My thesis is nearly complete. I defend tommorrow, 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 tommorrow 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 tommorrow 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. It doesn't help that Larry is hard to read---I am never sure if he's happy with an answer or not. Actually, I do know---when he repeats it as an answer to someone else. But, he rarely does that with my work; but I've seen him do it with things that Jon Orwant or Nat Torkington has said.

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.