Day One!

Hello, all!

Today is my first day at REUSE! In honor of my mentor and recommender, the visionary Dr. Chris Johnson of JMU, I'm going to keep a little blog of my time here at CMU.

It is 6pm. My roommate will move in soon. We'll see how much I write.

Fortune favors the bold... and those who know good writers, apparently! By the strokes of fortune and the keystrokes of Dr. Johnson, I've landed an invitation to the CMU Research Experience for Undergraduates in Software Engineering program.

My topic: formal verification of network protocols. Wow! Those intimidating words are the gateway to a world of pure mathematical imagination.

Leslie Lamport (as in Lamport clocks) wrote a language called TLA+. I'm not sure what it stands for. Maybe Translation LookAside Plus? (Probably not!)

My current task: to learn the TLA+ language, some relevant protocols such as Paxos (If I remember correctly, the two-phase distributed consensus protocol), and read some articles on robustness in software.

Lamport is very opinionated about TLA+, insisting that mathematical truth is the superior means of representing abstract algorithms. I'm skeptical, but exploring new means of computation is very exciting! Plus, concurrent systems are infamously hard to debug. We've tried the code monkey way. Maybe it's time to step aside and give the mathematicians a try?

I woke up in a hotel with a very kind father who drove me here yesterday. We visited some parks. We ate some food. He helped me move in. The elevators were slow. Now he's gone!

OK, now you're caught up! Time to think about the future.

Tomorrow is orientation day #1! A breakfast has been scheduled for 9:30am for some hardcore (human, not computer) networking. Then, we're supposed to have lunch with our advisors. One of mine is getting married. The other awaits his newborn child's birth.

It turns out, however, that I've got a partner named Eduardo! Maybe we'll chill together instead?

I'm cooking some rice, which I'm going to mix with some canned food to make a primitive first meal. I'll learn a lot about light cooking this semester!

Then, I've got some Lamport Lectures to watch and some papers to read!