Kampkoder

No more than an hour ago, i passed my first exam at the graduate level. While doing the preliminary research for our master thesis, we (students at AAU) are required to attend a course on presenting scientific papers which are somehow related to the research group that you are associated with. In my case this was the “Distributed Systems and Semantics” group, thus at the exam I was expected to present a paper on generating diagnostics information for prebisimulation preorder algorithms – which I did.

Generating diagnoatic information for Behavioral Preordes. by U. Celikkan and R. Cleaveland.

The general idea in terms of traditional theory, is that when ever a process model / implementation (any thing which can be modeled in a labeled transition system) turns out not to comply with a specification, we would prefer that we were told why, and not just that it failed to comply.

Your are welcome to download my slides either in pdf (talk.pdf) or keynote format talk.key.zip

Yesterday I was appointed teaching assistant (TA) for the undergraduate course Semantics and Verification given by Jiri Srba and Kim G. Larsen. I’m very happy about this, because I enjoyed the course last year when I was attending it as an undergraduate. For anybody who is interested in what this curse is about, you can either follow the link above or read my slightly edited version of the information:

Course Description:

The aim of this course is to introduce advanced mathematical models for the formal description and analysis of programs, with emphasis on parallel and reactive systems. As part of the course material, we also introduce several automatic verification tools, and hint at some of the implementation techniques underlying them.

Material:

The curse has main text book:
Reactive Systems: Modelling, Specification and Verification by Luca Aceto, Anna Ingólfsdóttir, Kim G. Larsen and Jiri Srba.

and several additional papers.

But personally, I would like to pass on the recommendation of two additional books, which I have recently read. While reading these books, I was convinced that they very nicely bind together, the Semantics and Verification course with other very important courses at AAU such as “Software Engineering”, “Computability and complexity” and “Syntax and Semantics”.

• Software Reliability Methods
• Model Checking

This is a much a reminder to my self as it is a blog entry. In the beginning of this semester I bought a MacBook, and ofcause my work requires me to use latex, in order to write my project, and other stuff. I’m normally a Linux (Debian) user so I’m having a hard time leaving the terminal window and doing stuff the Mac way.

One of the tasks I’m still urging to do in a terminal, is to compile my latex projects using make. But since I did make the move from Emacs to the TexShop editor (it has a nice, compile and view updated feature, out of the box) I needed to get it to use my Makefile which I, by now, have use a coupe of years perfecting to my use. The TexShop manual has a few suggestions, on how to do this, e.g. with the %!TEX TS-program=xxx command, but non of these seamed to work for me.

The “hack” im proposing here, is to add a small script to /usr/local/teTeX/bin/i386-apple-darwin-current/ containing

After installing texshop and tetex using fink, create a script e.g latexproject in /sw/bin/
containing something like this:

#!/bin/sh
PROJECTDIR=`pwd`
cd $PROJECTDIR
make pdf

Now if you open your tex files from a finder window, which I do, the pwd command will evaluate to the path of the project. Thus you are all set to use your old Makefiles for multiple projects (given they all have pdf target ). All you need to do, is  to modify the preferences as follows:

Now, there is probably an easier way to to this – but hey, it works for me!

Follow up: It seems that this blog entry has been googled quite a few times, which has lead me to think that it might be worth the time to make this nano-howto (ie. very small) more complete. If you have found this approach didn’t work for you (which it probably didn’t ), please write a comment stating what you needed and maybe how you fixed it

My colleague Uffe and I, have just arrived at Schloss Dagstuhl after a surprisingly long trip, by plane and taxi. The place looks very nice, the rooms are quite impressive (without being overly so) and I’m quite convinced that this is going to be a very nice few days. The only downside so fare is that, both Uffe and my luggage has been “delayed” in some security check back in copenhagen and I have discovered that my cellphone does not have international coverage. But I think we will manage quite fine until it gets brought in order.