking (actually the reindeer were before the rain) crossed a few streams, gaped at the beautiful mountains and the sky. There was a wide variety of terrain: fields of rock, marsh, flat ground, streams to cross and hike up, etc. There was a lot of up-hill climbing and we got to the point that we seemed almost level with the bits of mountain with snow on them. (I got a lot of pictures.) There were patches of blue sky that we got to walk through every so often, but for the most part, it was overcast. It didn't rain again, though hurray!

Warning, Mushy stuff:Throughout the walk, Anna and I had a surprising amount of stuff to talk about, considering that we've been together for about 2.5 years and constantly together for more than a week traveling and talking. I was so proud watching her hike with my backpack and seeing her joy at the creatures and beauty we were encountering all around us. This trip, to me, has been very powerful in making me feel more and more attached to Anna. As we hiked together and stopped to point things out to each other, I felt a very deep affection. Affection, I've noticed, is something you can have without really feeling it explicitly sometimes. It was a very romantic walk.

End Mushy stuff. One thing we talked about is that we really want to explore the United States a lot more. There are lots of beautiful places to hike and camp and explore in our own beautiful country.

So here was the deal with the next cabin. There was a shelter on this side of another lake, and a cabin (just like the last one, and expensive) on the other side. There was a motorboat which you had to pay to take you across the lake, or you could row yourself across. There were three boats so if there was only one boat on your side of the lake, you'd have to go to the other side to pick up another boat and bring it back. There of course always has to be two boats on one side of the river and two boats on the other. This means that its impossible to cross the river alone if there is only one boat on your side.

The shelter was great, though. It was little, had a little table, a stove, (with a chimney), some benches, and an axe and some saws for cutting firewood. Of course you're not allowed to chop live trees, so the cutting implements were for making small bits from the wood you find on the ground. The area was so beautiful too. The lake was stunning and the water clear and tasty, the mountains in the distance poked into the clouds and the sky went on forever.

We decided to stay in this wonderful, romantic, and free shelter for the night, so we got our stuff set up. We went around and collected some firewood and met these silly little birds that live in the area. I think bears also live in the area, but they don't bother people, but you should be careful not to sneak around (make lots of noise) because you don't want to startle them. I'm not sure if there were bears in this area, but I saw some droppings that I think were bear.

We chatted with a couple other hikers who were doing much more hiking than us, and were moving on another 6k tonight, and planned to do some real mountain climbing later on in their trip. They also moved much faster than us since they were still in their tents when we passed them earlier in the morning. They were very friendly, though (these were the guys who actually were the only ones who knew that we shouldn't try to make the trip last night).

So we collected firewood, napped, read a bit (lots of sunlight you see) and wandered around the area. We went down to the lake and just had a beautiful and relaxing time in our temporary home in the woods. We heard some more hikers and we heard the motorboat cross the lake a few times, but we didn't talk to anyone else. Our only companions were those silly little birds who eventually ran away.

We found more than enough firewood for the evening and I chopped it up, and after a while, we built a fire in the stove, and heated some water for some soup I brought with us. The cabin got really warm, and we ate soup and dinner and I tried loading the stove so that it would burn slowly all night to keep us warm, but the fire went out at around 11:PM I think. The wood here was a little wet and soft, and hard to keep burning compared to the wood in Ohio. The embers also went out fast, but that was all OK because before the trip, I invested in an awesome sleeping bag: its a convertable 30-degree and 15-degree bag, and has a bit that unzips. So with the fire out, Anna was cold, and I was too warm in my bag, so I unzipped the convertable part and made it a cover for her, so we were both toasty. I also invested in this great sleeping mat that Phil recommended which is self-inflating air thing, and which works wonderfully, is very comfortable, and very compact. We were cozy in our little cabin in the woods.

Tue Aug 19 07:23:29 2003

So we woke up early in the morning in our beautiful cabin. There were several issues facing us. We didn't have enough food to travel for very long without getting resupplied, and most of the cabins were not these free shelters that we stayed in, but expensive things with a bunch of people. We coudn't get resupplied without getting a bus, and the buses only came twice a day. So we decided to get up very early and hike back in time to catch the first bus, and just make our camping trip a two night thing.

This was fine by me; I felt undersupplied for a long-term trip and didn't want to spend tons of money on cabins (we left our tent in Boden). Also we didn't have rain gear, Anna didn't have waterproof boots (she was wearing sneakers) so we decided that it would be best to play it safe and head back to civilization after some more hiking on the 18th. If we got wet, it would be pretty unpleasant, and I wanted to be able to talk Anna into more hiking trips in the future :)

The trip back was as beautiful as the trip down, with a different view of mountains in the Serek National Park, and eventually the first lake came back into view. This time, we were a little earlier so we saw several hurds of reindeer which let us get very close this time. There were some without horns, and there were some which were a little lighter colored and spotted. They were so cool :) They watched us very suspiciously and would run off, but they were always running in the direction of the trail, so we'd catch up with them, and they'd have to run away again. Silly beasts.

