Sub Ubi

A number of projects I’m involved in could all use a Wiki. I need a wiki engine that:

• Can support multiple wikis under multiple domains
• Can run out of a DB or out of the filesystem
• Easily skinned
• Has RSS support

I might need other features as well, but those are the ones that come immediately to mind. Vanilla, Instiki, Twiki, MediaWiki/GetWiki, and MoinMoin all look like interesting choices. I’m not committed one way or another at the moment.

I was kicking around ideas for restructuring the Transterpreter website, and imagining it as a bunch of weblogs with static content. I’d be happy to use Wiki markup for documentation authoring, render it to LaTeX, and then use something like SLaTeX to produce clean PDF and HTML-versions of the LaTeX. (The PLT group uses SLaTeX for their books and documentation, and it looks good, I think.) The biggest reason I’m not keen on using a Wiki strictly for authoring documentation is that they often don’t translate well to print, and I’d really rather be able to produce both clean WWW and printable versions of our docs.

Anyway. I’ll be in Houston, TX, for the next week. I’ll forward my SkypeIn number (my US number) to my hotel room once I arrive, and should be reachable that way if need be.

… OK, I was one of nine authors, but that’s still a trick. Writing a book with 9 people—and still liking them when you’re done—is no small feat.

The text is already available on Amazon; it is titled “Studying Programming”, and because publishing houses don’t seem to like groups of people to be authors (for various legal reasons), Sally Fincher is the lead author on the text. It is fairly unique as a text: we’ve attempted to tackle the question of how a student should go about learning to program. This means we’ve tackled issues like how to utilize resources (textbooks, teachers, peers), how to go about tackling syntax and semantic errors in a program, the use of editors, and so on. In short, we’ve hit all the things that we’ve observed students struggling with, and not having any resources for getting started.

We all were primary authors on two chapters, and secondary on two. This means that many people took part in writing all of the text. I was the primary author of chapter 8 (“Writing Bigger Programs”) and chapter 11 (“Writing Your nth Program”), and added segments on Scheme and occam to the 16th chapter, titled “How Languages Differ” (I think it used to be “Here be Dragons”). Of course, almost everyone ended up touching every chapter in some way—for example, Colin worked through the Scheme example and contributed greatly to the quality of the text in that section, and the chapters saw many hands as we all proofed and revised each-other’s work. Really, it was a fun and challenging process.

I think the book is a fine piece of work, and fills a void in the world of texts available for novices learning to program. I believe it could be an excellent compliment to, say, Objects First With Java by Barnes and Kolling, or How to Design Programs, by Felleisen, Findler, Flatt, and Krishnamurthi.

Oh, and last, but not least—my most excellent housemate Ed provided illustrations for one of the chapters. Sadly, we failed to acknowledge his efforts in the text (not for want of trying—there’s a number of things that didn’t happen, despite repeated attempts on our part to make it happen). So, thank you Ed.

Now, everyone go order the book.

Software projects aren’t. The Transterpreter is a small and portable runtime for the occam programming language. However, there is more to the Transterpreter than just the TVM (the core interpreter). There are wrappers for each platform we target, the SWIG FFI generator, the toolchain (currently the slinker, and soon 42, our new compiler), as well as documentation, educational material (for use in the classroom), and applications. In our case, we have two primary areas of application—wireless sensor networks and robotics, both embedded contexts.

However, there’s a hidden aspect to the project that we have had our eyes on for some time, but really never kept up on—the WWW. The Transterpreter.org site was largely static when we first built it, and I believe that is inappropriate for reporting on the work we’re doing as a team. The goal is to have an easy way for us to publish updates and information pertaining to our work in a flexible form that can easily be subscribed to in several different ways.

Currently, our site is a collection of static pages, and one weblog where we post updates. I recently promoted that to the top-level of the site, as it was the most interesting/dynamic part of the site. However, I think I can take this much further. In the coming Transterpreter.org site reorganization, I’ll treat every aspect of the project as a flowing source of information and updates, easily aggregated and redistributed. Practically, this means that the Transterpreter.org website will become a collection of weblogs; it will be easy to add new weblogs, and they’ll all be aggregated through the main part of the site.

