Looking for the PL group at IU? Go here to subscribe for talk schedules and other updates:

http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/pl-wonks

http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/145

Armed with a backhoe and a handful of markers, Deborah Gordon studies ant colonies in the Arizona desert. She asks: How do these chitinous creatures get down to business -- and even multitask when they need to -- with no language, memory or visible leadership? Her answers could lead to a better understanding of all complex systems, from the brain to the Web.

Pretty neat talk.

Sometimes you've got to scratch an itch. So here goes:

X-Zylo
http://www.xzylo.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GavWPxAAlY

GyroBall: A Japenese Baseball Pitching technique
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyroball

Dyna Flex Gyro Ball Gyroscope
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nC5AjM2NI_c

Stirling Engine
http://www.gyroscope.com/catalog.asp?catalog=1014
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vM0YmlRIYBI

Gyroscope
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WbbfzMH2to

The Controversy generating Royal Institute talk by Eric Laithwaite
http://www.gyroscopes.org/1974lecture.asp
(Its a bit funny actually)

XStream: Internal Wing Aircraft
http://www.rexresearch.com/carrcoan/carrcoan.htm

Winshurst Machine (Voltage Generator)
http://www.physlink.com/estore/cart/WimshurstMachine.cfm

Maxwell Wheel
http://www.physlink.com/estore/cart/MaxwellsWheel.cfm

Levitron
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iv8msBamA3M

Radiometer (Light Mill)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Zd70sOcYOQ

Got more?

Common Larceny

Common Larceny is a Scheme runtime implementation on the Common Language Runtime.  One more chip in the usage of dynamic languages on the CLR. More details of the project here -

http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/will/Larceny/

Robotics4.Net

Robotics for .Net is run by a bunch of geeks who have robots and API that run on .Net. I had been out of touch with Antonio Cisternino for while after our discussions on implementation of closures in C# and further… It looks like Antonio has been making brilliant use of his time since then. Among other goodies on the site you would find Antonio’s Annotated C# language and something that said that its VC++ API for controlling Robosapien that runs on a WinCE box.

http://robotics4.net/default.aspx

Spamming the Spammer

This actually sounded nice. Worth a look - discusses a screen saver from Lycos that discourages spammers by spamming their servers using unused bandwidth.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4051553.stm

MSDN Mag

Some things to say – the MSDN magazine has hit news stands in India, that too at an affordable price of 60 rupees a copy. Worth taking a look. Most people simply don’t even know about MSDN mag, so take a look here to get an idea of what it is like:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/

Additionally this is an India edition of the magazine so it has some information about the folk you should be getting in touch with in India, articles from some folk here and the community effort and such, in addition to the regular technical content.

Email

A friend forwarded this mail to me and it felt so 1984 like.

> -------- Original Message --------

> Subject: [Fsf-friends] Re: DotNet

> Date: Wed, 27 Oct 2004 06:48:28 -0400

> From: Richard Stallman

> Reply-To: rms@gnu.org

>

>  >Re the request by Microsoft to speak at the Hyderabad usergroup on

> >DotNet,

>

> I am not sure what the "Hyderabad usergroup" means, but anyone who

> advocates freedom should not offer a proprietary software developer a

> platform to present a practical discussion of a proprietary software

> product.

>

> Such discussion focuses on the practical characteristics of the

> software, and therefore makes the implicit assertion that, "There is

> no ethical issue with this software, therefore the interesting things

> about it are its technical capabilities and merits/demerits."  We need

> to reject that assumption, and the best way is not to offer them a

> platform at all.

The context here is that someone at MS offered to speak the local Linux UG at Hyderabad. I don’t know why I bother so much. Somewhere my personal definition of freedom made it a superset of choice.

(more) 1984

Speaking of 1984 and I am taking the risk of being politically incorrect here, but someone forwarded this to me: http://observer.guardian.co.uk/magazine/story/0,11913,1323246,00.html

I feel sorry for these people. I personally strongly feel against wrong like this.

CEC

Just giving an early heads up to folk who are watching – this is going to be an interesting thing in the future. Something that is going to form the basis of compelling and winning arguments – Microsoft Common Engineering Criteria.

