I’ve got ten minutes till I get the bus so here’s an update. I’m going for a beer with Sebastian who is working on some automata with the exact properties that we have been looking for the past six months,
- determinism,
- minimal normal form,
- calculus to guard against stupid programming errors (realated to the normal form).
The complexity of his model ain’t half bad either. They’re MSOTT or monadic second order logic based tree translators.
At the moment there are five of us on the course, but we’re expecting another three. So untill they get here I have an office to myself 
GuangWu is Chinese and my room mate, he’s easy to get on with and has a good sense of humor. Zelat is Romanian with perfect English, Tero (her nickname) is Mongolian, but has been studyong in Japan for a few years and Mihai who is also Romanian and kind of our guide. There’s a large Romanian contingent here as there seems to be a large community of Romanian formal language researchers, presumably in part to do with Prof. Solomon Marcus and others like Paun. Four of the five speakers I have heard so far are Romanian.
The accomodation, as I have said, is decent. The food is decent too. The Spanish seem to keep to strange hours though. We start at 9:00 in the morning (bus at 8:20) and break for lunch at 13:00. Lunch is in a large canteen building which we share with several secondary schools. I forgot to mention that the lecture theatre and my office are not actually in the University campus, but are in Chernobyl. Or at least that’s what they call it. The surrounds are one of the largest petro-chemical industrial parks in Europe. The park is huge, so large that Mihai informed me that due to a terrrorist treat a few years ago, the whole city of Tarragona had to be evacuated!
Anyway, back to lunch, which finishes at 15:00. We finish our day at 21:00, but Sebastian finished his lecture early today so I’ve time to type this. I’ve been doing work when I get back to the residence, but I won’t tonight (even though I need to). I think I can postpone it untill Saturday.
Gotta go for the bus…Can someone email me when the Gentoo ebuilds for Gnome 2.6 are ready, as I’ve no time to poll their server (I’m looking at you Vish).