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IBM Programming Languages Day 2010

Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

IBM Programming Languages Day

July 29, 2010, Hawthorne NY

The eleventh annual Programming Languages Day will be held at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center on Thursday, July 29, 2010. The day will be held in cooperation with the New Jersey and New England Programming Languages and Systems Seminars. The main goal of the event is to increase awareness of each other’s work, and to encourage interaction and collaboration.

The Programming Languages Day features a keynote presentation and approximately 8 regular presentations. Prof. Doug Lea, State University of New York at Oswego, will deliver the keynote presentation this year.

If you would like to present your work, please send a title and abstract to etorlak@us.ibm.com by June 23, 2010. Tutorials or joint presentations are welcomed. We also solicit input on topics or particular presentations that would be of interest to attendees.

Abstracts will be selected by a committee consisting of Adriana Compagnoni, Stevens Institute of Technology; Joshua Guttman, Worcester Polytechnic Institute; and Emina Torlak, IBM Research. Notification of accepted abstracts will be sent by approximately June 30, 2010.

You are welcome from 9AM onwards, and the keynote presentation will start at 10AM sharp. We expect the program to run until 4PM. The Programming Languages day will be held in room GN-F15 in the Hawthorne-1 building in Hawthorne, New York.

If you plan to attend the Programming Languages Day, please register by sending an e-mail with your name, affiliation, contact information, and dietary restrictions to etorlak@us.ibm.com so that we can plan for lunch and refreshments.

Important Dates:

Talk title and abstract deadline: June 23rd
Acceptance notification: June 30th
PL Day 2010: July 29th

Program committee:

Adriana Compagnoni, Stevens Institute of Technology
Joshua Guttman, Worcester Polytechnic Institute
Emina Torlak, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center

Posted in Technology | No Comments »

Compositional Freedom — The True Path to Simplicity

Monday, March 15th, 2010

Advocates of the iPad and its locked down single vendor store based kin contend that End Users will gladly trade a nearly complete loss of freedom for stripped down user interfaces with fewer bugs that save them from having to make choices. Gone are the days of General Purpose Computing, computers are destined to devolve into consumption oriented appliances where End Users will forever be paying for each and every scrap of restored functionality.

But there is another path. The path taken by programming languages like Lisp and Scheme and by internally extensible software applications like Spreadsheets (host to the most common form of End User Programming) and recent Hypertext environments. Such systems, offer a range of powerful primitives that can be combined in an infinite number of ways to meet any given End User’s personal needs. They empower End Users to craft their own solutions or to mix and match components from other sources. They don’t discriminate between commercial and non-commercial solutions, since no one economic model is best at meeting real world needs, nor can any one vendor know which tools are best.

An optimal workflow will often draw on both free and proprietary software and when found, it should be possible to encapsulate such a solution so it can be shared. Indeed, it is this sort of compositional freedom that holds the greatest potential to empower End Users and simplify life.

Posted in Consumer Advocacy, Technology | No Comments »

The iPad — A Garden of Pure Ideology

Monday, February 1st, 2010

Rarely does a company have the opportunity to remake an industry and create the Next Big Thing.

Sometimes, as in the case of the Apple Newton, the technology isn’t quite mature enough to deliver on its potential until the marketing damage caused by a poor first impression is irreparable to the brand.

Other times arrogance, avarice, and a failure of vision conspire to cripple a new device, before it even reaches the hands of its potential End Users. Such is the case of Apple’s much vaunted iPad which is only a worthy successor for the Screen of the Newton.

With a decade to improve on that truly innovative creation, we expected no less than a new OS with multi-touch support, as well as a stylus to drive state-of-the-art handwriting recognition, a forward facing cam for video-conferencing, preemptive multitasking, a zoomable interface, a full compliment of standard USB, ethernet, firewire, and solid state memory card ports, a core of deeply integrated notetaking, sketching, and communications modules with an open architecture allowing them to be extended in unforeseen directions, a fresh platform-wide programming language to simplify such development, User Swappable power packs, and an option for wireless video out to an optional transceiver that could be plugged into industry standard projectors.

We expected the freedom to purchase or develop additional software, without paying to join an Apple Developer Program or having to purchase only Apple Sanctioned content through an Apple Store that will probably add to our costs. We would have gladly paid a premium above even laptop prices for the kind of game changer Apple could have offered.

What we were offered was little more than an oversized iPod Touch optimized to act as a mobile cash register to fill Apple’s till.

The old Apple Computer understood that its End Users wanted power and freedom and were willing to pay a premium to have it. Perhaps even more importantly, it believed that we were intelligent individuals and not stupid drones needing to be coddled and told what to think.

How ironic that the face on the giant video wall dictating to the unwashed masses should be none other than that of Steve Jobs himself. Welcome to 1984.

Yet again, Apple has betrayed its core values.

At the IEUC, we still believe in End Users and Open Innovation and look forward to seeing what the rest of the industry will develop to leapfrog this latest affront to common sense.

Posted in Consumer Advocacy, Technology, The Executive Director's Personal Log | No Comments »

Free Anti-Virus Roundup, Part 3 — ClamAV

Thursday, January 14th, 2010

For users of Unix and Linux, the most comprehensive free anti-virus solution is the venerable ClamAV.

This open source project licensed under the GPL will thoroughly scrub your system of known threats to any platform. Its database of malware signatures is frequently updated and the system has a number of graphical front ends.

A new native port for Windows is still in the works, but there is already an older unsupported ClamAV for Windows and a ClamWin as well as a ClamXav 2.0 Public Beta that runs under the latest release of OS X for Mac Users.

While the various ClamAV GUI’s tend to produce too much low level feedback on what the tool is doing, the system gets the job done which is what really matters most in this space.

Also see Part 1 & Part 2 of this series.

Posted in Linux, OS X, Platforms, Security, Technology, Unix, Windows | 2 Comments »

Free Anti-Virus Roundup, Part 2 — iAntiVirus

Wednesday, January 13th, 2010

If you are a home user and your platform of choice is the Mac, you can find a rather elegant and free OS X anti-virus solution in PC Tools iAntiVirus.

Note however that iAntiVirus won’t catch any non-mac threats, so if someone sends you a file with a windows virus you are still at risk of passing it on to friends. Nevertheless, it will catch known Mac viruses and trojans and since there are fewer of these on the Mac side, the scan will generally run at a good clip.

The company also has a subscription version of the tool with technical support for business users.

Alternatively, all Mac users can look at ClamXav (see tomorrow’s post).

Also see Part 1 & Part 3 of this series.

Posted in OS X, Platforms, Security, Technology | 1 Comment »

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