education » Always Where

from llvm to lnot: compilation back-to-front

As a member of the faculty, it is often hard to justify spending time learning new technologies. This, to me, is a rather ugly Catch-22: to learn a new technology, I must justify it either with a publication or a clear, immediate application to my classrooms. If you’re driving towards a clear, concrete deliverable, it really isn’t exploratory learning… it’s work, under pressure, with a deadline. That’s why I’m excited about a project I’m undertaking this semester with one of our seniors.

The student was looking for a 2-credit independent study (this is roughly a 1/2 course load). We brainstormed a great deal, and in the end, the student thought they’d like to dig into some more Scheme programming, so we decided a compiler might be a good way to focus our efforts. However, I didn’t expect that it would end up being a project with so much potential.

At Indiana, I saw how we can write compilers front-to-back in the nanopass style. However, several grad students in the languages group insisted the right way to write a compiler was back-to-front. What does this mean?

First, you take your assembly language, and generate an executable.

In our case, we will be working with LLVM Compiler Infrastructure project. Specifically, we’ll begin by writing programs in LLVM assembly, and using the LLVM toolchain to turn that into a native executable.

Although our input language is not C, we might imagine starting with a simple program in our language LNOT (L₀) that is nothing more than the number 8. A single expression. When compiled and executed, it should return the number 8. Expressed in C, this would look something like:

int main(int argc, char **argv) {
  int retval;
  /* Assign the result of our entire program to retval */
  /* In this case, the entire program is the constant 8. */
  retval = 8;
  printf("%d\n", retval);
}

The disassembled LLVM looks something like:

define i32 @main(i32 %argc, i8** nocapture %argv) nounwind {
entry:
  %0 = tail call i32 (i8*, ...)* @printf(i8* noalias getelementptr inbounds ([4 x i8]* @.str, i64 0, i64 0), i32 8) nounwind ;  [#uses=0]
  ret i32 undef
}
 
declare i32 @printf(i8* nocapture, ...) nounwind

As we are writing the compiler “back-to-front,” we now need to take one step backwards towards our input language. Because we are working in Scheme, we’ll represent our language in S-expressions (to minimize parsing effort). The first pass (or, the last pass, in front-to-back thinking) will be one that transforms an S-expression based syntax for LLVM assembly into actual LLVM assembly. Therefore, the input language to the penultimate pass might look something like:

(define (main i32)
  (args [i32 argc]
        [(i8** nocapture) argv])
  (entry
   (tail-call (printf (i32 (i8* ...)) ...))
   (ret (i32 undef))))
 
(declare (printf (i32 (i8* ...) ...)))

This elides many things, but my point is that we might take the ASM of LLVM and “lift” it into a syntax that can be easily pattern-matched in Scheme and manipulated. As we work from the back-end of the compiler to the front, our next step might be something trivial: for example, we might get rid of the entry form, because (with a very simple input language), we know we will only ever have one function, and therefore we can generate this automatically. Or, we might be more aggressive, and acknowledge that we don’t need to generate any of the wrapper code… so, we should only need to develop a language for statements that will proceed and/or live on the right-hand side of the retval assignment statement.

For me, it is exciting on a number of levels. I get to learn with a student, which happens less often than one would like. I don’t know LLVM, and am glad to be spending time getting to know it. Also, I haven’t ever written a compiler back-to-front, and evaluating this (both technically and pedagogically) has value — I’ll probably be teaching our compilers course next spring. And, I get to do some hacking, which I simply don’t get much time to do.

When we have a repository up, I’ll post a link to it, although it won’t be an “open” project, per se. We’re not doing this to engage in a new compiler authoring project so much as learn, but if you want to, you can watch us as we work.

Reflections on Software Design F2007

This past autumn I taught Software Design at Olin College. It was an excellent experience, and I enjoyed myself a great deal. As I was experimenting with a number of things (a transition from material found in HtDP to an OO introduction to GUI programming, pair programming, the use of version control with novice programmers, extended projects in a first programming course, etc.), I was very interested in getting good feedback regarding how the course went. Translated, I mean “better feedback than a bog-standard feedback form would yield.”

