Technical Blog

Complete and Liveness, Safe and Sound

2 Mar 2022

I have a hard time keeping these terms straight:

  • liveness vs. safety
  • soundness vs. completeness

This is intended as a short guide for myself; maybe someone else will find it useful too! Note that this is all to the best of my knowledge and understanding at the present time; if there be faults, they be the faults of myself. I welcome correction and clarification if I am wrong.

Liveness vs. Safety #

Liveness and safety deal with properties of a system. Contrast that with soundness and completion, which are adjectives about analyses.

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Christmas 2021

25 Dec 2021

It’s my first Christmas being a dad. The end of the school semester was unusually stressful; I didn’t have much time or energy to anticipate Christmas. But I’ve felt a marked lack of eagerness for getting presents. That feeling wanes each year—something I’m grateful for—but this year I only felt an eagerness for a time of peace and celebration with my family. Peaceful it has been.

My family isn’t perfect. (My baby daughter is about as perfect as they come, though!) The time I’ve gotten to spend so far and the time that I will spend with them is precious to me. My wife and I have focused so much on celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ that this commercialized junk we put up with has been all but absent from our home. We have a few books about Santa Claus that we read to our daughter, but we’ve listened to strictly Christ-centered music. (A Charlie Brown Christmas counts, though!) There’s been a spirit in our home that has brought me comfort and peace in this tumultuous year—more than any before it.

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Class Management Reviews: Fall 2021

18 Dec 2021

A collection of what worked well and what didn’t in classes that I took this semester. This is partially for me to record what things reduced friction for me as a student so that one day, should I become a professor, I’ll be able to run the lowest-friction class ever!

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Foundations of High-Modernist Ideology in Metropolis

7 Dec 2021

The following is from a essay from a class on German literature and film.

Fritz Lang’s movie Metropolis is primarily about the struggle between the oppressed working class and the ruling elite. What drives this tension, however, is a particular view of technology and technological progress that exacerbates the problems the film focuses on. This mentality is called high modernist ideology by Scott in his book Seeing Like a State:

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Programs and Intent

9 Nov 2021

What does this program do? At the most reduced level, one could say that a program’s behavior is defined by the effect it has on the hardware running it. That’s not very useful however; when we’re programming, we often have to deal with legacy code and tease out the original intent of the code.

Saying that the meaning of a program is entirely encapsulated by the code is saying that the intent and the implementation are the same. They so rarely are!

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Models of Programming

24 Oct 2021

Last week I was studying outside of a lecture hall where someone was teaching an introductory course on computer programming. There was a lot that I overheard that I disagreed with; this essay is an attempt to help me crystallize what exactly I disagreed with.

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Reluctance to Bear a Symbol

19 Sep 2021

I feel uncomfortable with many symbols. I might have opinions about a subject, but there’s rarely a camp that has some symbol, flag, slogan, etc. that I’m comfortable with adopting because that camp does not accurately reflect my opinion. All too often, a slogan takes on more than its surface meaning, and that can make using that slogan tricky.

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A programmable programming language? I'll drink to that!

21 Aug 2021

My wife and I got a chance to go to a place that lets you paint pottery and then have it fired. The pottery is all pre-made; you just get to paint it.

It’s been a very long time since I’ve worked with a physical art medium, so the mug looks kinda dumpy. I did alright with the Racket logo on the bottom-inside of the mug though!

A poorly-painted blue mug A passable freehanded Racket logo

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Health and Taking Care of Yourself

14 Aug 2021

It’s going to be another long night. My baby has reached the point where she’s too tired to sleep. She alternates between screaming at 90+ decibels and sleeping fitfully. She only transfers from the crying state to the sleep state after prolonged, labored rocking and soothing. She transfers back to the base crying state on her own after a few seconds.

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