Fun Stuff

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A picture of a door in a rural town in Germany. (Pfaffenbichl, to be precise. Near Rosenheim, in Bavaria.) Photo courtesy of Dylan McNamee.

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Ceremony in Amsterdam

In The Netherlands, PhD candidates must wear white tie and tails, and the examiners are in gowns. (Note that my orange is very appropriate, as the color was chosen by Princeton in light of Nassau Hall (first building), which was named after William III of England, who was part of the House of Orange-Nassau.) Here is a picture of the examiners during the defense, and the reception after. The exam was of Alex Ballegooij at University of Amserdam.

 

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Singapore Flyer

Weekly (or so) write-ups from my third sabbatical year, at the National University of Singapore

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Wisconsin Journal

My collection of reports on travels and adventures during my second sabbatical year, at the University of Wisconsin

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Dateline France

My missives to friends and family during my first sabbatical year, in France

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Maier’s Maxim:

Any sufficiently popular data-interchange format will become a data-storage format.

Examples: HDF, netCDF, XML, FITS, RDF, JSON.

Once a system has to support exporting and importing data in a given format, there is incentive to store data locally in that format, rather than maintain a specialized one. The approach is not without problems. For example, some interchange formats expect files to be produced and scanned in their entireties, which means small updates and sub-item access can be slow. However, as an interchange format also becomes a storage format, its APIs are often extended to accommodate such use cases.

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Boom

The demise of my 89 Volvo

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The Gang at Princeton

This photo shows some of the EECS grad students and faculty at Princeton, in front of the E-Quad. From the people who are present, I'm guessing it was taken the summer of 1977 (but it could be 1978). Some of the folks pictured, besides myself, are Ed Sciore, Patrick Chen (?), Peter Honeyman, Udai Gupta, Carolyn Bjorklund, Shuky Sagiv, Shuky's wife Ilana (?), Alberto Mendelzon, Brad Dickinson (faculty), Mihalis Yannakakis, Mihalis's wife Maria-Elena, and Sam Toueg. The photo was courtesy of Alberto Mendelzon.

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