I often close my courses with a discussion as to how the course went. This year, I took the results of the 45 minute discussion that the students and I had, and reflected on how I might evolve the course the next time I teach it. I then pushed those reflections (4 pages of summary and 10 pages of reflection) back to the students, asking for them to verify whether they felt my proposed changes captured the spirit of their comments and criticisms. Of the 20 in the class, 6 came back to me with their thoughts.

I have now consolidated my proposed changes and the student comments into one document. I’ve titled it Feedback as a conversation (PDF, 5MB), and have made it available online (if you are interested… mostly, this is so I can point students and colleagues at it). Based on a quick poke around the literature, I’m curious whether the notion of “feedback as conversations” (in the spirit of the Cluetrain Manifesto) has made its way into the academic discourse. I may try and dig through this literature, as I have never actually seen anyone go through this kind of iterative, reflective process with their students before. Certainly, it is outside my experience at Kenyon, Indiana, and Kent.

the little computers

There’s a great deal to reflect upon from this past semester, but I think I’ll start by looking forward.

For the last two years, I have been delving deeper into the world of embedded systems. By this, I mean computational devices that exist in the world around us. Your microwave is an example. Mobile phones. The LEGO Mindstorms. Cars. Toys. Gadgets.

All of these things have little computers in them, and they all interact with the world in one or more ways. Sometimes they have buttons, sometimes displays, sometimes a multitude of sensors, or perhaps various kinds of radios for doing wireless communications: WiFi, or Bluetooth, or GSM (which is what many mobile phones use). I’ve learned how to program these devices, and have been thinking hard about how to make programming them easier and more robust.

But what I don’t have is good mastery over how you design and build these little devices. I can program them, but I can’t create them. It is all fine and good that I can write programs on my laptop that do interesting things with all kinds of data, whether that data lives on my hard drive and from the Internet-at-large. But when it comes to embedded systems, I feel like there is a great deal of power to be had from being able to combine the components—the processors, the radios, and the sensors—to create devices of my own design.

This semester, a group of five Olin students have agreed to help me tackle this learning challenge. Together, we’re going to explore the basics of digital design, and build a small device that is capable of doing something interesting. Ideally, I’d like it if the device was human powered—perhaps by a clockwork spring or similar. But to start, we’ll see what we can do in terms of reading documentation, drawing schematics, and assembling our own, tiny computational device that can interact with the world around it.

Teaching with LEGO

It is frustrating watching all the Lego Mindstorms Developer Program weblogs. Many of them appear to be people who were randomly chosen to be in the program, and are now (apparently) maintaining weblogs about the robots they’re building.

So, I’ve realized that I could, after all, put my weblog to good use: I could write about some of the things I know, and are appropriate to the blog’s title. One is how students engage in the act of programming—I’ve written very little about my dissertation work over the past few years, and I might as well start serializing my research, results, and ideas out into this space. Certainly, it is a rare and hardy soul who would want to read my dissertation.

Likewise, I have spent years teaching with the LEGO Mindstorms in the classroom. I designed and taught my own course in the CS department at Indiana University Bloomington, and have continued using LEGO in my workings with students at the University of Kent in Canterbury, England. I’ve even helped write a massively concurrent runtime for the LEGO Mindstorms, and have been a judge at two First LEGO League competitions now, but never mind that we weren’t selected to be part of the developer program. I’m not bitter. Much.

…

So. Purpose. Direction. These are good things. And it will help keep me from blathering on about things that don’t matter in this space. Like, um, Peeps. Erhm… yeah.

(Actually, Peep research seems pretty important. But I’ll let that go for now.)

Why eBooks will be more amazing than iPods

The killer app is content.

