Part one of my tutorial attracted a considerable number of visitors, far more than any single entry in the past, partly because it was posted to reddit.

Looking at the comments on reddit, I figured that I would say that luatex does resolve pdfTeX's internal limitation of 256 glyphs that I mentioned in part two, and it should directly support OpenType fonts with PostScript outlines.

However, my understanding is that the authors of luatex do not intend to make using TrueType and OpenType fonts as simple as XeTeX directly.  Instead, luatex merely makes the machinery available for someone else to build upon.  So someone will need to write a LaTeX package for luatex to put it all together, and as far as I know, no one has done this yet (let me know if I'm wrong!).  Also, while the plan is for luatex to eventually be merged back into pdfTeX, I think it is an overstatement to say that it will happen "soon".  The current luatex roadmap says that a "production" ready version will be available in August 2009.  I doubt that the merge back to pdfTeX will happen any sooner than 2010 given that.  But yes, in the long term I think luatex will be a great thing.

It also sounds like I should probably write a fourth part to my tutorial on using fontinst.  I've never personally used it myself, and when I first started working with OpenType fonts and LaTeX I wasn't aware of its existence.  Therefore, I wrote otftofd.  So it might take a bit longer to write as I will have to learn it at the same time.

With the ICFP deadline out of the way, I've finally put up a new version of my academic website, now hosted at EPFL: http://lamp.epfl.ch/~washburn/.

This website includes a link to a draft of my ICFP submission, "InforML: Scrapping your boilerplate with integrity", the previously mentioned draft version of "Generalizing parametricity using information-flow" submitted to LMCS, and a version of Principia Narcissus with the front and back cover included as part of the PDF (for those that would like that sort of thing).

I am a bit worried that my ICFP submission is just too dense to be comprehensible to someone who is not only well-versed in the area of type systems but also information-flow. I will see I guess.

(Wordpress ate my first draft, grrr.)

So after thinking about it further, I was incorrect, and it is possible to explicitly unpack existentials in Scala. As with some other languages, it is done via pattern matching. The following example illustrates how:

val x : List[T] forSome { type T } = List(42)
val w = x match { case y : List[u] => ((z : u) => z)(y.head) }

However, in practice this functionality seems to be rather fragile. For example, the following two variations are rejected:

val x : T forSome { type T } = 42
val w = x match { case y : u => ((z : u) => z)(y) }

and

val x : List[List[T]] forSome { type T } = List(List(42))
val w = x match { case y : List[List[u]] => ((z : u) => z)(y.head.head) }

In both cases it reports that it cannot find the type u. In the second case, it could be attributed to erasure, as there is no way dynamically to guarantee that the contents of List are in turn also a List. However, the first seems reasonable, so it should probably be reported as a bug.

We have been experiencing a massive delay in all the scala-* mailing lists at EPFL, both the public and private lists. The admins are so worried about open relays, the firewall prevent us from having our lab's admin run the mailing lists on one of our servers. Of course, despite telling the central admins that this is a serious problem, it has just gone from bad to worse. Last week we were seeing delays of about an hour. The past day or two the delay seems to have hit something like at least twelve hours. That means if someone does a Subversion commit, we do not see the commit e-mail for at least twelve hours. The same goes with submissions to the bug tracking system, or even internal queries.

Arguably, it has been good for productivity in some ways.

My wrists are continuing to get worse. I am writing this using Dragon Naturally Speaking Preferred, but it is quite a struggle with the software.  I'm not sure whether I need a faster computer, or my enunciation is just terrible.  I certainly won't be  able to use it for typesetting or programming anytime soon. I'm not quite sure what to do now.  Wow I didn't actually have to correct that last sentence.  Or that one.  Sometimes I just get lucky, I suppose.

As you may be noticing, I am gradually moving to a new theme for the site.  I do not have a precise finished product in mind, but I am aiming for greater simplicity.  I am hoping to converge on something over the course of the coming week.

I was fiddling with the site's formatting yesterday, trying to better utilize available display space by using relative sizing for the sidebar and main column. Unfortunately, on larger displays (and still noticeable on smaller ones) there is this huge space on the left-hand side.

I have not been able to figure out what is causing it. I've tried adjusting the padding and margins on all of the relative <div> blocks and even tried using the Aardvark Firefox extension to figure it out. What it is probably going to take is to replace to fancy CSS styling of the <div> blocks with old-fashioned HTML tables.

I have many things I would like to write about, but I figured I would take a few seconds to express my annoyance that because my hostname now ends in ».ch«, Google automatically assumes that I want my interface and searches to be in German by default.  Which I  probably also really annoys the third of the country where German is not the primary language.

I am finally absolutely and completely done with my doctorate. There is no doubt that I am now Doctor Washburn. On Tuesday, I deposited my dissertation, which proved to be more of an adventure than I expected.

For reasons I have not bothered investigating, LaTeX numbered the third page in the document as "ii" when it should have been "iii" (the first two pages are unnumbered).  However, this was the only mistake in terms of formatting that the ruler-lady noticed, so I only needed to reprint the pages numbered using lowercase Roman numerals.  She even offered up some of her spare sheets of the required 100% cotton, 20lb (or greater), acid free paper so that I could reprint the needed pages.  However, upon returning to Levine Hall to make the correction (\setcounter{page}{3} on the dedication page) and reprinting, I determined that we must have made an off-by-one error and the ruler-lady had given me one too few sheets.  So then I dashed off to the Penn Bookstore to purchase some more 100% cotton, etc. paper.  But I was able to get it all fixed and was even able to deposit the corrected pages without making a new appointment.

As far as double spacing goes, I went with a \baselinestretch of 1.5 as one of my colleagues said that he did so and it worked for him.  In practice, the ruler-lady did not actually ever lift her ruler from the table – not even to check the margins. She did ask me what size typeface I was using and whether my abstract was double spaced.

I have put a copy of the document that I deposited online.  I'm almost certain that the careful reader will find arbitrarily many typos, but I am also certain that I could expend an arbitrary amount of effort making it a better document and the returns were already diminishing. Still, if you do find any mistakes, please e-mail me so that I can fix them before I print up copies of the "director's cut" version via Lulu.

I am hoping that I will now have a little more time to write here on ∃xistential Type. I have a few non-typography related things that I will probably write up soon, for those of you bored by my endless tweaking of Gentzen Symbol.

I've finally handed off a draft of my dissertation to my committee. I hope that I will find time to update more frequently from here on out.

In other news, I've finally taken this opportunity to upgrade to the latest version of Wordpress in the hopes that it will prevent the spread of that malignant blogroll spam that you may have been noticing. I guess this is what happens when you run software written in PHP. Maybe I will have time to think about a custom theme before too long as well.