I’m taking a quick “vacation” from Summer of Code and traveled down to San Diego for my first time. Actually, officially I’m here with my UIUC research group for the Federated Computer Research Conference (FCRC) to attend the International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA) – also my first time at one of these types of conferences (but there’ll be plenty more as I continue the Ph.D. program). FCRC is a combination of a bunch of other conferences, so there’ll be sessions about programming languages, theory, and more – it’ll be interesting to hear about the exciting new research in those fields as well.

The flight from San Jose was just over an hour, and we landed in the Commuter Terminal (so if you ever have a short flight out of SAN, make sure to go to CT and not Terminal 1 or 2). I met up with another of my advisor’s Ph.D. students, and we taxied to the hotel/convention center and took the trolley to Old Town to find some dinner.. mexican food! I’m sure there’ll be plenty more in the days to come before I leave Wednesday night.

About to land at SAN – flying past the baseball stadium

The last several days were.. filled with activity – gathering data and preparing a paper submission to MICRO-40. It’s my first time to submit a paper, and it’s mostly the research I did during the Masters portion of the degree, so it’ll be interesting to see how things work out.

Yay for screen multiplexing! Perhaps it’s more useful for my 12″ iBook G4, but ssh + screen to keep console sessions running from a single terminal is very useful when moving around remotely. Add in vim‘s own document splitting.. I’ve got 10+ virtual windows with many more subwindows to edit scripts like crazy. All this is going on with X windows opening and closing as tests start and finish…

After 100s of emails and last minute changes.. time for a nap.

Running a ton of tests remotely – X windows everywhere!

Wow. Such a long entry that it needs 2 parts? Well, I just wanted to separate the after-race excitement from the during-race fun. And because there’s too much text in the first part, I’ll just put pictures of places that Team UIUC visited.

Pacific Ocean + tons of wind = sandy beach

Our ride back to downtown decided to block traffic instead

Looking down Pierce from Castro

Corner of Duboce and Church = Castro Coffee

Powell Street Muni Station has an Apple Store

A very sunny day at Union Square

Today was the annual Bay to Breakers race that runs across San Francisco – starting on the east side on Embarcadero (next to the San Francisco Bay), cutting across the city and the Golden Gate Park, and coming out to meet the Pacific Ocean. The Mozilla people planned to meet at Cupid’s Span to prepare for the race and pass out Firefox swag, and I found some of them at the Mountain View Caltrain station at 6am.

Sunny day in SF from Cupid’s Span

The train was packed with a ton of people – some of which were race participants, but the majority were going for the “parade.” The latter group had all sorts of costumes dressing up like superheros or McDonald products (fries, milkshakes, Hamburglar). Quite a few people brought refreshments (some loaded up with shopping carts), but these drinks aren’t the ones that help them go faster in the race.. not that they were worried about getting to the finish line in the first place.

By the time we got to San Francisco, there was a huge crowd, so I walked towards the starting point with some UIUC friends hoping to eventually find the Mozilla people later. We made a quick stop to grab some drinks and breakfast, but by the time we finished, the race had started promptly at 8am, so the Mozilla people were nowhere to be found at the meeting spot.

So I decided to take some detours through the city following one street off of the main parade to later catch up with Team UIUC. The nice part about not getting lost in the crowd is that I could take stops and examine the various decorations around the city. Also interesting to note was that as I ran down the street parallel to the main race, there were extremely long lines of cars going in the other direction – seems like the only way to downtown San Francisco from south of the race was going to the Bay and up Embarcadero.

Art at the Child Development Center

1 hour 41 minutes in and not even halfway

Highest intersection of the race (3mi mark)

I soon caught up to my friends, and we witnessed all sorts of interesting sights to see (and some you don’t want to see). The entrance to the Golden Gate Park is near the 4 mile mark, and this is where many people left the race to party party party with plenty of drinks and music and crazy outfits to go around.

Arrr matey.. one of the many floats

Team UIUC finished the race with a time just over 3 hours – not that we began at 8am or the starting line..

Windy end of the race (but still sunny)