We’ve known this for some time; people don’t buy devices, they buy devices that allow them to access content. In the case of the iPod, it is music. In the case of the computer, it is applications. Phones? The words of others—live, realtime, anywhere. The Internet itself is also a massive source of content, and many devices have been repurposed to allow access to that content; PDAs and phones finally have processors and displays that allow for (reasonably) effective access to the ‘net.

The iPod is probably the most powerful of these devices because of its simplicity. Music—rhythm and pitch—have been fundamental to human culture since the beginning of time. Giving people the ability to carry thousands upon thousands of songs with them anywhere is an incredibly powerful thing. eBooks will be no different.

The iPod of eBooks is coming. Sony will, no doubt, screw it up, but we’ll get there, in time. A year ago, they released the Libre, an e-ink based eBook. What is e-ink? It’s a display technology that doesn’t require power to hold state. So, the Libre’s battery life is measured in page turns—or, screen refreshes, if you prefer. Now, the first version of the Libre was broken: it couldn’t handle content in PDF (or any other ubiquitous format, like plain text), and it came encumbered with DRM. As if I want to buy books that will expire.

If Sony actually releases a new version of the Libre unto the world, and if they think for just a moment, they could take the world by storm. If the device can display unencumbered (DRM-free) PDFs and plain text, if it has an integrated MP3 player, and it is priced right, the Sony Libre will become not the must-have gadget, or must-have toy, but must-have tool for a literate society.

Consider what will happen. First of all, I can begin collecting all my favorite books in PDF (if the publishers ever get their heads out of their asses and sell them to me, DRM-free, as PDF downloads); now, I can pick up any book I’ve ever purchased, any time, and read it. I can start collecting papers pertinent to my work, and keep them with me, all the time. I already have thousands of papers related to my dissertation work on my laptop, but that’s a horrible place to try and read a paper—primarily because my laptop wasn’t designed for reading. This, though, is just the start.

Weblogs will render eBook friendly streams, into either plain text or directly into prettily typeset PDF. I’ll download eBook content from weblogs as readily as I download podcasts for my iPod… but moreso. Why? Partially because I ran my iPod Shuffle through the wash, but more importantly because I can read far faster than I can listen. eBook content takes up so little space—it costs me nothing to keep it, accessible anywhere, anytime, on my Libre. Micropayment infrastructures like BitPass will matter all the more, because now I’ll be able to subscribe to the Plain Dealer, in England, for cheap—and download it to my Libre for reading on the Tube.

Well, maybe I won’t read the Plain Dealer. But you catch my drift.

The Libre doesn’t need an interface to include an MP3 player; the iPod Shuffle demonstrated that. So, with an eBook and integrated MP3 player, I can sit and read the newspaper while listening to the Bach cello suites that I downloaded from Magnatune.com. Or I can call up the complete Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy—a wholly remarkable book. The Libre could, even, replace textbooks the world over. And, someday, eBooks will. $100 laptops matter, too… but eBooks will be every bit, if not more, important.

The iPod is amazing; 50 years ago, you could only listen to music in one place, using a large reel-to-reel player or vinyl. Today, I can take thousands upon thousands of hours of audio with me in my pocket. I still cannot, however, transport thousands of pages of text with me everywhere, all the time.

So do it right, Sony. Give me an eBook that lets me load thousands of PDFs and ASCII files onto a (more than one) memory stick, hundreds of MP3s onto another (with two separate, replaceable batteries, please), and don’t screw it up by locking it down. You’ll change the world.

And I’ll buy one.

IEEE Digital Library still outrageous

I continue to be appalled at the IEEE digital library’s terms and conditions. From http://www.ieee.org/products/ieeemdl/

Find the research you need, when you need it. Subscribers can read, print and save up to 25 full-text articles each month for just $35 a month. A six-month commitment is required, and your credit card will be billed monthly.

As a full member of the IEEE, I would pay $35 per month to download up to 25 articles per month. That’s $1.40 per PDF. Of course, I would pay the same regardless of whether it is a 20-page journal publication or a 5-page conference publication, but never mind that. Furthermore, all of these publications were written and reviewed by academics (the hard work), and then checked for spelling and grammar, and typeset, by the IEEE (assuming it is a journal publication, of course).

