tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-122928432012-01-21T11:50:50.939-06:00William Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13627036863243572742noreply@blogger.comBlogger801100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12292843.post-22417994074925597612012-01-21T11:44:00.001-06:002012-01-21T11:50:50.949-06:00

I recently gave a talk on Batches at Microsoft Research. I think them for being nice enough to host my visit and record the talk. Batches are a new approach to relational database access, remote procedure calls, and web services.A Remote Batch statement combines remote and local execution: all the remote code is executed in a single round-trip to the server, where all data sent to the server and

William Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13627036863243572742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12292843.post-5341433414831923822011-11-20T12:17:00.002-06:002011-11-20T12:22:55.592-06:00

I have been telling people that we need to work on guided synthesis over verification. I believe that guided synthesis is the only way we are going to be able to create correct programs in practice. Verification is just too hard, because you have to write the actual program, write the specification, and then develop the verification proof. Maintenance is difficult, because if any of these parts

William Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13627036863243572742noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12292843.post-62123382236975968332011-11-16T12:35:00.003-06:002011-11-20T12:17:08.004-06:00

Channel 9 interviews from SPLASH 2011.I talked with Charles Torre of Channel 9.

William Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13627036863243572742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12292843.post-37688381715462069812011-09-27T21:09:00.005-06:002011-09-28T07:42:56.407-06:00

I have always felt that zoning regulations are an insidious evil that have caused our communities to be built in ways that are impractical and, well, unpleasant. It doesn't make sense to completely separate uses, so that we end up with huge strip malls and housing developments without shops or sidewalks. That's why I'm excited to learn about a viable alternative, called form-based code. The idea

William Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13627036863243572742noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12292843.post-78163948974753222272011-09-18T08:21:00.006-06:002011-09-18T08:36:15.086-06:00

Austin recently started conversion of its old Mueller airport into a housing development. There are some things right about it: mixed use, public space. But the actual houses are crazy. Look at this photo:(Thanks Google!)Note that it has huge stand-alone houses that almost completely cover the available space. The alleys are a nice touch, but they aren't very efficient in terms of space. The

William Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13627036863243572742noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12292843.post-40455519538292967272011-09-09T07:53:00.007-06:002011-09-09T08:04:49.793-06:00

On Tuesday I gave a tutorial on partial evaluation, called "Build your own partial evaluator in 90 minutes" at the working conference on domain specific languages (DSL 2011) in Bordeaux. The lecture notes benefited greatly by help from Ralf Lämmel. I've given this talk a few times before, but have not suggested that the audience actually implement a partial evaluator during the tutorial, as I did

William Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13627036863243572742noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12292843.post-41795785328228014722011-07-30T17:18:00.004-06:002011-07-30T17:23:40.096-06:00

I recently found out that Facebook is incredibly easy to hack. It allows you to access the reset password page without any email confirmation, and it also does not let you modify your security question. Facebook had better do something about this, especially given that Google+ is now going after them. Please go to this Facebook FAQ page and tell that that the answer is not helpful.Facebook FAQs

William Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13627036863243572742noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12292843.post-19573684785934125592011-06-28T08:06:00.001-06:002011-06-28T08:07:46.652-06:00

I posted a message recently to the Ensō blog about grammars.

William Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13627036863243572742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12292843.post-77471140461004908142011-05-21T07:43:00.003-06:002011-05-21T07:44:22.557-06:00

I've been busy working on Ensō, but took time out to write something about what we are doing. This post introduces the Schema Schema. Next I'll talk about grammars...

William Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13627036863243572742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12292843.post-12974594753434447902011-05-04T15:20:00.004-06:002011-05-04T15:27:08.940-06:00

I know that this is just a teaser, but it is the introduction of the paper on Ensō that Tijs and I are writing. If you want to know more or see the code, let me know.Ensō is a theoretically sound and practical reformulation of the concepts of model-driven software development. Ensō is based on first-class structural descriptions, invertable transformations, generic operations and

William Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13627036863243572742noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12292843.post-37794268399150703222011-05-02T12:35:00.007-06:002011-05-06T17:34:57.292-06:00

