The past week or so I've been trying to deal with all sorts of smaller things in the hope that I can concentrate on my dissertation research afterward.

Probably the most interesting things I've been up to are learning the Scala language. In some ways it has been a little strange as I think I may actually have a better understanding of the language from a technical standpoint than a practical one. Specifically, I am still trying to figure out how to gracefully combine functional programming with algebraic datatypes with nominal objects and inheritence. In some regards, mutability is more pervasive in a object-oriented setting.

Additionally I've started using the Scala Eclipse plugin along with the Subversion plugin. Which I've found very impressive. I haven't tried using the standard Java mode to compare, as I understand the Scala plugin is still in the early stages of development. But even just the fact that it rebuilds dependencies as soon as I save a file, and hilighting the lines with errors is an amazing time saver. Additionally the tools for browsing revision history are vastly more useful than trying to figure the same things out from the command-line.

In other news, after considerable debate an qualitative analysis, the mechanized metatheory group here at Penn has decided to narrow our focus down to Coq. So Stephanie will be using Coq for all the assignments in her special topics course this fall, and in general we will be working on developing libraries and tactics to support our development and perhaps write some additional tools.

Based upon Karl's suggestion, I created a prototype logo for "Free the Mallocs" based on the idea of a circular "free" list.

I'm not entirely happy with how the linked list came out as I couldn't get Omnigraffle to converge on a "perfect" circle. My attempts at constructing one by hand in Illustrator were a little better, but then I would have had to have drawn all the arrows by hand.

In any event, it is at least a starting point.

Silly as it is, one thing that has been holding me back on making further progress with free-the-mallocs.com is that I'm still trying to come up with a good logo design. The problem of course is that it is really hard to come up with a design that seems fitting. However, while typing this, I was just struck by using a design reminiscent of the various "free foo" and "save the bar" campaigns.

After spending a few minutes with Google seeing what other sites with a "free the" theme, I'd have to say that most of them weren't really very inspirational. I probably liked Free the Grapes the best, but I'm not sure what I would draw for a malloc in shackles.

Most of this week has been devoted to getting the getting the journal version of "Boxes Go Bananas" out for final approval. I'm finally happy enough with the latest draft to make it generally available on my research page. I've had these revisions burning a hole in my to do list for far too long now; it has nearly been a year since we received our reviews.

I finally acquired the reviews for our TOPLAS submission, after calling the technical support line for the service TOPLAS uses to manage the review process. Apparently there was some kind of glitch and the reviews didn't wind up attached to the decision letter like they normally would be. On the whole the reviews are positive, and most questions and comments are reasonable. Hopefully the turn-around on this paper won't be nearly as long.

I also spent a bit of time thinking about type inference and implementation issues. After some debating and discussion with Stephanie, I think the current plan is to start implementing impredicative polymorphism via boxy types, and then to start on the module system. I'm hoping I can get that far before I leave for Portland. Especially because I need to begin preparing a revised proposal presentation.

In celebration of it's 50th birthday, a documentary on Helvetica is being released. I try to avoid using Helvetica when possible, but it will hopefully prove interesting to my inner type-geek.

I just finished spending an hour or so starting on a Sudoku solver in written in Twelf. I didn't quite finish, but I would have to say that the complexity introduced by the lack of polymorphism seems to outweigh any of the benefits of logic programming. Plus the lack of a standard library means I needed to write custom list and matrix manipulation code. I'll probably finish it at some point just for the hack value, but perhaps not before the new Twelf module system becomes available.

I was pretty terrible on Tuesday and spent a significant portion of the day thinking about unification, anti-unification, and type inference for InforML. I am almost certain that I want to just stop working on the higher-rank polymorphism extension to AspectML and start directly on InforML. At least my hope is that if I stop working on AspectML and start directly on InforML, I'll have a rough implementation of InforML ready by WGP, which will be far more expressive than higher-rank AspectML anyway. Especially because while thinking really deeply I concluded there are a few things that we did when designing the AspectML type-inference algorithm that unnecessarily complicate it. I guess I'll have to see if I can sell Stephanie on this plan.

I was quite surprised to try a few different searches on Google and find that there does not appear to be any regular "competition" for the "best" spam filter. This seems like a good way to make sure we're making progress on filtering based solutions.

What got me thinking about this was the enormous amount of image based spam that I get these days because it has no content for SpamAssassin to work with other than the headers, and apparently they aren't always suspicious enough to be flagged.

It seems like a simple contest to run once gone to the trouble of compiling a training and competition corpus. I know from talking with J that contests are definitely used for "information retrieval" type research. Plus it seems like it would be a breeze to get a few corporate sponsors. I'll have to ask around and see what people think.