So what do I gain (as an academic) were I to submit a paper to this process? If it goes through, I gain a notch in the belt towards tenure. I certainly don’t see any revenue from the IEEE, and they certainly aren’t sharing the research and efforts of IEEE members freely within the organization (not at these prices). Instead, they’re charging unreasonable rates for access to work that was, in many instances, probably funded with public dollars anyway.

By comparison, the ACM digital library allows me unlimited downloads as part of my standard membership ($45, approximately, as a student). I can casually download 25 articles without trying. Guess which digital library I prefer using, and which work I tend to cite more as a result?

Let’s play pretend: what if I want unlimited download access from the IEEE digital library? What do I have to do to get it?

I can get unlimited access to the IEEE Computer Society for $59 on top of my membership (as a student) or $118 as a professional member. This is separate from the IEEE DL, however.

The IEEE Computer Society Digital Library delivers quality and quantity.

Get online access to all issues of 22 society periodicals from 1988 to present.

Over 1,200 conference proceedings are also part of this collection.

Read and print with ease with HTML and PDF formats.

Find what you need fast with full text search capabilities.

Members subscribe today for access to over 100,000 articles and papers.

This is reasonable; I’d pay either of those rates for full, unrestricted access; it’s still $59 on top of the student membership, but I can handle that.

But what about the full IEEE library? I looked at their brochure:

Ieee-Digital-Library-Product-Sheet

On this document is a contact number, which (thanks to SkypeOut), I was able to call. I went ahead and phoned, and spoke with someone in member services. There is no such thing as individual, unlimited access to the IEEE digital library. If my institution pays for unlimited access, then it is possible for me to obtain unrestricted access… but only if.

So, how much does unrestricted access at the institutional level cost? For a library the size of Kent’s, it is roughly 50,000 pounds. Partial access (electronic only, and only going back to ~~around 1988? 98?~~1998) is £21,000. Compare this with the ACM digital library, which provides full access for around £20,000 at the institutional level.

I suspect I’ll receive an email at some point from someone associated with the IEEE DL explaining to me why their prices are what they are, and why what I’ve said is uninformed and unreasonable. However, I maintain that if the ACM can afford to offer full access at less than half the price (at an institutional level), and can offer it to me freely as part of my membership, then the IEEE has some explaining to do…

As a last resort…

If the write-up and subsequent defense go poorly, I can always take advantage of those many emails I receive…

UNIVERSITY DIPLOMAS OBTAIN A PROSPEROUS FUTURE, MONEY-EARNING POWER, AND THE PRESTIGE THAT COMES WITH HAVING THE CAREER POSITION YOU’VE ALWAYS DREAMED OF. DIPLOMAS FROM PRESTIGIOUS NON-ACCREDITED UNIVERSITIES BASED ON YOUR PRESENT KNOWLEDGE AND LIFE EXPERIENCE If you qualify, no required tests, classes, books or examinations. Bachelors’, Masters’, MBA’s, Doctorate & Ph.D. degrees available in your field. CONFIDENTIALITY ASSURED CALL NOW TO RECEIVE YOUR DIPLOMA WITHIN 2 WEEKS 1-206-279-9144 CALL 24HRS, 7 DAYS A WEEK, INCLUDING SUNDAYS & HOLIDAYS

Community building on the WWW

As a followup to my WWW/community thread (one, two, three), I noticed that Tim O’Reilly posted a summary of the Web 2.0 from Foo Camp. I guess I’d score high on the “Do You Get The Web 2.0?” quiz in Esquire this month, because a lot of his memes were in my thread.

Web2-Meme-Map

What did I hit on that Tim did as well?

Trust your users
Small pieces loosely joined (web as components)
Software that gets better the more people use it
“An attitude, not a technology”
The right to remix: “Some rights reserved.”

