About
I’m Chris Bunch, a third-year Ph.D. student studying Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara (official page here). This blog is my personal outlet for recapping information I pick up across my days doing research. It mostly varies from reading various books to what I do in my classes (and research related to my field), although occasionally some weird ethics and politics stuff will creep in. Because the point of this blog is to complain or note the various experiences I undertake (and generally are me thinking out loud), posts by default don’t allow comments. Occasionally when looking at new programming languages or weird tech stuff I do allow comments (since that’s the time when input from the world is useful), so don’t take it personally if comments are turned off.
My research is all over the map at the moment, but right now I’m looking at cloud computing and programming languages. I’m also on a Ruby binge (And Then There Was Ruby…) so that is ends up being a mix-in of sorts to my current research. My research as of right now is AppScale, an open-source platform that you can run Google App Engine apps on. There’s a tech report describing all the details of it here (pdf) and a much shorter version here.
The name for the blog came from an ancient (by CS standards) distributed systems paper, “The Byzantine Generals Problem”, about distributed fault tolerance and a particularly interesting class of problems that can show up. Take a look at it; it’s got many pretty pictures!
Every once in a while I review the current book or paper I’m reading. Those of you keeping score at home will note that I tend to give the books I read very positive reviews and recommend that you read them. This is because…I tend to read books I’m already excited about. I don’t go out and read books that I think will be terrible. If I start reading a book and it’s bad, I put it down. I don’t sludge through it and torture myself, so as a result, the books I actually do finish are ones that I happen to like. Negative comments usually are nitpicks or usability complaints, but most of them aren’t that big of a deal.
I’m not really that active on any of the social networking sites, but I do meander around on Stack Overflow every once in a while. Although there’s no real way to contact users, you can always see what questions I’ve asked and answers I’ve given on my user page (it sometimes is a glimpse into the work I’m doing as well).