Common Engineering Criteria

While every component of Windows Server System is already very good on its own, they can be better still, both as individual products and as part of an integrated system. Microsoft is establishing a common set of guidelines and requirements that each server must meet. Starting with the Windows Server System product releases for 2005, Microsoft is increasing its focus on improving the servers with common engineering criteria, with a goal of eventually delivering a unified group of products that provide what customers really need to simplify their IT environment.

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem/overview/commoncriteria.mspx

To throw some ideas in, think of WMI and then think of Monad and then think of WSH and then think of CEC and then use your imagination.

Exec Mail from SteveB

This was just released -

Customer Focus: Comparing Windows with Linux and UNIX

http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/execmail/2004/10-27platformvalue.asp

My Collected Articles

I decided to collect urls of some of my longer entries here, things I think are of lasting significance and have put them up with some of my other articles. Some of the blog entries need a little more polish before they can be considered as standalone articles though. If there is something that you are looking for, chances are that you may find it here:

http://www.thinkingms.com/pensieve/homepage/articles/articles_tech.htm

JRuby

I didn’t know that this beast existed. This is a Ruby port to the JVM.

http://jruby.sourceforge.net

JRuby is a pure Java implementation of the Ruby interpreter, being developed by the JRuby team.

JRuby is free software released under a dual GPL/LGPL license.

JRuby is tightly integrated with Java to allow both to script any Java class and to embed the interpreter into any Java application.

A Little Ruby, A Lot of Objects

This is good fun to take a look at. This also talks a bit about Ruby’s meta-class hackery

http://web.archive.org/web/20030618203059/visibleworkings.com/little-ruby/

This is a draft book titled A Little Ruby, A Lot of Objects. It's in the style of Friedman and Felleisen's wonderful The Little Lisper (now called The Little Schemer), but on a different topic. From the preface:

Welcome to my little book. In it, my goal is to teach you a way to think about computation, to show you how far you can take a simple idea: that all computation consists of sending messages to objects. Object-oriented programming is no longer unusual, but taking it to the extreme - making everything an object - is still supported by only a few programming languages.

Can I justify this book in practical terms? Will reading it make you a better programmer, even if you never use "call with current continuation" or indulge in "metaclass hackery"? I think it might, but perhaps only if you're the sort of person who would read this sort of book even if it had no practical value.

The real reason for reading this book is that the ideas in it are neat. There's an intellectual heritage here, a history of people building idea upon idea. It's an academic heritage, but not in the fussy sense. It's more a joyous heritage of tinkerers, of people buttonholing their friends and saying, "You know, if I take that and think about it like this, look what I can do!"

Schemers.org

A website about Scheme

http://www.schemers.org

Another American Pie Spoof : Bye Bye Mr CIO Guy

This is titled “Bye Bye Mr CIO guy” and is performed by Pat Helland, David Chappell and Don Box at the Europe TechEd. This is just hilarious. I highly recommend this for your free time.

http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=11950

I just had to drop these links at the expense of a separate entry, for them.

http://primates.ximian.com/~miguel/archive/2004/Jun-08.html

http://primates.ximian.com/~miguel/archive/2004/May-31.html

(The Marcelo in the last picture on this entry is Marcelo Tosatti – Maintainer of the Linux kernel)

There are reasons why many of my friends who work non Linux technologies are generally treat work on Linux as user hostile and generally immature. I personally think that while the majority of the Linux crowd may have their head in the clouds, the serious programmers are the same sort of the free style systems hackers that we idealize – despite the difference in technologies. I appreciate these folk for their spirit and sometimes for sheer smartness.

This is a tremendously exciting time to be thinking about programming languages and language research. I recently I have come across a lot of material that has made me think a lot.

Polyphonic C#

http://research.microsoft.com/%7Enick/polyphony/

            This is a C# like language that is built for concurrency control. Amazing piece of thought exercise there. I recommend looking at Modern Concurrency Abstraction for C#.

Xen/X# from Microsoft Research

Xen basically proposes to extend the C# language to better data handling support into the language. 

Unifying Tables Objects and Documents

This should give you a good idea of X#. This is by Erik Meijer of MSR.

Programming with Circles, Triangles and Rectangles

More – interesting reading.