There might be others, but my point is that the notion of a participant community creating content that they flow between each-other, share, and build upon is not new… but “radical trust” and “radical decentralization” are difficult stances to adopt, as you can’t “wade in” and test the waters… you have to dive in, head first, and find out that the water’s just fine.

Community building

I suppose I should finish the “site redesign” thread (part one and two).

My “proposed redesign” is more of a sketch than anything else. And it has rapidly evolved past any specific comments or criticisms of my own department’s web presence, and become more of a statement regarding my thoughts about how to support the community that exists within a department, online. Shared goals are part of what defines a community, as well as clear and unhindered communication. Most academic departments (all around the world) manage the shared goals bit, but often fall down on the communication bit due to politics, schedules, and the general business of the academic lifestyle. Between teaching, research, the neverending quest to publish and obtain funding, as well as administration—well, it often makes for a busy day.

One way to provide structure to this communication and collaboration (online) is centrally.

Central-Wm

The challenge to centrally managing a website like this is that the webmaster/mistress must be incredibly well integrated into the community to be effective. Faculty, staff, students of all kinds, as well as other departments are all, in a sense, customers to the service that a webmaster provides. Are all of these people able to adequately achieve their goals and communicate effectively via the WWW? What services and content must be added, designed, built, or possibly removed, refined, and replaced to achieve those goals and facilitate communication? Meeting the needs of all of these disparate groups involves being aware of what is going on, the various needs of each of these communities, and the ability to respond quickly and with agility to new and shifting needs.

Of course, people who are plugged in to a community this way are often called deans or pro vice chancellors, or something similar—they don’t have time to build effective websites. They would probably benefit from the existence of such a website, however, as it is their job to be on top of the state of the community.

The other way to manage this is to decentralize the process.

Decentral-Wm

In the decentralized process, each stakeholder in the community contributes to and is responsible for their own cloud of information—a constantly changing, dynamic resource for their immediate peers and colleagues. And each group can peer into the process by which the other communities organize, share, and move information. The webmaster simply becomes responsible for the connective glue, and is no longer primarily responsible for information and content on a broad and overarching scale.

But this is not how academic departments work—because in the first model, it is clear what role the webmaster has: they’re a gate keeper. They say what does and does not happen on the WWW. If they are truly amazing, they enable the free flow of information into and out of the department via the WWW. If they are not, however, then they can become roadblocks, preventing the easy dissemination and communication of information within and without of the department. In the second model, it isn’t obvious to the community what the webmaster does, because if they do their job right, the infrastructure just works, and everyone is happy creating and sharing content.

And, the reason I know this kind of thing cannot, and will not, happen, is it represents too much loss of control. No-one likes giving up control—it’s hard, far harder than most people think. Furthermore, a site this dynamic requires participation on the part of all of the shareholders; even though the individual contributions are small, and actually things they do already (via email, in the hall, over the phone, etc.), it will be perceived as being much more work than it actually is. The idea will die, and, we will build no communities today.

Fortunately, ideas are free. Regardless of whether the department I am part of now, or part of in the future, decides that this is an interesting experiment to engage in, the idea exists. It has been written down. It is there for others to be inspired by, or ignore, or tear apart, or build upon. In fact, we’ll make that explicit:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5
License.

This post and the images contained herein are available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Sharealike license. Feel free to rip, mix, and burn, as long as you provide a pointer back to this document.

A modern computer science department website

I’ve received a number of responses regarding my post regarding our departmental website. These responses have either come in via email, or people have caught me in person to comment on the post. I have not yet received any comments praising the site. Instead, I have consistently received comments along the lines of “that’s exactly what I think.” Often, it’s a bit more explicit: “I’ve been here n years, and for as long as I can remember, people have thought that the departmental website was an unnavigable nightmare.”

So, lets work from the premise that we have a website that is, by-and-large, ready for a complete overhaul. I’m going to suggest how we might rebuild the site to capitalize on communication and fresh, dynamic content as opposed to static content and the occasional (static) rendering of a database.

