The Software Universe

Go FORTH

Early in December I tweeted on a great little board that ran the FORTH language called FIGnition.  It entranced me for two reasons, first it reminded me how much I missed the computer language, FORTH and second it reminded me of the days of building your own machine to experiment with softwaare (and hardware concepts).

FORTH is a great language, having both high level and low level aspects, it still is used in some boot loaders.  One of its unique aspects was that it used RPN, Reverse Polish Notation - think old school HP calculators.  RPN is postfix, to add two numbers one would enter " 3 <enter> 4 +", the <enter> was a real key that would push the first number on the stack.  This inspired a popular (for geeks at least) bumper sticker of the era, "FORTH love if honk then" that you can still purchase here.  It was low level in that it defined an entire very simple OS with primitive file management that made it very popular with microcomputer hobbyists. 

My recommendation for the best page to begin discovering FORTH is the homepage of a defunct organization, the FORTH INTEREST GROUP, aka FIG.  I was once a member of FIG and still miss FORTH, that is why I will probably reacquaint myself with it by building a single board computer that runs it, the FIGNITION.   It is under $35 dollars when delivered form the UK.  Note it is a kit and you should have the hang of soldering, but at the end you can claim you built your own computer with far fewer connections than my original ALTAIR.  I will keep you posted on my progress on my twitter account, SWUniverse.

Hopefully I am back in the blogging swing of things.  Have a bunch of great blogs from my students that I would like to post.  Happy 2012!  Later!

 

Valentine's Day Recommendations

This entry re-establishes a tradition on my blog suggesting technical books and novels for your significant other on Valentine's Day.  What better way to show you care than providing someone with a riveting book on Computer Science or Software Engineeirng!

My first recommendation is an edited compilation from Diomidis Spinellis and Georgios Gousios (Eds.), Beautiful Architecture.  This book provides some great chapters on software architecture and will be part of my software architecture and design course in the fall.  Diomidis is no stranger to my Valentine's list.  Year's ago I recommended, Code Reading, a book on reading code and it too would make a great gift.  Moving onto HCI, for years I have been pressing for including an anthropological approach to user experience work.  I gained this appreciation through a book by Bonnie Nardi and Vicki O'Day, Information Ecologies, and am using a new book by Bonnie Nardi in my HCI course at Penn, My Life as a Night Elf Priest: An Anthropological Account of World of Warcraft.  Night Elf Priest is a great companion to these cold winter nights with your significant other in either real or virtual worlds. My final recommendations for technical books that would make great Valentine's Day presents are: HTML5: Up and Running by Mark Pilgrim and, in case your significant other loves to learn a new software language (and who doesn't!), Getting Started with Processing by Casey Reas and Ben Fry.  If your significant other also likes to build things, you can supplement the last book with an arduino kit.

My science fiction recommendations this year start with some classics I am rereading.  The first is Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, an excellent read even the nth time around, a gift that will keep giving.  Note that I provided a link to a used book store, alibris, which I frequently use for older technical books.  A great service and a hedge with a less expensive gift, in case you think your romance will not survive another year!  I also am in the midst of rereading the Dune books by Frank Herbert.  The two of you will gain a new appreciation for a glass of water.  Some more modern recommendations are Richard K. Morgan's, TH1RTE3N, Morgan's books will certainly encourage togetherness since they are great scifi thrillers with a new concept almost every page.  Another mind blowing idea a page flip author is Charlie Stross' Glass House, a bit of gender bending and a truly fascinating read.  Stross's books are always mind blowing.  I once communicated with Charlie and he actually gave me a manuscript version of Halting State (a great book) but alas when I got swamped and did not return any comments, he never responded to any further emails.  My loss, but don't make it yours, highly recommended.  Other authors I will cover in future posts are China Mieville, John Scalzi - Old Man's War is a modern classic as is Stross' Accelerando, all fantastic reads for your valentine.  Last I could not close the science fiction section without mentioning a novel that is hard to classify but excellent to read William Gibson's, Zero History.  Actually it is best to read the earlier novels in the triology before you gift this one, Pattern Recognition and Spook Country.  Definitely the triology would make a special Valentine's gift.  Gibson is also an avid tweeter, if you are interested follow GreatDismal on twitter. 

Phew!  Finally if you really want to make Monday special, cook for your valentine.  If you are at a loss for what to prepare, I recommend a good marinara sauce (gravy in new jersey) with pasta from Marcella Hazan's book, Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking.  A no knead bread with a great crust would complement this menu and one of the best is from Jeff Potter's, Cooking for Geeks.

