I have a large head

I measured my head today in order to find out my cap size for graduation. It is 24 and 3/4 inches around. According to the faculty regalia rental form, that counts as "extra large".

The La's: BBC In Session

The long-delayed copy of The La's: BBC In Session I ordered from Amazon finally arrived yesterday. Initial impression: excellent, and certainly an interesting counterpart to their eponymous first (and only) album. The BBC sessions have a somewhat looser and more spontaneous feel, although I was frankly surprised that in some ways they are more "produced" than the album versions. For example, several tracks sport doubled vocals with a hint of an echo effect; not that there's anything wrong with that, but it was a bit surprising for a band whose distrust of modern production is legendary.

A re-formed La's (with core members Lee Mavers and John Power) played some gigs in 2005; maybe we'll eventually see some new music from them.

PASTE 2007

Bill Pugh and I will be presenting a paper at PASTE 2007 entitled Finding More Null Pointer Bugs, But Not Too Many. A preprint is available. The paper describes some work that Bill and I did in summer 2006 to improve the null pointer bug-finder in FindBugs. The idea is simple:

1. Perform an backwards intraprocedural dataflow analysis to track values that are guaranteed to be dereferenced on all non-exception forward paths
2. Look for locations within methods (both within basic blocks and on control edges) where a known-null value is guaranteed to be dereferenced

The improved analysis finds more null pointer bugs than our previous null pointer analysis with a low false-positive rate; see paper for details (and try it out by using FindBugs on your Java code).

PASTE happens to be located at FCRC this year, so there's all kinds of cool stuff going on there.

FindBugs tutorial at PLDI 2007

Bill Pugh and I will be presenting a tutorial on FindBugs at PLDI 2007. The intended audience is researchers in static analysis and automated bug-finding who are interested in using FindBugs as a platform for bug-finding analyses. (Hmm, the tutorials haven't been posted on the PLDI website yet.)

PLDI will be part of FCRC this year. I think that's great, since it allows attendees to check out interesting research at lots of other conferences and workshops.