Viewing profile — ausimian

Live in Sydney and have had the cockatoos in our bins a few times in the past six months. They’re pretty brazen too, caught them at it a while ago and they carried on like I wasn’t…

I think that's fair. It's been described elsewhere as 'exhaustively testable pseudocode'.

I used it for the first time in firmware design at MSFT a few years ago, and I've used it since in the areas of protocol design. I don't use it frequently but it's a tool I'm glad …

Nicely put. In my nearly three decades of software development, the most successful of my various colleagues have been the ones motivated by understanding the problem and its wider…

VCC[1] was a substantial piece of research from MSR aimed at supporting the verification of C (not C++) via a theorem prover. However, it appears in a study[2] of its application t…

I learnt and used TLA+ while working at msft, and I'm still using it today: - anytime I have some protocol or state machine whose behaviour isn't obvious, I write a TLA+ spec. - th…

I understand that someone at Microsoft Research once found a bug in the XB360's memory subsystem by model checking a TLA+ spec of it. The story goes that IBM initially refused to b…

1. It took too long to start. 2. Navigating between specific pages of the app was slow. 3. It would sometimes get into a bad state if a podcast failed during streaming, requiring a…

I was a long time user until yesterday. Due to working at MSFT, I had been on the 7/8 windows phone train for a few years with a few devices, latterly a 925. I'm not a power user, …

I concur with both these statements, but would widen the former slightly to say that it helps you think (and then validate your thinking) about any non-trivial state-machine - it d…

"...and wasted the rest" to quote the late George Best.

Hololens already runs x86 natively. What did you have in mind?

I've used TLA+ professionally in a previous role and found it useful. I'd agree with the sentiments in the GG discussion: 1. A repl would be useful. 2. Better documentation for the…

Yep, exactly the same thing happened to my wife's iMac two weeks ago. Bought it in the US 4 years ago, private sale, reputable owner (senior MS exec if I remember, bought it for hi…