Later!

OLPC

It is fitting that my 100th post on this blog be about One Laptop Per Child. I have discussed OLPC in many of my classes, both as an intriquing concept and an example of focused design and Human Computer Interaction principles. You can read much more about OLPC here.

All of this is great, but the real reason I ma posting on this yet again is to encourage you to buy an OLPC. Yes you can buy one in a special 1 for 2 deal! Yes I said a ! for 2 deal. For a very limited time you can buy one OLPC machine for the price of two. The second one will be given to a child in a third world country an dyou will get a $200 dollar tax deduction. I have already ordered and, with shipping, my total came to $423.95.

I encourage anyone who thinks this is a neat idea and can afford it to do the same. You can begin the process at this site. This special offer i sfor 15 days from November 12th to November 26th, 2007. Get a great piece of technology and give a child in the world a very special gift for the price of a stripped down Playstation 3.

When I get my OLPC I will post my impressions here and on my other blog.

If you do order one, I would appreciate adding a comment to this post. Thanks!

Later!

First One Web Day Tomorrow!

I have already provided an entry on One Web Day and for those of you that missed it please check back a few posts.  The first One Web Day is tomorrow, September 22nd, and I encourage folks to check on the One Web Day Site for activities in their area.  For folks in the New York City area, the festivities are at Battery Park in NYC. 

Some information on the NYC event:

Download sample_1.pdf
Download the_battery__map_of_the_battery_with_stage_and_truck.pdf

If there is no event in your area, consider starting one next year.   Contact me if you need suggestions.  We hope to enlarge the role of Universities next year.

The web is about community and this is one day out of the year when we recognize, celebrate and work to enhance and broaden that community.  The web is global and so are many of our problems.  If there is one thing I stress in all of my courses it is that communication is the key to successful products.  Communication also is an important factor globally for the same reasons, to understand each other and work  together to improve the process and the result!  Yes, I am showing my stripes as a child of the 60's!

So at the very least tomorrow, take a moment to reflect on how the web has affected you.  Later!

Pro T folding

The title of this post was meant to have you think about Protein folding, but actually refers to T shirt folding.  I thought it was worthwhile bringing it to your attention, (1) because it is very cool, (2) if you do it, it will save you time, (3) it is a very effective instructional video and  (4) it was posted on Pavel Curtis's blog and Pavel is a legend in software.  You can  read Pavel's  T shirt blog entry with ya link to the relevant video, here.  (If you have difficulty accessing it, send me mail.)

Here's a bio of Pavel I scarfed from this MIT website,

Dr. Pavel Curtis received his bachelor's degree from Antioch College in 1981 and his master's and doctorate degrees from Cornell University in 1983 and 1990, respectively. Since 1983, he has been a member of the research community at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, where he has worked on aspects of the Smalltalk-80, Interlisp-D/Xerox Lisp, and Cedar programming environments and other projects related to the design and implementation of programming languages. He led the SchemeXerox project, which explored large-scale software development in the Scheme programming language.

Dr. Curtis is the founder and chief administrator of LambdaMOO, one of the most popular recreational social virtual realities on the Internet. Since 1992, as co-leader of the Network Places project, he has been working on bringing the benefits of network places to a broader range of users and applications.

I will discuss some of the topics including MOOs in a later post.  Pavel is a legend in software and (good) hacking circles.  His work (along with others of course) with Interlisp, Cedar, Smalltalk and Scheme formed the basis for how we develop today.  He is a luminary of computer science well worth knowing.

Since my title alluded also to protein folding, a bit about that reference.  My personal iMac at home (melmac, a G5 2 gig beauty) when not dealing with me, happily runs protein folding, climate prediction and SETI.  BOINC, software from UC Berkeley manages these apps and it is a great experiment in GRID computing and a way to donate cycles to your favorite scientific research.

However, if you are not interested in delving into any of these topics, please at least view the  t-shirt folding video.  It is fascinating and, for the laundry folders, could give you more time to enjoy these last days of summer.  Later!

Having an Impact

If you cannot ascertain from the name of this blog, I will tell you that in addition to computer science and psychology I am interested in space exploration, astronomy and climatology.   On July 4th NASA is attempting to crash part of a space probe into the comet Tempel 1, with the main craft recording the event.  If all goes well the craft will be placed on an extended mission with its next probable target the comet Boethin. It will take 3.5 years to get there.  So even if you read this after July 4th  2005, there is still more to explore with this probe.

