Draft Thrist Paper Online

I am happy to announce that my thrist paper I've been working on more than a year is now complete, and downloadable from my ad-hoc web directory. Completeness does not mean absence of errors or lack of room for improvement. If you like my paper and would like to improve the presentation please contact me. You can find my e-mail address in my profile. I am happy for every comment, though I cannot guarantee that I will pick it up. Please consider that this is still a draft so it should not be passed on and also please do not cite or link to it, as all links will break when the final version comes out.

It has been quite a fight to get this far. I started out April 2007, and the initial e-mails turned into a paper of several pages. But then life took over. My wife in final days of pregnancy needed my support, my daughter was born. Everybody who has been through such events knows that it is a different mode of living. Sleep deprivation and all that...

Also, while I have started several papers already, I have never gotten around to finish one. This was quite traumatic, and this time I had sufficient resolve to get through. Hopefully more follow.

A final word: the formatting of source code sometimes line-breaks in ugly ways. The reason is that the format may change to one column page and then all is right. This depends on the channel how the paper gets published. Updates may happen next week, but July 18 is my absolute deadline.

Enjoy.

Clang Server?

Sometimes things happen that sound like a miracle. There is this guy, Peter, who signs up for Google SoC, with mentor and all. The project plan is to come up with a distcc-like parallel/distributed compilation scheme, only with clang, the aspiring LLVM C frontend.
He gets the deal, but the weeks run away, and no signs of any progress. Peter is missing in action.
Then, suddenly this weekend: a status report.
I did not look at the attached patch, but he promises a working compile server, no less!

Things I hate

Each year the same tragicomedy. Filling out my tax declaration. After procrastinating the first half of the year, and seeing that everybody else already has done it. Being dragged kicking and screaming by my wife (I love her nevertheless). Sometimes I even volunteer to do the stuff.
But every time I read the forms I do not understand how to fill in the right values. The words make so little sense to me. Even if I figured it out last year, it has almost no value, I have already forgotten it. So I can only stare at the last year's form and try to find the corresponding box, which is not so easy since the boxes tend to wander around. I usually give up and opt for another messed-up evening.

And now there are the tax papers for my wife also to be done, yes, her company is new and the bureaucracy requests 12 reports a year and a final declaration. That is not enough, this all has to be made official and another two exemptions handed in till end of May.

Welcome to Germany!

I definitely prefer programming to this.