I recently gave a lecture in my programming language class concluded by explaining that Java does not support inheritance of interfaces. It supports aggregation or composition, but not inheritance. This statement makes no sense unless you understand what inheritance is: consistent modification of self-referential structures. This is why "self" or "this" refers to the subclass in inherited

William Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13627036863243572742noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12292843.post-71127364472831753732011-05-01T09:40:00.003-06:002011-05-01T11:21:57.527-06:00

A great language should let you think useful thoughts you have never been able to think before. This new project I'm working on, whose code name is "Smalltalk of Modeling", is expanding my mind.Here is one idea. Lets generalize the idea of grammars. A grammar is normally used to parse text to create a parse tree. But if you annotate the grammar with constructors then the parse tree can be

William Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13627036863243572742noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12292843.post-14324217488564810852011-05-01T09:30:00.003-06:002011-05-01T11:18:20.724-06:00

I recently said that I'm working on creating the "Smalltalk of Modeling". To me, this means creating an elegant system that is practical but also embodies radical and powerful new ideas. It should also be implemented in itself and also capable of creating real applications.But there are few things about Smalltalk that I hate. The first is the idea of an "image". I cannot stand it when my program

William Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13627036863243572742noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12292843.post-10273861442428115062011-05-01T08:40:00.005-06:002011-05-05T08:00:55.435-06:00

I'm in Ruby GUI hell.wxrubyI'm using ruby1.9 so I need the latest gem. But it is not compiled for 64bit architecture, so I have to build it from source. When I compile, I get an error:SWIG version 1.3.31 is installed, minimum version required is 1.3.37.But when I used MacPorts to try to upgrade SWIG, it only lets me install version 1.3.31 or 2.0.3_0. But wxruby requires a version between 1.3.32

William Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13627036863243572742noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12292843.post-91466203384392371782011-04-30T07:43:00.002-06:002011-04-30T08:17:08.846-06:00

Last week I started tweeting about a new programming language/model that I'm working on with Tijs van der Storm. If you've talked to me about software in the last 10 years, you've probably been exposed to some of my ideas on this topic. I've been trying to make sense of it for a while, but now I'm pleased to say that it is coming together in a concrete way. We aren't ready to announce anything

William Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13627036863243572742noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12292843.post-68247137438616792742011-04-09T21:22:00.004-06:002011-05-02T12:56:48.968-06:00

I just realized that Paul's note is about 10 years old. I'll leave my comments here, but I'm sure a lot has changed since then.... I just read Paul Graham's explanation for why Arc isn't especially object-oriented. My comments below correspond to his points:"Object-oriented programming is exciting if you have a statically-typed language without lexical closures or macros." Smalltalk, Ruby, C#

William Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13627036863243572742noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12292843.post-51115276884982131012011-02-26T09:20:00.003-06:002011-02-26T09:22:51.693-06:00

Does anyone else find it ironic that JAOO would rename itself GOTO? Doesn't anyone remember GOTO considered harmful?

William Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13627036863243572742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12292843.post-2967130977098966922011-02-12T09:41:00.000-06:002011-02-12T09:42:01.914-06:00

I was poking around the ACM site and ran into this list. Its too bad the onlyinclude "terms" not entire search strings.The following are the Top 20 most frequently used search terms over the past 90 days: (occurances of term)1. security (30,608) 2. object (24,393) 3. database (22,965) 4. dot com (19,605) 5. data mining

William Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13627036863243572742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12292843.post-53612949328967029142011-01-15T11:24:00.006-06:002011-01-15T11:51:39.057-06:00

I'm on the PDLI external reviewers committee this year. I've never published a paper at PLDI but I have attended. This is also my first time reviewing papers. I thought the quality of the papers I was given to review was quite high. They were also on a surprisingly broad and interesting range of topics. Unfortunately there was a inverse correlation between paper quality and how interesting I

William Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13627036863243572742noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12292843.post-19820003368500659312010-12-25T23:50:00.002-06:002010-12-25T23:57:23.175-06:00

A student sent me a link to my academic genealogy page. Mine goes like this:Peter Wegner, Maurice Wilkes, John Ratcliffe, Edward Appleton, Lord Rayleigh (discovered argon), ..., Isaac Newton. One thing that's interesting is how few students the great minds had in the 1700s and 1800s.

William Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13627036863243572742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12292843.post-50217390600385650612010-11-17T09:27:00.003-06:002010-12-13T10:36:00.589-06:00

Some rants about conference names:PLDI: the only PL conference with "Design" in the title is also the least likely to accept papers about design of PLs,OOPSLA: a conference originally about objects, but now part of SPLASH because objects are everywhereICFP: was once a conference about programming with functions, but now that almost every modern language has first-class functions, its about pure

William Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13627036863243572742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12292843.post-86417319275566083552010-09-12T21:09:00.003-06:002010-09-12T21:10:46.036-06:00

I am really annoyed at Matlab. It keeps a record of all your old commands. At least, that's what it seems to do. Gives you a nice good feeling that "nothing is ever lost". However, it turns out that it only saves a certain amount of history, and then it starts throwing away commands. I didn't lose anything critical, but it certainly makes me unhappy that I cannot go back and see what I did a few

William Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13627036863243572742noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12292843.post-12662060623283923402010-08-27T06:39:00.005-06:002010-08-27T06:45:36.341-06:00

I finally found out how to sync all (ten) of my secondary Google calendars into iPhone and my Mac:iPhone: Just go to http://google.com/calendar/iphoneselect . Forget about adding multiple CalDAV calendars. That was not a fun prospect.iCal: Go to Preferences/Accounts/Delegates. Sure, this makes no sense. And it doesn't work until you close and load preferences creating the account. But it works

William Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13627036863243572742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12292843.post-76652676713841017972010-04-25T04:38:00.002-06:002010-04-25T04:40:53.340-06:00

I just took at look at The future of programming by Tony Wasserman and Steven Gutz. I've never met him but his article made some fairly accurate projections. Note that we are now in the "Medium Term" period. But we are starting the transition to the "Long Term".

William Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13627036863243572742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12292843.post-85421964818527202010-02-01T08:41:00.002-06:002010-02-01T08:43:24.637-06:00

I just go back from a trip to India/Madrid/Delft. I was at the First Mysore Park Workshop on Building and Programming The Cloud. Then I went to POPL. Finally, I visited Eelco Visser and his group at TU Delft. Very productive! India was great and the food was quite good in Delft. I was less impressed overall with Madrid, although the museums are fantastic.

William Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13627036863243572742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12292843.post-61629313472672425352010-01-29T10:51:00.005-06:002010-04-16T18:19:07.256-06:00

Here are some other comments on my essay:A detailed discussion by Derrick Coetzee.A short comment at Forty Six and TwoIt is recommended as "wOOt brainfood" hereI'm not sure how to interpret the comment that it is "a great vulgarization of various concepts". After I asked them, they explained it is a poor translation from French: they mean "a great accessible explanation of various concepts".A

William Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13627036863243572742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12292843.post-75078152240981944202009-12-14T10:21:00.002-06:002009-12-14T10:29:25.151-06:00

The ECOOP banquet talk was delivered during dessert on the lawn of a nice Italian villa on the hill overlooking Genova. When I started the talk I was wearing this dark Zegna suit I got to wear at the IPO of my company. Unfortunately I never got to wear the suit for that event.You have to realize that banquet talks are about entertainment, not technical details. Everybody was full of good food and

William Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13627036863243572742noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12292843.post-31280419107446170692009-12-14T10:04:00.002-06:002009-12-14T10:20:52.996-06:00

My recent essay seems to be causing a big stir. I am pleased because I love it when my work has impact. The only funny thing about it is that I've known all this stuff for 20 years. I guess I just haven't communicated it clearly enough. And the essay is not an easy read, even still. Some people have suggested I need to write a book. We'll see.Guy Steele pointed out that a pure OO approach to data

William Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13627036863243572742noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12292843.post-38381344526337739342009-11-02T22:52:00.002-06:002009-11-02T22:53:22.877-06:00

I uploaded slides for several of my recent talks. I'll try to upload the rest before the end of the year :-)

William Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13627036863243572742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12292843.post-11591356797584502662009-11-02T22:32:00.003-06:002009-11-27T10:47:28.700-06:00