A frequent contributor to this blog and former student, Greg Horvath works at JPL on this project and sent me this heads up a few days ago.  I wanted to share Greg's logbook entry with you.  The text was provided by Greg with some minor edits from me.  Actually there was more interesting stuff on testing in his entire email, but I will save that for another post.  Later!

So, on to the fun stuff:

- We release the impactor Saturday evening, 7/2, at 11pm PDT (2am 7/3, Sunday morning EDT).
- Assuming all goes well, the impactor will arrive at the comet at 10:52pm PDT on Sunday night (1:52am EDT Monday 7/4).

In addition to the instruments on-board the spacecraft, we will have a number of other on-orbit telescopes taking both visible and spectral images (Hubble, Chandra, Spitzer f/k/a SIRTF) as well as many ground observatories including Keck, Palomar, and the SMA.  There will be plenty of gooey data to check out if this goes off as planned.

Our mission website has a schedule of programming
http://deepimpact.jpl.nasa.gov
As of right now, the schedule is:
----------------------------------------------------
Deep Impact Press Encounter Events - Jul. 1 - 4
(All times PDT.)

    * Pre-impact briefing: July 1, 10 a.m.
    * Pre-impact update: July 3, 11 a.m.
    * NASA TV coverage: July 3, 8:30 p.m.
    * Expected time of impact: July 3, 10:52 p.m.
    * Post-impact briefing: July 4, 1 a.m.
    * Post-impact press conference: July 4, 11 a.m.

Also, there is some animation and a few videos over at http://jpl.nasa.gov.  Click on 'Night of the Comet', and it will launch a little flash player.  (In fact if you click the picture of the woman under the 'Videos' tab of the flash player, you can see me near the beginning of the clip being a big dork.)

As I've mentioned, we will be on NASA TV, which you can stream online at http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/  (see times above).  I'll be on-console for impact so if you tune in you may see me pointing to a blue screen and doing other amusing geeky stuff.

Other good sources of info are:
http://space.com
http://spaceflightnow.com
(This site usually has good real-time info updated during critical mission events).  Also, our mission webpage http://deepimpact.jpl.nasa.gov will be updated in near real time during encounter, including images as they come down.

Lastly if you're in the SoCal area, the Planetary Society will be holding an event with real-time data streaming in and running commentary.  More info here:
http://planetary.org/cometbash.html
It's in Glendora, and entry is $20.  There will be some guest speakers as well.

Your Presence is Requested

A good friend of mine, Steve Crandall, is doing a survey on how college students communicate and presence -- the ability to detect whether are users are online or available (source: webopedia). He would like you to complete this really short survey. You can access the survey here.

Steve is part of a company, Omenti Research, that specializes in usercentered technology. They are a great group of folks. Steve also keeps a blog on his perspectives on science and communication.

I hope you do help Steve and participate in the survey. Some software engineering and artificial intelligence posts coming real soon. Good luck with finals and papers for those of you struggling with the end of the term! Later!

Glowing Language

As a break from all the great student posts, I would like to call your attention to two articles from slashdot. (I am a regular reader of slashdot and it provides a wealth of information on lots of computer oriented, science and curiously interesting topics.) The first is about a language for passwords called l33t, pronounced "leet". l33t is a password language and provides you with substitution rules for letters, converting them to alphanumerics. For example in basic l33t, you substitute 4 for a, 3 for e, 1 for i and 0 for o. Note that the numbers vaguely resemble the letters. More advanced l33t, substitutes more letters with numbers and other characters. The article mused as to whether some avant garde parents were using l33t to name their children! I would be Gr3gg in basic l33t. Just a slice of software culture.

The second slashdot article is not exactly fun but is fascinating. The referenced site chronicles a motorcylce ride through Chernobyk, site of the worst nuclear reaction accident in history. The narrative and pictures are very thought provoking especially for those of us who lived through the Cold War.

I hope you enjoy the sites if you had not already seen them on slashdot. Later!

Exploring the Real Universe

With the end of the term and the holidays coming soon, you might want to know what to do with all that spare time.  Besides reconnecting with your family and friends or reading a great book, if you are looking for a low cost alternative, check out these paper models that NASA offers at (updated link) this location.

The link is daunting but it is worth browsing some of the model building activities listed there. 

Later.