Michael Weber: Random Bits and Pieces

Your Vote Decides!

2007-05-13 :: /rants
Eurovision Song Contest 2007 (Logo)

Quoting from the article Radical Serbia speaker steps down (source: The Beeb, emphasis mine):

Earlier, opposition MP Nenad Canak said Mr Nikolic's nationalist and anti-European stand no longer had a place - especially as Serbia had just won the Eurovision Song Contest.

Mr Canak said Serbia's neighbours had all awarded his country maximum points in the contest. But Russia, described by Mr Nikolic as Serbia's only friend, had only awarded his country five points.

Clearly, five points are not enough to prove friendship, don't you see?

New Paper

An Embeddable Virtual Machine for State Space Generation (accepted for publication to SPIN 2007).

Abstract

The semantics of modelling languages are not always specified in a precise and formal way, and their rather complex underlying models make it a non-trivial exercise to reuse them in newly developed tools. We report on experiments with a virtual machine-based approach for state space generation. The virtual machine's (VM) byte-code language is straightforwardly implementable, facilitates reuse and makes it an adequate target for translation of higher-level languages like the SPIN model checker's PROMELA, or even C. As added value, it provides efficiently executable operational semantics for modelling languages. Several tools have been built on top of the VM implementation we developed, to evaluate the benefits of the proposed approach.

This is one pixel in a bigger picture.