We returned in time for the bus and took the bus back to Gallavare then the train back to Boden. The train ride was very nice after hiking for so long. Trains are so civilized, we even had a little table to write on.

Last night we stayed up late chatting with our hosts, Shae & Bea. I was planning to cook my famous tofu & carrot dish for them, but even after wandering around the town, we couldn't come up with any tofu at the 3 grocery stores here. Ah well, Bea made some yummy food and we talked about music, and a million other things.

Today we are planning the Stockholm day and some details about the conference. Hopefully, we will get a chance to explore Boden some more today. It is a military town, basically built to defend Sweden from the Russians. According to Bea, the medical and military industries are the staples of Boden's economy.

Tue Aug 19 06:29:32 2003

Traveling to Sweden was fun. We're staying in Boden with some friends. We traveled to Stockholm from London by air and then from Stockholm to Boden by train. (In the train station, it cost more than a dollar to use the restroom, ahem.) The flight was not too interesting, but the train ride was great. It was the first time I've stayed in a sleeper car (the trip was an all-night trip; sweden is a long country).

The train compartment was awesome. It was so cleverly designed; it fit three beds with a sink, a lot of hooks and places for storing your luggage. Each bed had a light which wouldn't disturb your companions, and a radio at both sides which you could plug headphones into. The beds were stacked like bunks, and had little nets so you wouldn't fall out. The middle bed folded into the wall so that the bottom bed became a seat so you could sit rather than lie down.

We had dinner in the restaurant car, it was actually not that expensive (we didn't have a super fancy dinner either, though). There was also a little lounge on the train. We have the same kind of compartment on the way back, for another all-night trip, so it should be fun.

I felt a little stressed on the train ride because we didn't have any plans for hiking and are really a little bit under-equiped, which limits our flexability. It was raining and I was afraid that we'd have to hike and camp in the rain (which didn't turn out to be true), but this was really stressing me out! I didn't have a camping stove since you can't carry flammable stuff on airplanes, so we'd have to carry enough food and water (this turned out to be not true, more later).

Anyway, I did have a little trouble falling asleep because I decided to be stressed, and I thought a lot about the sorta seat-of-your-pants travel that we were doing in Sweden, as opposed to London where we knew a lot in advance. You see, information on Sweden is harder to come by in English, and some of the hiking areas are in such small towns, and Americans seldom go there, accurate information is hard to come by. Even the tourist information centers were not that great.

On the other hand, I started to immagine how one could get hooked on seat-of-the-pants travel like that. I think its a healthy thing to do sometimes, to not really have a detailed plan and to 1) trust in God to take care of you and so that nothing really bad happens and 2) trust in your abilities. A really important thing to do, as bad as it may sound, is not be afraid to ask people questions. Sure, its a little embarrassing to be a tourist and not know the language (everyone knows English BTW), but people are usually quite willing to answer questinos, and its so much better to bite the bullet and be embarassed than to remain ignorant and miss your train. Also, at the tourist information centers, keep asking questions until you get an answer :)

We got to Boden in the morning and were greeted by our friendly hosts, Bea & Shae. That day we pretty much just hung out with them and chatted up a storm. We watched a movie in the evening and tried to make some plans for the next day, when we were going on our hiking adventure. We went to the tourist information office, and they told us that we should take a train up near the Sarek national park and do some hiking around there. They were right about that! (more later) They also told us that we could stay in cabins for free, which didn't surprise me very much, but they were wrong about that. The cabins were actually quite expensive, and since there were so many of them, I didn't bring my tent (its rather heavy). More later.

Bea & Shae are great hosts and we are having a great time!

Wed Aug 13 08:24:40 2003

Bletchley park was great. Anna and I had decided that we would each pick a place to take the other and to make a surprise of it. Well, neither of us kept the surprise. As I type, Anna is shopping (I took her shopping, aren't I a good boyfriend?) and yesterday we went to Bletchley Park.

A bit about Bletchley Park: Go to the web site for details, but this mansion and the grounds around it were used by England during WWII as the Top Secret area to crack crypto systems. The Enigma machine used by the Germans was broken here. This is where Alan Turing worked alongside the other great mathematical minds of Britain on the problems of codes and ciphers. Their work supposedly shortened the war by three years.

They have lots of neat crypto machines there, including several versions of the Enigma machine (one of them was stolen in 2000, as you may remember, but they got it back). The opposite of an Enigma machine might be a Boemb (sp?) machine. One of them was designed by Turing, and if I'm not mistaken, some were produced at NCR in Dayton, Ohio. This machine was built to break the code at the beginning of the Enigma encodings.

