Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2001/01/22/masters-complete.html

My thesis is nearly complete. I defend tomorrow, and as usual, I let
the deadline run up until the end. I just finished my slides for the
defense, and practiced once. I have some time in the schedule tomorrow to
practice at least once, although I have to find some empty room up at the
University to do it in.

I’ll be glad to be done. It’s been annoying to spend three or four
weeks here sitting around writing about perljvm, and not hacking on it. I
have a Cosource deadline coming up this week, so now’s a good a time as
any to release the first version of the Kawa-based perljvm.

I am really excited about how Kawa works, and how easy it is to massage
perl’s IR into Kawa’s IR. I got more excited about it as I wrote my thesis
defense talk. I really think great things can happen with Kawa in the
future.

Larry Wall is here, and we’ve had two dinners for the Cincinnati
GNU/Linux Users’ Group (who paid Larry’s way to come here). I was there,
and Larry was asking some hard-ish questions about Kawa. Not hard exactly,
just things I didn’t know. I began to realize how much I have focused on
the Kawa API, and I haven’t really been digging in the internals. I told
him I’d try to have some answers about it for my defense, and I will
likely reread Bothner’s papers on the subject tomorrow to get familiar
with how he deals with various issues.

It’s odd having Larry on my thesis committee. I otherwise wouldn’t be
nervous in the least, but I am quite worried with him on the
committee.

Anyway, so I defend tommorrow, then it’s into perljvm hacking again
right away on Tuesday to make the Cosource deadline, and then I have to
finish preparing my Perl tutorial for LinuxExpo Paris.