I just got back from OOPSLA/Onward! where I presented an essay On Understanding Data Abstraction, Revisited. There is a discussion about it on Lambda the Ultimate. Here are the slides from the talk. The talk went pretty well. There was a nice discussion with the audience. Unfortunately the paper is pretty technical, so some people in the audience didn't get it. I suppose now I need to write the

William Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13627036863243572742noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12292843.post-736873700693888742009-10-21T09:22:00.002-06:002009-10-21T09:29:22.094-06:00

Today I want to talk about my experiences in industry and academia. When most of you think of industry, you think of an industrial research lab, for example HP Labs, Microsoft Research, or Google Research. I've spent some time in an a research lab, but what I really mean by industry is commercial software development. Getting some industrial experience is a good thing, but I don't necessarily

William Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13627036863243572742noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12292843.post-52594195438904144062009-04-06T09:29:00.002-06:002009-04-06T09:38:52.869-06:00

I was on the review panel for 3 Day Startup, an entrepreneurial experience for students here at UT Austin. It is co-organized by one of my PhD students, Thomas Finsterbusch, and I have worked with several of the other 44 students who participated. They had a good mix of technical, business, and communication experience. They also included graduate students and undergraduates. Last night they

William Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13627036863243572742noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12292843.post-49201464605638386242009-03-26T08:41:00.006-06:002009-10-28T06:18:54.909-06:00

Despite being jaded and feeling that you've seen it all before, its important to keep your sense of wonder at the possibility of seeing something new. There are new ideas in software. Maybe the last cool idea that captured your imagination didn't turn out to be as amazing as you had hoped. Don't give up. The next idea might be better. It probably means that the first idea didn't solve the whole

William Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13627036863243572742noreply@blogger.com16tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12292843.post-50842589097974705982009-03-15T14:14:00.004-06:002009-03-16T17:11:29.970-06:00

I've been working with Jose Falcon, undergrad here at UT, for almost a year on this crazy idea for an approach to syntax that combines aspects of Lisp S-Expressions and familiar Algol/C/Java notations. The idea is to use a generic syntax, as in Lisp, but extend it to include many of the common syntactic conventions found in programming languages, grammars, and style sheets. Lisp only recognizes

William Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13627036863243572742noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12292843.post-276941546525870282008-10-12T20:27:00.001-06:002008-10-12T20:36:34.567-06:00

I have participated in this thread about LINQ for Java. There are some very good comments. I don't think that LINQ is perfect, but it is better than most alternatives. It is better than my proposal, Safe Query Objects [PDF] (aka Native Queries supported by Db40), although the constraints were different. I was trying to see how to do a type-safe query language without any changes to Java. I think

William Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13627036863243572742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12292843.post-36422346369641096172008-09-27T06:59:00.001-06:002008-09-28T22:40:47.964-06:00

I have been working with model-driven software development for many years, but I haven't published anything on it yet. At Allegis, we developed a complete enterprise application based on models. We found this to be much more effective than the standard object-oriented MVC approaches. One reason I returned to research, and joined academia, was to do research into this programming paradigm. I've

William Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13627036863243572742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12292843.post-77932293240115129392008-09-26T09:01:00.001-06:002008-09-28T20:11:56.360-06:00

I've been using Scheme recently, and have been complaining to everybody about the lack of any good visual debugger for the language. Dr. Scheme has some debugging features, but they seem very primitive and awkward to me. Maybe they are exploring new ways to debug (e.g. drawing arrows all over the code to illustrate the calls stack), but I just want a good conventional debugger. Gambit Scheme has

William Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13627036863243572742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12292843.post-57542775002981265392008-09-26T08:59:00.000-06:002008-09-26T09:00:53.239-06:00

I hunted around for a while and found out a good way to embed a news feed (RSS) in a web page. You use Google Reader to convert the feed into a little block of text that can be embedded. Here are directions on how to do it.

William Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13627036863243572742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12292843.post-16503286721982306712008-09-07T12:16:00.000-06:002008-09-07T12:22:53.734-06:00

I just got back from the Middle Earth Programming Language seminar (MEPLS) in Abilene TX. Where I gave a talk on Strategic Programming by model interpretation. I have been working on this for a long time, and its a great feeling to finally have a working implementation and a paper. See my home page at UT Austin for a link. I am very excited about this work. I'm programming an implementation of

William Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13627036863243572742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12292843.post-89541924140869355962008-05-15T20:51:00.001-06:002008-09-26T08:59:21.069-06:00

Java Object Persistence: State of the Union PART II PublishedODBMS.ORG, a vendor-independent non-profit group of high-profilesoftware experts lead by Prof. Roberto Zicari, today announced anew, second sequel to its popular panel discussion Java ObjectPersistence: State of the Union, adding responses from theODBMS.ORG experts Jose Blakeley (Microsoft), Rick Cattell (SunMicrosystems), William Cook

William Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13627036863243572742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12292843.post-60691200739891603662007-12-23T09:16:00.000-06:002007-12-23T09:34:39.217-06:00

Influencing another researcher or company is about the best that can happen to a piece of academic research. The proposal in my paper on Safe Query Objects was implemented and shipped by db4objects as a key feature of their product, within 6 months of publishing my paper.They are an amazing company, and they even gave me a little research grant to do more work. Thanks!More recently, my paper on

William Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13627036863243572742noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12292843.post-16216898489883360102006-12-01T09:03:00.000-06:002007-02-22T09:11:16.353-06:00

The second Dynamic Languages Symposium at OOPSLA 2006 was a great success. There were 193 registered participants. To put this into context, it's a little more than 15% of the overall OOPSLA audience, and is significantly larger than most other events that are part of OOPSLA. DLS 2006 had three invited talks:Ian Piumarta: Openness and simplicity in dynamic systems implementation Audrey Tang: Perl

William Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13627036863243572742noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12292843.post-1162325212931514672006-10-31T14:03:00.001-06:002006-10-31T14:06:53.006-06:00

The panel on Objects and Databases: State of the Union in 2006 went pretty well. There was a lot of talk about who owns the data. The O/R crowd made a credible case continued interoperability with RDBMS, while the OODB people continued to paint a picture of a pure object-oriented future. But these are just two impressions from the panel. You can hear the whole thing, thinks to Stefan Edlic, at

William Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13627036863243572742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12292843.post-1162325006482080942006-10-31T14:03:00.000-06:002006-10-31T14:03:26.963-06:00

Well, OOPSLA was amazing this year! But I'm biased, since I was program chair. I had fun meeting everybody who came from around the world to share the OOPSLA experience. This year had some consolidation and regrouping, but also gave some glimpses of what's to come.Guy Steele gave a great talk on Fortress, a high-productivity language for the Fortran crowd. It was also a great sequel to his 1998

William Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13627036863243572742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12292843.post-1159482117225791562006-09-28T16:17:00.000-06:002006-09-28T16:21:57.673-06:00

My paper with Janel Barfield on Web Services versus Distributed Objects: A Case Study of Performance and Interface Design was selected as the Best Paper at IEEE International Conference on Web Services ( ICWS) 2006. This paper has caused a little controversy... the basic idea of the first part is well-known, but I don't know of any formal benchmark comparisons that demonstrate the idea in a

William Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13627036863243572742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12292843.post-1158360244684428122006-09-05T16:43:00.000-06:002006-09-15T16:44:05.106-06:00

OOPSLA 2006 will be held October 22-26 in historic Portland, Oregon (USA). You can learn all about OOPSLA at www.oopsla.org, and/or download the Advance Program PDF at http://www.oopsla.org/2006//program/oopsla_06_advance_program.pdf .OOPSLA is the premier gathering of professionals from industry and academia, all sharing their experiences with today’s object technologies and its offshoots.

William Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13627036863243572742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12292843.post-1155606181363592572006-08-14T19:42:00.000-06:002006-09-28T16:22:50.536-06:00

I told my brother that Second Life is going to replace the current web in 10 to 15 years. There are many potential problems on the way, but it is certainly possible. It is pretty clear that a single company like Linden Labs, cannot pull something like that off by itself. The exponential growth of the web -- remember it’s just been 15 years! -- requires a more open model. However, there are some

William Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13627036863243572742noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12292843.post-1152540397730842922006-07-10T08:06:00.000-06:002006-07-10T08:06:38.333-06:00

I just returned from ECOOP. It was great to reconnect with so many researchers from around the world. I saw Walter Olthoff for the first time in 10 years. I was invited to present at the special session on Summing up the Past and Trying to Outline the Future in honor of the 20th ECOOP. I used a Lessig style presentation. This is the first time I've ever gone so far as self-timing, with each slide

William Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13627036863243572742noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12292843.post-1151188211591658802006-06-24T17:22:00.000-06:002006-06-24T21:40:22.853-06:00

It really bugs me when people say "technology-X was not adopted because 1) there is a conspiracy against it, or 2) corporations are too slow, stupid, conservative to try anything new, 3) MS tried to kill it, etc". Usually they say this about their pet technology, and they can't believe that there were fundamental problems with the idea, so they invent conspiracies or assume other people are too

William Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13627036863243572742noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12292843.post-1151188528481112052006-06-24T16:30:00.000-06:002006-06-24T21:27:40.743-06:00

I recently got into a little argument with Michi Henning about his article Rise and fall of CORBA. This is too bad, because we mostly agree with each other. I think CORBA is dead too. My only point is that I think it is dead for much more fundamental reasons than he does. That is, I am not sure that tranparent distributed objects are a good idea at all -- which is why I am interested in web

William Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13627036863243572742noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12292843.post-1150731700477228042006-06-19T09:41:00.000-06:002006-06-19T09:42:53.000-06:00

I posted to a thread on Javalobby: Language Wars Redux - the imminent approach of LINQ (see page 4). Most people just don't seem to understand the issues involved in connecting databases and programming languages... most seem to think that things are fine the way they are, but if that were true why do we have a new OR mapper every year? Also, Java people seem to be very conservative, not even

William Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13627036863243572742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12292843.post-1150731890661780592006-06-07T09:44:00.000-06:002006-06-19T09:46:00.473-06:00

I am hosting a panel on Objects and Databases at OOPSLA in Portland this year, on Oct 24th. Here is the working abstract:Java and C# have brought Object Oriented Programming to the masses, yet programmers continue to struggle with persistent storage of objects. Juggling object persistence with requirements for simplicity, flexibility, maintainability, transparency, scalability and five-nines

William Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13627036863243572742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12292843.post-1141231697141605372006-03-01T10:46:00.000-06:002006-03-01T10:48:52.570-06:00

Here's a better way to see what is going on for kids at Explore UT 2006.You can also view the official schedule.

William Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13627036863243572742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12292843.post-1140014618478019222006-02-15T08:37:00.000-06:002006-02-15T08:43:38.653-06:00

I just got back from the ECOOP program committe meeting in Paris. The meeting went well, but the highlight of the trip was that I accidentally found a Poilane bakery and even asked if I could visit le fournil in the basement. They have a huge woodfired oven, but the room itself was tiny. My French is still good enough after 20 years to get around and have reasonable conversations. I went to

William Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13627036863243572742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12292843.post-1136591553592735022006-01-06T17:51:00.000-06:002006-01-06T17:52:33.866-06:00

Dr. Dobb's February issue has the article on Native Queries, listed on the main page:Native Queries for Persistent ObjectsBy William R. Cook and Carl Rosenberger

William Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13627036863243572742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12292843.post-1140014073721306812005-12-17T08:32:00.000-06:002006-02-15T08:35:52.126-06:00

I visited db4objects in December. We had a good discussion on object databases and native queries. Here are some photos.

William Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13627036863243572742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12292843.post-1134138722141555312005-12-09T08:28:00.000-06:002005-12-09T08:32:02.153-06:00

I am sad to say that my Alma Mater major department, Computer Science at Tulane, is being eliminated. I wonder how they can lay off tenured faculty and just shut it down. I have many fond memories of the department. It was a great place to learn and grow.

William Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13627036863243572742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12292843.post-1133919051921388712005-12-06T19:30:00.000-06:002005-12-06T19:30:51.923-06:00

A very nice review of db4objects and Native Queries by Jeff Brown. This was also picked up by TheServerSide... we'll see if there is any discussion.

William Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13627036863243572742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12292843.post-1133918857335899722005-11-18T18:27:00.000-06:002005-12-06T19:29:17.320-06:00

Native queries discussed on TheServerSide. There was also an earlier discussion in the context of JDO.

William Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13627036863243572742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12292843.post-1133918821214163232005-09-29T14:42:00.000-06:002005-12-06T19:27:01.213-06:00

POJQ: Plain Old Java Queries project approved by java.net. This is an open source implementation of Safe/Native queries, launched by Wes Biggs.

William Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13627036863243572742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12292843.post-1133918756866634332005-09-15T19:25:00.000-06:002005-12-06T19:25:56.866-06:00

Object Database Management Systems portal announced, which features Native Query paper.

William Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13627036863243572742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12292843.post-1124889479312345272005-08-24T07:17:00.000-06:002005-12-06T19:30:23.890-06:00

I have had lots of problems clipping pictures. I am surprised that you have not been having problems with your pictures being inside a large white border (the size of the powerpoint slide).I didn't know you could use EMF. How do you convert it to PS?What I do is print the picture to a postscript printer but use the "save as file" option. This produces a PS file. THen run this through Ghostview

William Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13627036863243572742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12292843.post-1133918733529080432005-08-23T17:25:00.000-06:002005-12-06T19:28:16.470-06:00

Released Native Queries for Persistent Objects, A Design White Paper with Carl Rosenberger

William Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13627036863243572742noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12292843.post-1124835949936644072005-08-23T16:19:00.000-06:002005-08-23T18:50:53.000-06:00

When I defined Safe Queries for Java I thought that it might be an idea that could be applied relatively soon to solving real needs of industry... but I didn't think it would be shipping so quickly. Then I found out about db4objects. They are implementing the idea as a key component of their next product release this fall. We have made some improvements to the idea, described in a new white paper

William Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13627036863243572742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12292843.post-1133918790954678592005-08-19T10:26:00.000-06:002005-12-06T19:26:30.956-06:00

ODBMS.ORG Launches Educational Portal on Object Databases High-Profile Experts Help Meet Growing Demand for Free Educational Resources on OO Database Technology

William Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13627036863243572742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12292843.post-1133918706451628792005-08-18T11:24:00.000-06:002005-12-06T19:25:06.453-06:00

We have released a preliminary interpreter for Orc, an Orchestration Language.

William Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13627036863243572742noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12292843.post-1124375002608099122005-08-18T08:15:00.000-06:002005-08-18T08:30:29.486-06:00

In trying to solve the problem mentioned in the previous post, I did a lot of Google searching. Some things are hard to find, because they can be described a lot of ways but use words that also have many other uses. The ideas "currently running script" and "directory of something" are quite common and can be combined in lots of ways. But I wanted just one partcular meaning, and it took me a while

William Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13627036863243572742noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12292843.post-1124373851909354772005-08-18T07:43:00.000-06:002005-08-18T08:15:10.963-06:00

I want to distribute some Java software in a way that is easy to use. The software depends upon some libraries, so I need to set the class path before running Java. I created a simple command ile (for Unix and Windows) to launch the application. I assume the libraries are in the same irectory as the command file, but had a hard time finding out what directory the command file is in. I didn't want

William Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13627036863243572742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12292843.post-1133918665450242952005-08-10T16:23:00.000-06:002005-12-06T19:24:25.536-06:00

I will be attending OOPSLA this fall (as always). Let me know if you want to meet there.

William Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13627036863243572742noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12292843.post-1123603133674488392005-08-09T09:56:00.000-06:002005-08-09T09:58:53.680-06:00

I'm working on an article on the history of AppleScript for HOPL III. I led the team that designed and implemented the language, but then we all left Apple. That was during the bad times when Jobs was away.

William Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13627036863243572742noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12292843.post-1119924521117051882005-06-27T20:03:00.000-06:002005-08-19T07:18:40.320-06:00

I can't stand it any more. Why does is it so difficult to install experimental software???? Granted, a lot of the stuff I want to try out is academic/experimental, but IT SHOULD NOT BE THIS DIFFICULT! The next time I download a package like this I'm going to tear my hair out:* A README file that doesn't say what the software does!* An INSTALL file that goes on for pages and page about

William Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13627036863243572742noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12292843.post-1117766139552415312005-06-02T20:26:00.000-06:002005-06-02T20:42:23.333-06:00

I will not say anything too negative about Emacs here. I suspect my peers might think badly of me simply because I don't use Emacs. But I've been living the the world where text selections should be visible, status bars are drawn by the GUI, and cut/copy/paste are control x/c/v for too long. I just can't handle Emacs.But I've always liked being able to run a command in an editor window. An editor

William Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13627036863243572742noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12292843.post-1117424114338859942005-05-29T21:31:00.000-06:002005-05-29T21:35:14.343-06:00

I'm learning ACL2: after spending a day understanding what most people feel when they try to program a computer (why the *#@* doesn't it accept my program?), I seem to have a breakthrough that at least allows me to write some functions and make a little progress. Mostly this involves learning "The Method", and becoming a lot more sensitive to all those nagging little corner cases that don't

William Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13627036863243572742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12292843.post-1116603421940117382005-05-20T09:33:00.000-06:002005-05-20T09:45:24.366-06:00

Last August I decided to sign up for Vonage, to try it out. I made a few calls and it seemed to work. So I requested that my home number be converted to a Vonage number. I waited and waited. Nothing happened. I called them every month or so for the next six months to check the status, but nothing happened. Perhaps SBC was not willing to make the transfer. Perhaps Vonage dropped the ball. Updated

William Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13627036863243572742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12292843.post-1115299971167421972005-05-05T07:29:00.000-06:002005-05-05T07:32:51.173-06:00

I've noticed that all my posts so far have been tips, tricks and annoyances. There are several reasons for this: 1) I have a backlog of useful bits that I feel I should post.2) I feel guilty that I've been using solutions to problems I find on the internet, but haven't been posting my own.3) Perhaps I'm still getting used to the medium.Eventually I will start writing about higher-level issues....

William Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13627036863243572742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12292843.post-1115176798771311742005-05-03T21:12:00.000-06:002005-05-16T07:48:56.956-06:00

I had a disk completely die, and my backups are not as good as they should have been. Fortunately, the data recovery people know their job.This motivated me to figure out Windows backups. I am not sure that this is the greatest backup script, but it works for me. Here is what it does:* creates a full backup every week (on monday)* creates differential backups (with changes from the full backup)

William Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13627036863243572742noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12292843.post-1114403684333639922005-04-24T22:30:00.000-06:002005-04-25T07:08:26.936-06:00

Do you have trouble with your signature having the wrong format in Outlook? Mine had the "paragraph" style instead of "normal", so it looked different from the rest of my messages.Well, I figured out that you can edit the HTML in the files where the signatures are stored. Just take out the paragraph marks and everything works much better!I found the files inC:\Documents and Settings\\Application

William Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13627036863243572742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12292843.post-1114379252462376802005-04-24T15:37:00.000-06:002005-04-24T16:03:48.686-06:00

I recently wanted to get some data to select program committee members for a conference. I decided to estimate which authors had the most impact with papers published at the conference in the past. After some experimentation, here is what I wanted to do:Use Google to estimate how many pages refer to each paper published at the conference, then analyze this data to find the most cited

William Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13627036863243572742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12292843.post-1114279801406427552005-04-23T12:04:00.000-06:002005-04-23T12:10:01.406-06:00

Here is an older paper that is a real gem:Reducing cross domain call overhead using batched futuresPhillip Bogle and Barbara LiskovOOPSLA '94http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=191133Techniques that reduce the cost of latency are becoming increasingly important. This approach is quite simple, but it doesn't eliminate all the latency from a program. It can only delay sends based on the history

William Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13627036863243572742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12292843.post-1113948126907624822005-04-19T15:57:00.000-06:002005-12-06T19:35:38.340-06:00

Have you ever noticed that online maps don't usually point to the right house/business on a street? I was looking at one today and noticed that google maps pointed to the wrong house. The addresses on my side of the street go from 1 to 13, and my address is 11 so I am near the north end of the block. But google pointed to the south end of the block. I suspect that they assume the block goes 1 to

William Cookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13627036863243572742noreply@blogger.com0