It is possible that we should just announce and discuss more about the Transterpreter on the mailing lists—in fact, I might encourage the group to begin doing so. However, people go to Google to find information when they’re stuck, and therefore exposing as much information as possible to search engines in a structured format that can be repackaged and repurposed (a DB-backed weblog exporting an RSS feed) seems to make a great deal of sense.

Selenium is a unit test framework for web-based applications. Open source.

VMWare Server is now free. I need to read up on it to understand why this is better, worse, or the same as VMWare Player. Either way, it follows from what Christian and I were saying yesterday about VMWare. Having recently put together a virtual machine for deployment to our students (more coming on the Transterpreter weblog shortly), it’s clear that VMWare is trying to establish a broader market share now. The reason isn’t 100% obvious, but they’re making the right moves.

We now have a convergence of all major and boutique PC manufacturers on one platform (Intel/x86). More importantly, Intel is incorporating support for multiple operating systems into their processors. This virtualization support means, in the crudest possible terms, that the days of dual-booting a machine are over. Once support is baked into (say) OSX and Linux, it will be possible to run these two operating systems on the same machine, side-by-side, and simply flip back and forth between them. Likewise with Windows.

This kind of support for virtualization on the end-user’s desktop spells death for VMWare. However, if you make the tools to play a virtual machine free, and charge $180 for the ability to create virtual machines, you’re on the road to establishing a broader user base. They might be a little too late, I’m not sure—but think about how ubiquitous Flash is. Macromedia has never charged for the player, just for the content creation tools.

Over at Brick Labs we have an article about operating systems for robotics; I’m curious what the competition looks like. In the same (robotic) breath, I’m curious about this project taking place in London regarding environmental sensing and “feral robotics”.

In vaguely related news, I liked the description of an attempt by a new Erlang programmer to tackle the three-body problem. I enjoy “peering into” people’s thought processes on problems like this.

Finally, there’s some discussion at LtU regarding Guido’s thoughts on language design. Also something to take a quick look at.

I just saw Jon’s post regarding managing Wordpress installations with Subversion.

Aaah.

Makes excellent sense. Perhaps everything here will move from MT to WP sometime in the future? Who knows…

I wrote “On Languages and Models” some time ago; the timestamp on the file is May 11, 2005.

It was surprising to find it by way of a Google search. I don’t know how it was exposed to the world, but it was. C’est la vie.

There are a few ideas and things I want to hold on to there—perhaps I’ll just repost it at some point as a weblog post.

You know, it works for everyone except for me. And I wrote the damn pinger.

Testing 1 2 3.

This should Ping the CSCS Planet aggregator…

I’ve been told my weblog doesn’t ping the CSCS Planet aggregator. Does this fix it?

I find myself wanting an ebook reader now. I’m tired of lugging around stacks of articles so I have them to hand to read. I’d much rather have one small device in my bag that lets me carry thousands of PDFs with me everywhere I go. And no, neither my Powerbook nor a PDA is the answer I’m looking for. I need something with a near 8″x10″ display, and a battery life measured in page-turns—or weeks, not hours. (I’ll settle for days.)

I apologize to anyone who actually reads the weblog for the sparse posting of late (not that I ever got into a habit of updating daily or anything like that). The dissertation comes due this month, and there are a lot of other deadlines and pressures on me at the moment. That, and the British government continues to make life difficult for me as a foreigner studying on their fine island. This all amounts to a fair bit of stress.

It’s possible, after February, that I’ll update this whole damn site… possibly with the impending server move. We’ll see. I’m considering thrashing most of the content of the weblog, save for those posts that I’d actually like to turn into articles of some sort. Put another way—many of my posts are just noise. Some of them, I think, were good/interesting. We’ll see. Anyway, it’s not going to happen tomorrow, so I won’t worry about it today.