Well, they don't have a Boemb (sp?) in Bletchley park. I think that I saw the only one at the NSA's museum (which is open to the public, and I highly recommend it!). They had several reproductions that were used for the film "Enigma" which I haven't seen.

Rebuilding Efforts: One fascinating thing that they are doing there is trying to rebuild the machines. The blueprints were destroyed to keep the fact of the cracked Enigma machine a secret, all the machines save one were destroyed as well. No one knows exactly how they work, but they're working on rebuilding one from vintage parts. They are also working on rebuilding another cracker machine which they claim was the first computer. "The Americans used to think that they built the first computer, but that was only because this one was a secret; it was built three years before the American computer." I don't really know what a "computer" is really. I would say that a good definition for a computer would be a machine that is Turing complete.

They were going to destroy the park, but 10 years ago, a group formed to save the park and turn it into a museum. Its kinda sad really, its not in great shape, and its secretive nature has led to its neglect. The British government isn't that interested in maintaining it either, according to our tour guide.

History or Not: As I was walking through the Tower of London the other day, I wondered what makes them decide when to turn something which is an ongoing piece of history into a tourist attraction rather than allow its history to continue. The history of England didn't stop at 1900, and Bletchley Park is a perfect example of the modern history of this country. Do they appreciate it, though? Do they appreciate the breakthroughs in computing that were made here? Perhaps they don't realize how computers are effecting and will effect us.

Sun Aug 10 15:30:17 2003

Tower of London: 10:00 - 15:00. In the morning, we went to the Tower of London. Really cool. We hooked up with a tourguide who was quite amusing and who lived on the grounds. He gave the impression of The Tower being sortof like a large family home, with an organic history, lots of lost objects that people find later (does anyone know what they are or how they got there?) and beheadings, lots of beheadings.

The White Tower (still inside the tower) was really neat. It was, I think, the oldest part of The Tower. It had been used for many things over time, but for the most part, no one knew why it had been built or used for. There was a nice progression of weaponry here, though.

I liked how The Tower seemed to have been built in layers, with the white tower first, and that itself was based on some Roman walls. Then more towers were built with more two large walls, and a mote with the Thames on one side. Pretty well protected! This is where the to-be kings would go to prepare to take their throne in complete safety. Queen Elisabeth spent some time here, of course.

Borough Market: was great for lunch. It was like the North Market in Columbus but bigger, better, with more accents and (sadly) more meat. It was hard to find something Vegetarian there, but what I did find was good, and we got some fruit, and of course coffee. I was still thirsty. I had been doing better today finding water and filling my jug which I'm carrying with me the entire time. The market is only open on certain days of the week, so we won't get a chance to go back.

Tate Modern: 16:30 - 22:00. Thank goodness the museum was open late. We saw almost the entire thing, it was awesome. We pretty much had dinner in the cafe which was quite good, but bad service.

The museum itself was great. It is somewhat similar to the MOMA in New York, but I think the MOMA seemed to have a little more technology, which of course I like. I didn't note down any of the names of the pieces i liked. There was a piano suspended upside-down from the ceiling which would spit out its keys at intervals, making a terrible noise. There were some bricks which aparently caused quite an uproar when they were purchased by the museum in the 70's (because after all, its just a load of bricks). There was a video of a guy punching himself, and a couple fighting and stabbing eachother over dinner. There were a lot of interesting nude and figure studies, and the "still life" section was far more interesting than I had imagined. They had a Monet Waterlillies next to some modern stuff which was influence by Monet's style, but which was just cavas which had been allowed to soak up the paint that was poured onto it.

There's lots more, but you get the idea. I'll try to flesh this out a little later (Maybe when its not so damn hot?)

We were pretty tired at this point so we went home and read and slept.

Sun Aug 10 15:48:15 2003

Mostly we relaxed today and then went to the British Museum for a while. There we saw lots of Egyption stuff and some pieces of the Greek Parthenon. I enjoyed the section of coins and money, as well as the clock sections. We saw some old Buddahs also. I guess the museum pretty much continually expanded due to the need for more room because of Britain's colonial exploits. Bah: exploits.

Today we ate at the Hostel and watched Simpsons with a bunch of other hostelers. Good food and cheap when you make it yourself. We have been very good about not spending lots of money on food here. We probably spent too much on our train ticket: we didn't really need some of the further away Underground stops, but we did use them to get from the airport to the city.

In the evening, we didn't really do anything besides relax and read.

Tomorrow, we're planning to go to the zoo, and do some shopping, we'll see. Tuesday, we're planning to go to Blechly Park, Wednesday to Leeds Castle, Thursday to Sweden.