C Omega

http://research.microsoft.com/Comega/

A combination of Xen and Polyphonic C#.

You might want to download this ppt that discusses C Omega by none other than Damian Watkins of MSR.

Groovy

http://groovy.codehaus.org/

            Groovy is the Ruby like language for the JVM. Ruby itself takes from the power of dynamic object oriented-ness that was so characteristic of smalltalk and whips a powerful expressive language on it. The thing is that Groovy also builds in Xen like concepts.

You might want to download this ppt that discusses Groovy by James Strachan co-author of groovy.

Self

http://research.sun.com/self/language.html

An old language from Sun Microsystems. Reading up about self makes you appreciate the spirit of many message passing and prototypes and cloning based pure object oriented systems.

I am not mentioning functional languages here because it is not fair to put up stuff I have no clue about. I must say this is an amazing time to be interested in programming languages.

Abilon

Found Abilon tday, an nice RSS viewer and more. I have shifted from Beaver to Abilon for good (I think).

http://www.activerefresh.com/abilon/

A Benchmark I find very hard to believe

Here is a benchmark that shows C# to be faster than gcc C (???)

http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=5602

Altair BASIC programming language

This still sounds so fairytale like

http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/Altair%20BASIC%20programming%20language

Informal Language Comparison Chart(s)

This is something rather intersting to have a link to. Follow the link to see comparison of several program languages in all sorts of ways. If you are a languages/runtimes connoisseur then this is a highly recommended link to try.

http://www.smallscript.org/Language%20Comparison%20Chart.asp

Defining the Game (Miguel De Icaza)

This is a link to blog entry by Miguel De Icaza – coauthor of MC, Mono, Gnome. It is nice, even refreshing to see open source in this form: nothing better than a good technical argument with both feet on the ground. And I do appreciate this man for giving credit to MS where credit is due and yet be willing to stand his ground and compete at the risk of loosing.

http://primates.ximian.com/~miguel/archive/2004/Apr-24.html

Joel Pobar’s Blog

Joel Pobar’s blog is a good mature resource for info about Rotor, the CLR and other stuff. If you have an interest in Rotor I recommend that you take a look.

http://blogs.msdn.com/joelpob/

Marcello Tosatti

The current maintainer of the Linux kernel.

http://kerneltrap.org/node/view/1880/5842

Marcelo Tosatti became the maintainer of the 2.4 stable kernel when he was 18 years old in November of 2001. His first kernel release was 2.4.16 on November 26'th which very quickly followed the earlier 2.4.15 to address an issue with filesystem corruption. Two years later, he has recently released 2.4.23 and plans to soon put the 2.4 stable kernel into maintenance mode, only addressing bugs and security issues.

Well, if you can handle a wife at age of 20, the kernel is nothing ;)

Yukihiro Matsumoto (Matz)

The author of the Ruby programming language.

http://www.artima.com/intv/craftP.html

Yukihiro Matsumoto, the creator of the Ruby language, talks with Bill Venners about becoming a better programmer through reading code, learning languages, focusing on fundamentals, being lazy, and considering interfaces.

Bill Venners: You also mentioned in your ten top tips: "Be lazy. Machines should serve human beings. Often programmers serve machines unconsciously. Let machines serve you. Do everything you can to allow yourself to be lazy." Why should I try to be lazy?

Yukihiro Matsumoto: You want to be lazy. You want to do anything to reduce your work. I work hard to reduce my work, to be lazy.

Miguel De Icaza

Coauthor of Mono, Gnome, MC.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/netframework/using/understanding/cli/default.aspx?pull=/library/en-us/dndotnet/html/deicazainterview.asp

Using the ECMA Standards: An Interview with Miguel de Icaza

In this interview, Miguel de Icaza, the founder of GNOME and Ximian, talks about UNIX components, Bonobo, Mono, and Microsoft .NET

Charles Simonyi

Microsoft Distinguished Engineer – the WYSIWYG, Hungarian Notation, Intentional Programming

http://www.edge.org/digerati/simonyi/simonyi_p2.html

"Intentional Programming"

A Talk With Charles Simonyi

("The WYSIWYG")

Chris Pratley’s blog

Now here is man.