The Front Page

The front page of a departmental website is both the starting point and the ending point; if your viewer isn’t interested by anything they see, then they’ll be gone in a heartbeat. To do this right, I’d grab about 20 first-year students right now, and ask them what they looked for just a few months ago when cruising the WWW and scoping out prospective universities and CS departments. You see, people who build departmental webpages are usually faculty and/or staff in the department, and these people typically lack critical insights that most any user of their product would have. Driving a redesign user-first is the best way for something like this to proceed.

Seeing as I don’t have these insights readily available, I’ll ignore my own knowledge of best practices and proceed. First, I’d turn the front page of the site into a weblog.

Homepage-1

Branding matters; the logo is still necessary. Persistent navigation throughout the site is also important; if users can’t easily jump back to the top (or the top of any other section of the site) at any time, I’d consider that a usability problem. On the right, I’d have some boxes that show the most recent “News” and “Events” in the department and/or University; seeing as we control that content, that shouldn’t be a problem. In both cases, I’d want to be able to “See more News…” and “See More Events…” at the bottom.

The body of the page should be one or more articles promoting activities and events in and around the department. Publications, awards, events, talks… really, anything that is of potential interest to the larger community (eg. here at Kent) or the world should end up in this space, for a time. It is, after all, a weblog. The danger comes not from putting the wrong things here, but not putting enough things here. The site, and therefore the department, cannot suffer from having a constant flow of fresh content.

The orange boxes in my picture are places where I expect users to be able to subscribe to an RSS feed; the News, Events, or main-page feed should all be things I can subscribe to from the main page. Having a link, somewhere, that explains what these little “RSS” or “XML” buttons are is a good idea, yes, but I think the world is more savvy regarding these things than you might think. Consider: my father uses an RSS newsreader now, for keeping up on weblogs, newspapers, and job searches.

Research Group Pages

The group pages are, again, fundamentally dynamic in nature. I would shrink my departmental logo (allowing me to return to the main page by clicking it), and then have a group header/logo for the remaining 3/4s of the “branding” area. There might be a bit of “static” space for something about the group, but this might not be necessary. Also, I’d retain the navigational space on the left; if done correctly, I suspect it wouldn’t change at all from the main page.

Group

The rest of the page is dynamic. The top right strikes me as a good place to put links to the weblogs belonging to each member of the group; likewise, I’d include links to the RSS feeds for each of those weblogs right there. Following those, I’d have a dynamic box where recent publications by the group could appear, as well as a place where the group can post recent CFPs. This way, the group contributes to placing calls that may be of interest in the feed (as well as, perhaps, the research support administrator), and all the members of the group (as well as people outside of the group) can subscribe to see what comes through their “CFP” feed.

The remaining space on the page could be used as a space to promote weblog posts from members of the group, or to highlight group-specific projects, events, or other work. Either way, we want this to represent information specific to or created by the group flowing through this space.

Faculty, Staff,and Student Homepages

If you haven’t figured it out already, everyone in the department gets a weblog.

Indiv-Blog

What do we gain by providing every member of faculty and staff, as well as every student, with a weblog? A number of things.

Currency.
Not hard currency, like cash, but instead “currency” as in “current events.” Everyone can remain up-to-date regarding everyone else. While I can’t be part of every research group, I can subscribe to every feed in the department. At a glance, I can find out about the research that a classmate or faculty member is engaged in–meaning any, and every, classmate and faculty member. If I had tea in the common room every day for a month, I wouldn’t get caught up on everyone’s academic and professional doings; this is much more time-efficient and effective for all involved.
Interactivity.
If every weblog has a comment system, it is now possible for students and staff to interact in new and important ways. If I write about my teaching, a student can chime in with “Yeah! That was great!” Or, they might say “Wow, I didn’t understand your analogy between the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and packrat parsing in functional languages at all.” Either way, I have a new, personal, and timely communications channel.

