Category: General

I’m working my way through the videos from the Lightweight Languages 2002 (LL2) conference at MIT. Yay, for digital videos of conferences! Boo, for doing it in RealVideo format. This isn’t just because I can’t archive it locally, but also because there isn’t terribly much action to watch. Most of the time, the camera focuses on the presenter’s slides, which appear blurry and pixelated after the RealVideo codec has squished them. I look forward to the day when SMIL or some other integrated multimedia solution allows us to mix audio/text/html/pdf/video in a syncronized stream. It would be a great boost for online learning.

Anyhow, I’ve just watched Matthew Flatt’s presentation in which he plays with the distinction between programming languages and operating systems. He makes the point that safe languages (such as ml, where the type system guarantees that you won’t suffer pointer errors) remove at least some of the reasons for having processes occupying seperate address spaces. Unlike in C++, an ML program will never scribble over the end of a heap block. So, if your citizens are well enough behaved, they can all live in the one house together.

Hmm, must leave to get to band practise now …

A few years ago, I dabbled in hardware by building a programmer and test circuit using the PIC microcontroller. At the time, I wished that I had a digital camera so that I could put up a webpage. Well, four years have passed and I finally have a digital camera, so here it is.

I think building these circuits exorcised my hardware daemons. I feel no further need to build “little computers” (which was what Susan’s mum would call it). Normal service will be resumed shortly.

Hello, world! After chatting with Anthony last night, I decided that I would switch blog software to one which supports backtrack. Sites like www.livejournal.com make it easy to crosslink between blogs on the one site, but the internet is a big place so I want to use a system which allows references between blogs regardless of where they live.

Up until now, I have been using BlogMax but I have now started using Movable Type. Time to convert my old entries to the new site ..