It's been a long while since I last posted anything, I thought I would summarize a few of the things that have occurred lately. The first of which is that the research paper based on my graduate research was presented at the IEEE Cloud 2012 conference in Hawaii in June. Dr. Onat Yazir presented the work for me as I wasn't able to attend. For anyone interested, the paper can be found here.
In addition to this news, I have accepted a Linux Development position at Sophos (SophosLabs) in Vancouver BC. I have been there for about a month now and am having a lot of fun. In particular, I've been playing a lot with the Scala programming language. In combination with the 3rd-party Akka library, Scala provides an extremely powerful set of tools for building distributed systems using the Actor model. I must admit, I originally resisted many of the changes in thinking required for effective use of the Actor model and Scala, especially coming from my favouritism towards C and Python. Scala actors however, have begun to restore my faith in the JVM (what's that you say?). I suggest you give it a shot, I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.