All Things Distributed

Some random news

I was out of the office for most of last week, if not physically then at least my head was, so blogging was moved to second place. Some things that did happen during that period:

• The paper Chris Re and I wrote about our prototype membership & failure detection protocol, ws-membership, based on ws-coordination was accepted for the web-services track of WWW2003. There is still quite a bit wrong with this paper, but instead of fixing both the research and the paper, I am waiting until we are further with the high-performance router and the choreography runtime components before writing new text.
• Chris was accepted into the PhD program at UWash, where he will be their new star in systems research for the coming 4 years. Look for his papers in SOSP 2005 and 2007.
• For the Middleware 2003 conference it was decided not to have an in-person Program Committee meeting because of the time consuming nature of the meeting. I am now sure I will spend more time writing emails about which papers to accept, than I would have if we would have had a real meeting. I strongly believe you cannot build a high quality program without a face-to-face meeting to weed out the errors that slip into reviews based on numbered ranking.
• The group of students that will work on newswire this semester got started. Our first target is to demo newswire at BOOM, the Cornell showcase of digital technology projects.
• The Samsung SyncMaster 240T (24" LCD, see the January 16 posting) arrived. It is absolutely fabulous. I am now looking for graphics cards that can handle the DVI bandwidth correctly for 1900x1200, suggestions are welcome. I'll make some pictures once I have it completely installed.