More importantly, I have a way for colleagues and researchers around the world to interact with me; the weblog is not an “internal” thing. This way, people who come to my weblog because they subscribed to it in Bloglines, or with a desktop newsreader like NetNewsWire, can comment directly on things I have to say about my teaching and research. That, I think, is a Good Thing, as it increases the number of people reading and commenting on my ideas, as well as improves the visibility of the department as a whole.

Visibility.
What happens when one of our posts gets propagated around the WWW? We end up with lots of people talking about and pointing to a webpage in the cs.kent.ac.uk domain. They might even subscribe to that feed, or perhaps several others in the department. If you have thousands of people reading news and events taking place in our department every day, is that a bad thing, or a good thing?

Undergraduate weblogs

While we’re talking about benefits of having a dynamic, constantly-fresh departmental website, I might mention that treating undergraduates like first-class citizens of the department would be a great move. These are smart people with good ideas who have come here to be challenged. Well, some of them might have come to get away from their parents and drink beer as long as the GPA holds out, but by-and-large our students are hard-working and engaging. Every one of them should be allowed to have a voice in this framework, and that means a weblog.

More importantly, they should never loose that space. If they want to maintain their weblog here at Kent for 10 years after they graduate, they should be allowed to. If one of our students goes on into graduate school, or the corporate world, or anything else, and becomes a Voice on some topic of interest to them—whether it is type theory or basket weaving—we want that voice to come from Kent. It is, I think, a no-brainer when you think about the time and effort involved in maintaining a service that can host a weblog and the possible tangible and intangible benefits of having someone draw significant amounts of traffic from around the world because they are writing on the topic of something they are passionate about.

[plea]

While I’m at it, the service might as well allow faculty, staff, and students to run CGIs without having to beg and plead for permission. This is the only way, in a Web-App World, for students to experiment and do interesting things that might draw good traffic to our domain. If they do something illegal, slap them on the wrist; if they do it twice, yank all computing privs at the University. There are no policy “problems” in doing this, and there are no “security” concerns, either: Apache 2, running suExec, is one of the most secure pieces of software in the world. Please. Give us all some freedom to do interesting things.

[/plea]

–>

In closing: the Big(ish) Picture

There are certainly details missing; many, many details. The theme, however, should be apparent: everything on the site, and I mean damn near everything, should be dynamic, participant-generated content that can be ripped, mixed, burned, and shuffled all over the planet using simple mechanisms like RSS, email, and similar communication and collaboration tools. Instead of viewing the departmental website as a static brochure for selling our wares, it should instead be a living, breathing document that sells our services by giving away our knowledge and expertise to any and all who are interested.

If we provide a simple interface for people all throughout the department—students, faculty, and staff—to update one or more parts of the site regularly, we will have one of the most novel and useful departmental websites in the world today. It will get coverage in the mainstream and educational press. Different parts of the site will draw readership from all over the world. In England, prospective, current, and former students will be able to subscribe to various feeds and keep up on their application process, topics of interest, their friends and their lecturers. Faculty and staff will be kept abreast of the goings-on in the department. Researchers and practitioners in industry will be able to easily keep tabs on the excellent research taking place at Kent. We will be connected to many people and places where we were unconnected before.

Put another way, we will be the single most interesting and open academic department in the world when it comes to the flow of information in, around, and out of the department. And it doesn’t take a quantum information theorist to do it (rocket scientists are old hat); it just takes some commitment and planning. It is, I would think, imminently doable. Failing to consider something like this seriously is, by-and-large, unjustifiable and criminal.

Update, 20050926

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5
License.

from llvm to lnot: compilation back-to-front

Reflections on Software Design F2007

the little computers

Teaching with LEGO

Why eBooks will be more amazing than iPods

IEEE Digital Library still outrageous

As a last resort…

Community building on the WWW

Community building

A modern computer science department website

The Front Page

Research Group Pages

Faculty, Staff,and Student Homepages

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In closing: the Big(ish) Picture

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The Front Page

Research Group Pages

Faculty, Staff,and Student Homepages

Undergraduate weblogs

In closing: the Big(ish) Picture

Pages

Tags

Archives

Admin