tim | Jul. 3rd, 2012

Jul. 3rd, 2012

While I feel like I got nothing done today, I should post anyway, for accountability's sake.

- I tried to figure out issue 2724, and failed. That is, I have a patch that I think fixes most of it... except now I get a mysterious segfault in the cycle collector while running the core library tests. Clearly, something is messed up, probably to do with different data representation expectations between the rustc back-end and the RTS (specifically do with how I changed the class-with-dtor representation to try to get rid of what valgrind was flagging as "uninitialized" data). It all makes my brain taste like burning.

- Rewrote the abstract for our POPL paper. I feel like I made it better (where better is defined by Kent Beck's advice on abstracts), but I also made it longer; woe.

- Met with Dave, who's my boss, and talked about how I'm doing and stuff. Further details redacted.

I think it's time for me to institute a comment policy. I already had something like one on my user info page, but I'm not sure how many people look at that.

Comment policy

I like comments, especially those that disagree with me or challenge me to think further, as such comments encourage me to grow and learn. I don't like or need comments that undermine my narrative of my own experience or suggest, no matter how subtly, that I or my friends aren't fully human or shouldn't be treated equally to others; as abuse doesn't encourage me to grow and learn. This journal is heavily moderated; if you object to that, please seek out a different forum.

If you comment, I have a few requests:

Refrain from phobic or discriminatory speech, or speech that (in the words of s.e. smith) suggests that "people don't deserve autonomy, dignity, and a place in society."
Refrain from comments that have the effect of silencing or derailing (see Derailing for Dummies for additional examples).
As a corollary, refrain from questioning the existence of privilege or systematic oppression. There are many resources available online and offline for learning about these issues.
Provide a name or pseudonym that reflects a consistent online presence (as opposed to so-called "throwaway" or "sockpuppet" identities).

My journal settings don't allow comments that are completely anonymous, but it's easy to set up an effectively anonymous account, though I'll still see your IP address. I do screen all comments from people not on my Dreamwidth access lists. The last rule isn't hard-and-fast, as there are good reasons for allowing anonymous comments. However, if you violate rule #1 and/or #2, and do it anonymously, I’m very unlikely to publish your comment. If you violate rules #1 or #2 repeatedly, I will ban your account from commenting.

Just as I'm allowed to decide who's allowed in and what goes on in my living room, the same goes for my journal. I reserve the right to:

Moderate comments from people not known to me.
Not publish your comment at all or delete it after it’s been published.
Restrict comments for a particular post, or never allow them in the first place.
Make any comments on this blog public, even when I have screening enabled by default. When you write a comment on this blog, you should assume it will be visible to everyone on the Web. (This doesn't apply to respectful comments if you explicitly ask that they not be made public.)
Repost any comment as part of a public post. (See previous item.)
Modify these rules at any time.

This policy is adapted from Christie Koehler's comment policy.

All I did today was work on the POPL paper. I should probably not *just* do that until the POPL deadline, but it is slightly tempting, given that the last bug I looked at involved scary runtime system stuff. I don't want to talk about the content of the (yet-to-be-submitted) paper much since I'm not the primary author, but you can read a related blog post from Niko if you're curious what the paper was about.

Not directly related to research, but indirectly related as various events have meant that this issue has, once again, been compromising my ability to focus on it: Mozilla still lacks a code of conduct, and that's a problem. The Rust project itself does have a code of conduct; I wish the Mozilla community as a whole could do the same and come to a basic agreement that in this community, we do not arbitrarily exclude people -- and their contributions -- based on traits as opposed to behavior, and that we do not tolerate harassment or insults based on membership in protected classes.

I've got a much longer post about related issues (which won't be posted under the "research" tag, though it might be linked) coming up sometime this month. I hope folks will pardon the foray into not-exactly-research in this post; people write code and being a person who writes code isn't all about formal rules and symbol manipulation.

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Jul. 3rd, 2012

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