#014

Ph.D

I’ve finished all the corrections! I also got in touch with my supervisor to find out the next steps: he suggests I write a document briefly saying how I addressed each correction before resubmitting. The good news is that there can be a further round of minor corrections; so if I’ve missed something out I can get a further three months to address that before the final final deadline.

I was only working on Monday and Tuesday this week, from Wednesday onwards I’ve been on leave, and will be back at work on the 2nd of January.
On Monday I got called in the evening about the site having issues (I’ve been on call since last Wednesday), where it seemed that our VMs were having difficulty talking to each other. After a fairly fruitless half an hour of debugging with the other on-call dev, the problem went away by itself. At the moment we suspect a network issue with our hosting provider.

A couple of the recent Advent of Code challenges have involved disassembling code for a fictional CPU. These can be pretty fun, but a bit tricky to solve if you’re not familiar with how higher-level constructs like loops and conditionals get compiled into jumps.

For example, Day 19 involved a program which computed the sums of the divisors of a large number. The fictional CPU doesn’t have division, so it worked by using loops, additions, and multiplications. There’s a tale of my reverse engineering in my solution, which I might write up as a full memo (along with the other related puzzles), as there are a few different techniques involved.
I’m now visiting family until the 29th.
This memo is a day late because time doesn’t exist during holidays.