Chris Pratley is Group Program Manager with Microsoft’s Authoring Services – Word, Publisher OneNote.. Recently he has had a sent of blog articles about Word that you simply got to read. Absolutely got to read them because he says it – and he says it so in-your-face.

Let's talk about Word (168 comments) - look at the number of comments on this – this is at the time when I am writing this

Word Myths and Feedback (38 comments)

More Word Feedback (25 comments)

More responses to comments on Word posts (18 comments)

(Thanks Sajith for pointing me at this)

An old Time magazine article on Bill Gates:
In Search of the Real Bill Gates

http://www.time.com/time/gates/cover0.html

A write up on Ruby by Matz himself:
The Ruby Programming Language

http://www.informit.com/articles/article.asp?p=18225&seqNum=2
The following is the outcome of a simple longest-word search program over
      /usr/share/dict/words (409067 bytes). These were tested on my Pentium-200MHz
      Linux machine.

Groovy programming language, reputed to be a lot Ruby like:
http://groovy.codehaus.org/

Groovy is a new agile dynamic language for the JVM combining lots of great features from languages like Python, Ruby and Smalltalk and making them available to the Java developers using a Java-like syntax.

(Groovy Entry)

Codehaus

Finally a project site that encourages the need to commercially use projects

http://codehaus.org/

The Codehaus differentiates itself from other similar efforts in several ways. The Codehaus places a firm priority on the production of useful code, and less on non-coding exercises such as voting, committee-forming and proposal-writing. Each project is provided autonomy to organize as it wishes and to address its own customer concerns and requirements directly. Codehaus is not entirely open to any and all projects. Projects must be sponsored or introduced through an informal manner by an existing haus-member and deemed to be "interesting".

Codehaus aims to support commercially useful projects, and thus does not sponsor or assist with projects licensed under the GPL or other business-hostile licenses.

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP)

If you are a fresher or are getting started on programming, or like thinking about programming I highly recommend reading the SICP.

http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/

"I think that it's extraordinarily important that we in computer science keep fun in computing. When it started out, it was an awful lot of fun. Of course, the paying customers got shafted every now and then, and after a while we began to take their complaints seriously. We began to feel as if we really were responsible for the successful, error-free perfect use of these machines. I don't think we are. I think we're responsible for stretching them, setting them off in new directions, and keeping fun in the house. I hope the field of computer science never loses its sense of fun. Above all, I hope we don't become missionaries. Don't feel as if you're Bible salesmen. The world has too many of those already. What you know about computing other people will learn. Don't feel as if the key to successful computing is only in your hands. What's in your hands, I think and hope, is intelligence: the ability to see the machine as more than when you were first led up to it, that you can make it more."

Alan J. Perlis (April 1, 1922-February 7, 1990)

After smoothing a out a few issues that dasBlog has, this blog is now functional. dasBlog requires that the user under whose permissions ASP.Net is running was write permissions to the folders - content, logs and siteconfig. On a win 2003 box ASP.Net runs as \NETWORK SERVICE.

So what you need to do, if you are setting up dasBlog, is to allow wirte permissions to our 3 folders.

This is also fine time to roll out some links:

Channel 9
Some folk at MS have dished out Channel 9. Channel 9 is where you can see into the big borg entity of MS and maybe come away with the feeling that they are not a big borg entity at all.
http://channel9.msdn.com/

IronPython: Python is being shifted to .Net by Jim Hugunin.
He is the same person who developed Jython, the Java implementation of python. .Net has been for sometime considered a difficult platform to shift to for dynamic languages such as Python and Ruby. Ruby might be a tad bit more difficult beacuse of all the tricks it does with continuations, closures, iterators and such.

http://www.hole.fi/jajvirta/weblog/20031210T0901.html
I'd guess that anyone who reads this weblog also reads Jeremy Hylton's weblog (which is in my opinion currently perhaps the best technical Python related weblog), but I still thought it was worthwhile to mention that the great Jim Hugunin has a new project, named IronPython, which is an implementation of Python for the Microsoft Common Language Runtime environment. The remarkable thing is that IronPython runs faster than the Python implementation in C according to the pystone benchmark. (See Hugunin's original message for full details.)