Poul and I are beating on our ITiCSE paper, which is due on the 15th at 5PM… in Hawaii.
What does that mean?
It means… it’s due Tuesday!
Perhaps we should have let “Intelligent Design” fly by… now, it’s just a frontal assault on science carried out by the USGS.
I wonder when DARPA, DOE, and NSF funded work will fall under similar rules?
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Bush administration is clamping down on scientists at the U.S. Geological Survey, who study everything from caribou mating to global warming, subjecting them to controls on research that might go against official policy.
New rules require screening of all facts and interpretations by agency scientists. The rules apply to all scientific papers and other public documents, even minor reports or prepared talks, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press.
The question is, how many members of the Transterpreter team keep an eye on this weblog?
There are some tips on presentations over at Creating Passionate Users from Kathy Sierra that actually capture a superset of what I think I (subconsciously) strive for in my own presentations. While a keynote is different than a paper presentation at a conference, I think there’s no reason why a good presentation of a paper (or lecture, or …) shouldn’t be entertaining and memorable.
Why?
Because if it isn’t memorable… you won’t be remembered.
While I’m at it, I thought I’d mention S5; all of our presentations, from this point forward, should be S5 presentations. In particular, they are standards based, easy to maintain, easy to distribute (everyone has a web browser), and easy to incorporate into our website (they’re HTML/CSS). No Powerpoint/Keynote/OpenOffice/LaTeX problems, no PDF conversion woes, etc.
I have a small hardware budget. So, I spent some of it.
LEGO Mindstorms NXT
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First, a LEGO Mindstorms NXT has arrived. This small platform provides sensor inputs, actuators, and a Bluetooth radio in a lickable plastic shell. It’s excellent for experimenting with, and will become a new flagship environment for the Transterpreter. Yes, it is a toy. But it is an incredibly useful toy in terms of the research that I’m interested in (doing lots of things, safely, apparently at the same time, on small devices). Having robust, well supported hardware to work with is an important part of that work. |
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Irex Iliad
Second, I ordered an Irex Iliad. This is a light (400g) eInk device, sized to an A5 piece of paper, with 1024×768 resolution. I stole a picture or two from here to give you a sense for what it looks like:
The second picture is to demonstrate that the device can be drawn on. My understanding is that the Iliad will support the annotation of documents with a touch-sensitive stylus. My assumption is that I’ll eventually be able to read PDFs on the reader, annotate them with the stylus, and export the documents again with those annotations intact. This way, I can carry my entire library of research articles (in PDF format) on a compact flash card, and have them always available, along with any notes I choose to make.
Either way, I’m very excited about the reader. So many of the reasons I carry a laptop can be subsumed by an ebook reader capable of handling plain text, HTML, and PDF. “To do” lists, calendars (printed to PDF), RSS feeds (rendered to XHTML or PDF), and more can all be carried around for easy reference, as well as a huge library of work/research related reading material. Taking things further, I can imagine that my teaching workflow can be greatly improved if I’m able to collect electronic documents from students (code, essays), comment on them electronically using the Iliad, and then ship back the annotated document. Portable, easy, and environmentally friendly!
Who knows… maybe the Transterpreter will run on the Iliad as well… 
Friday, July 14th, 2006, I defended my thesis “Exploring Novice Compilation Behaviour in BlueJ”. Pending the submission of minor corrections, I will have completed the requirements for a Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science.
In other words, I passed, and can now say “Why, yes, I’m a doctor” when people ask the right question.
Today, I played Katamari Damacy.
If you’ve not heard much from this quarter, its because I’ve been keeping busy.
First, I’m in Portugal, at the windy, south-western most point in Europe.
I actually spent more time jogging here than sunning and relaxing…
Carrie nearly blew away from the end of the world!
Most of my last few weeks has been spent bootstrapping 42. You can find out more about that on the newly revamped Transterpreter site. We’ll have a complete source download shortly. (It turns out I had broken the build in the trial release we did… mercy.)
Back to Canterbury tomorrow.
For those interested in computer science education research (generally) and novice compilation behavior (specifically), I’ve placed a PDF of my dissertation (as it will be submitted for examination) online. It is titled An exploration of novice compilation behaviour in BlueJ. This version will eventually be replaced with the final, defended-and-approved version, which I expect will also include acknowledgments.
I’m off to Scotland for a week, and no, it isn’t for holiday time. If you want to reach me, I recommend using Gmail or SMS.
I received my dissertation back from my supervisor Friday. If I wasn’t heading out to Denmark tomorrow, I’d submit on Monday. As it stands, barring disaster, I will submit my dissertation in six days; Christian and I will give our talk, the workshop, I’ll return, make the recommended edits, and I’m done.
Well, done-but-not-done, as there is still the small matter of the defense.
But still. Six… days…
It’s certain that I’ll be on the road quite a bit over the next two months:
- 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.
- 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.”
- 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…
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.