Bottling Day
The day after Christmas is Bottling Day! Laying down the Dark Ale for Autumn and Winter. I had racked it 4-5 days beforehand. Final gravity was 1.01, so it will be just under 5.5% ABV.
Author archives
Breaking the Fractal V Lifecycle?
Liming has raised three points in reference to my Fractal V Lifecycle. His questions are probing the limits of the model in interesting ways. Before I discuss them, I’d like to introduce a concept and some terminology from an earlier paper I wrote. The V model can accommodate as many levels of design abstraction as …
Fractal V Lifecycle for Pre-Project Activities
Louis has got a new article version of my earlier blog post on the Fractal V Lifecycle up on alinement.net magazine/community website. He’s also added some thoughts of his own on extending the concept into pre-project activities. For these sorts of activities I tend to favor putting them on top, i.e. on the left but …
Dark Ale Again
It’s been a madly busy year, with barely enough time to drink beer, let alone make any. But on the weekend I managed to find an hour to put on a new batch. Hopefully when the Christmas holidays come around in a couple of week I’ll find time to bottle it! I’ve gone with a …
Academic Academy Awards
I had to laugh at Liming’s latest micro-blog posting, Why are papers in top conferences very boring (these days)? It’s funny, but I’m not sure I entirely agree – I think top conferences do have interesting papers. Liming is saying interesting ideas won’t necessarily have had time to be well validated, and by the time …
Developing Whole Verified Embedded Systems
NICTA’s recent Techfest in Sydney saw a flurry of news around the announcement of a significant research achievement- the formal verification of the seL4 microkernel. The team developed a mathematical proof of the functional correctness of the microkernel down to the level of the C source code. The achievement is important for two reasons. Firstly, …
Reflections at WICSA
WICSA was fun. I usually find the most I can hope for in a conference is 1 or 2 papers that are really interesting, but I think WICSA cleared 5, so it was well worthwhile. What I particularly enjoy about conferences is hearing how people verbally describe the ideas and challenges in the field. You …
The BASE of CREST
Yesterday WICSA 2009 finished. There were a number of interesting talks over the three days of the conference. One was by Richard Taylor on Architectural Styles for Runtime Software Adaptation. He was discussing a framework (BASE) for comparing approaches to dynamic runtime adaptation. The model classifies how various architectural styles deal with Behavior, Asynchrony, State, …
The Next Big Thing?
How can you tell what the next big thing is going to be? Google’s pagerank algorithm will tell you what web pages have been important enough in the past for other people to have linked to. Google trends will tell you what search terms people have been using recently, again in the past. What …
Goannas Eat Bugs
After my PhD, I worked in industry on the verification and development of software for a safety-critical environmental control system. The project used a variety of tools and processes to improve and demonstrate product quality. However, the only static analysis tool being used was lint. I thought there had to be something better. As an …