Wed Aug 13 08:10:18 2003

Favorite Animals:Lynx, The friendly white deer-like thing, monkeys. Ask Anna for the list.

The zoo was lots of fun; There were lots of kids around doing their best to not scare the animals. There weren't too many signs around saying, "Do not feed..." I suppose that people are pretty good about that. Around the gorillas, though, there were very stern warnings, and I did notice people, especially children, making fun of the gorillas more than the other animals. I wonder if there is a natural urge to mock them more because they are more like humans? They're easy to make fun of if you think of them as a stupid large human. On the other hand, can you really mock a wildcat? Something fast and powerful and which you can understand a bit through your housecat? Powerful.

I really liked the monkeys. I loved watching them swing around with such playfulness and grace. I was especially impressed to realize that the ones who use their tails have grippy skin on the ends of their tails.

The lynx was sleeping, but I still liked him. He was asleep next to a dead chicken or something. All the big animals were very flat; not moving around. The hippo, the big cats, the anteater, all very flat.

I also liked the penguins, they were playful.

After the zoo, we went to a movie I think. Veronica Something. It was about a reporter who analyzed Dublin's underground drug market and exposed violent drug lords. She was eventually killed by one of them, but she was more like a martyr than a victim; after her death, Ireland was galvanized into action against corruption and drugs.

She was killed in 1996 I believe. I'm surprised I didn't ever read about this when I was in high school. I used to read about Ireland a lot back then, but mostly about the IRA.

I wonder why I like Ireland so much? Irish music (traditional and rock), Irish style crosses, the accents. I think that if I have been reincarnated, I was Irish before.

Shopping...

Sun Aug 10 15:22:21 2003

Beginnings: So we got here in the morning and headed straing for the hostel. The underground trip w/ our luggage was a little annoying, but no big deal. The hostel is pretty nice, but our room is on the very top floor, and we have to walk up five flights of this teeeeny staircase to get to our room. Also, its sweltering hot up here. I'm sweating profusely right now as I write this. Jet lag isn't too bad, by the way.

We didn't do _too_ much on our day of arrival. We wandered through the parks a lot which was wonderful. We relaxed and read our books. I was soo thirsty though. Britain doesn't seem to believe in water fountains (what do they call them here?) and my bottle was only half full. Finally we went to this great restaurant where the service was terrible. It was an african themed restaurant called "Mo". I was so thirsty and ordered water which they took forever to bring, and drank several glasses, and anna drank some too. Oops, guess what? It was bottled water they were serving us. Total cost for not nearly enough water at the restaurant: 7 pounds. Now that I've told you, I'm going to do my best to forget about that, so please don't bring it up. Have I mentioned that its hot here in London? Real hot. Heatwave. I wonder if I should really be using my computer in this heat.

Great London Beer Festival: After the food, we went to the Great London Beer Festival, where I had 2 pints of some of the best beer I've ever had. The place was I think a train station, full with about 85% men and the rest women. Everyone seemed very happy and somewhat drunk. THere were all these stands where you could get different kinds of beer. I don't know much about beer, so my choices were arbitrary. Anna bought a half-pint glass (she had two half-pints) and I just used one (returned it for a refund). The method for getting your glass full was to push your way to the front of one of the makeshift bars they had and stick your glass under the bartender's nose.

During our second glasses, Anna & I sat down and played set, then we went home. You think I was dehydrated before, now I was really dehydrated. On the train, a completely drunk guy was being rather chatty with us with everyone else sorta watching and laughing. He kept telling me that I should marry Anna. He asked us if we'd just been to the beer festival. It was completely clear that everyone on the train had just come from there, so it was a stupid question, but then he sorta passed out, standing up. When everyone else got off the train, he stayed, I asked him if he needed to get off, "I don't know!" and I asked, "Where are you going?" he didn't know that either. The doors were closing, so I got off. Some other drunk guy was trying to chat up a girl who was sitting next to him.

So home and sleep. Still haven't found water.

Thu Aug 7 13:09:03 2003: Columbus Airport, at the gate. Through security 1.5 hours ahead of boarding. Not much trouble. They didn't make me turn on my laptop or anything. Everyone had to take off their shoes. Just chilling out.

I brought some William Gibson books. I own a few, but I always have trouble getting into them. So I brought them with me; plan to read Neuromancer on the way to London.

Sun Aug 10 15:14:28 2003 I'm in my hostel now. I've been a little worried about someone taking my laptop, and have kept it locked up the entire time. Plan to visit an internet cafe soon. I've been here for a few days, and will try to recap for myself and for any interested readers :)

Had a simple plain ride, got searched, but no big deal. So far the London Underground riding has been very nice too. We haven't even made any mistakes that I can think of. Speaking of trains, I got the tickets in the mail for the sweden leg of our journey :)