Sub Ubi

In preparation for our talk and workshop next week at DIKU, we’re prepping our release of RoboDeb. Before the end of the week, the link:

robodeb.transterpreter.org

will work, and you’ll be able to download a VM full of occamy, robotic goodness. I can’t wait!

(Why can’t I wait? Because it takes a lot of effort to release something like this. And I want it to be over. Oh… sleep! Sweet sleep!)

It’s certain that I’ll be on the road quite a bit over the next two months:

1. Copenhagen, Denmark (April 2 - 6)

   Christian and I will be giving a lecture and workshop on the role of concurrent programming languages like occam-pi in robotic control.

2. St. Andrews, Scotland (April 11 - 15)

   Along with the DIAS RAs up north, we’ll be working on bootstrapping a couple of papers at the intersection of our interests, as well as continuing to grapple with the “big picture.”

3. Cal Tech, Los Angeles, USA (April 23 - May 22)

   Not entirely true; I can’t be at Cal Tech for the entire 4 weeks, so I’m looking for either people to stay with / things to do in the Bay Area for the middle two weeks, or I’ll aim for Cleveland. Drop me a note if you’re interested in having me bomb in on you. Capable of delivering talks on topics related to computer science education research, little languages, and little robots.

There might be more coming after that… those are just the dates I know about now…

Change comes slowly.

I dug up the rewrite I did of my link directory script, and proceeded to update my publications list. Time to clean the rest of the cruft out of that space now.

Mostly, we’re just making space to put my dissertation in there. I have a complete document now, and most of it has seen several revisions. I’d rather send it off to my external examiner now than ever touch the blasted thing again. However, it has instead been handed off to my supervisor. We will see…

Another ebook linkfest:

• TeleRead, which I’ve just subscribed to, has a bunch of interesting content surrounding the topic of ebooks.
• A first look at the Irex Iliad
• Answers to readers’ questions about the Iliad

Contrary to some rumourmilling sites, it looks like the powerhog on the Iliad is the WiFi; when it isn’t used, it has something approaching a 10,000 page-turn battery life. At somewhere between 400 and 650 Euros (rumourmill prices) it won’t be cheap; however, I downloaded 50 articles about architectures and languages for robotic control. It would be amazing to be able to sync those to an ebook reader and start reading, instead of printing, annotating, and then transcribing notes elsewhere.

Unrelated were some pointers to a $150 Linux-based PC produced by YellowSheepRiver. Cute.

I haven’t taken part in anything musical for the last year-and-a-half. That should change.

I have too many projects that I don’t have time for. I thought I’d jot a few down, for when I actually run out of other things to do…

• I’ve wanted to provide an XML-RPC to Applescript bridge for my Mac for some time. Someone may yet beat me there; I wouldn’t mind, really.
• XML-RPC for Scheme, client-and-server. This will probably be #1 to do after submission; Noel already has made an excellent start on the client-side rewrite of my old library.
• Update my web-based SMS client; it needs per-user phonebooks.
• Build a publish/subscribe version of email. I don’t want to receive things from people unless they’ve asked for permission to send it to me. And, I want the servers to automatically arbitrate a secure, public/private key exchange to encrypt all of my communications.
• I wouldn’t mind a weblog engine written in Scheme.
• 42, the new occam compiler, needs bootstrapping.
• I’d like to spend some time just hacking on an FPGA, and learning how to program one. This is important for the next steps from 42.
• I’d like to go walking; the Pennine Way would be nice.
• I have friends in Vienna, Spain, and other parts of the world; it’s getting nigh upon traveling time.
• I’ve been wanting to put together a photobook of pictures from my time in Kent for some time now. Preferably, before everyone I know leaves Kent—or I do, for that matter.
• I’ve stopped exercising in the last few months of the PhD; it’s time to loose 25 pounds and get into shape.
• I’d like to become a more competative/better squash player. I haven’t played in six months. Oh, the joys of the PhD.
• I’d like to see an occam-pi library for robotic control; we have all the pieces in place, but don’t have the literature review and software. It’ll make a nice conference or journal paper when we write it.
• Someday, I’d like to have a book published by the MIT Press. Dunno why. Some kind of prestige thing. I’ll likely have to settle for self-publishing, given the things I’m interested in writing about.
• It would be nice to see my research take me South of the equator someday. It’s a half of the world I’ve never walked on.

I don’t think those are in any particular order. And I think there are more things I’d like to do or get done. Perhaps, someday, I’ll be able to start knocking some of these things off my list.

We have a new binary build of the Transterpreter up; version 0.7.3 rolls in some minor fixes, and includes support for SHARED channels. However, it does not support SHARED top-level channels; this is an issue with how the data is passed through the compiler (and therefore, ultimately, to the slinker), and those issues may (or may not) be resolved someday. For now, you may not (directly) share top-level channels.

We also have a VMWare virtual machine available for download; if you are interested in using the Transterpreter and the Player/Stage library for controlling Pioneer class robots (a tastes-great combination, giving you world-class concurrency for robotic control), drop us a note. We’ve got around 60 pages of documentation to accompany it, and deployed it this semester to students enrolled in CO631, a second-year module in concurrency at the University of Kent. We’ll be giving a talk and mini-workshop at DIKU in April regarding this same technology.

Like all things, we’ll do a complete release in due time; we’re adding more things to the VM (like a JDK, JCSP, the FUSE libraries for userland filesystems, the Python Player/Stage bindings, so on and so forth) so we’re not keen on doing a general release at this time. It’s a 250MB download, and until it’s finished, we’ll be happy to release it to people upon request.

Today, the sun came out. The air took on that undefinable quality, for the first time in months, where the world says “I am alive!”

While it may not be official, I declare today to be the first day of Spring in Canterbury, England.

We can’t have an empty weblog, can we?

There once was a man from Rangoon
Whose farts could be heard on the moon;
When you’d least expect ‘em
They’d burst from his rectum
With the force of a raging typhoon!!

This dissertation thing isn’t so much fun, for the record.