simondobson.org

I’ve been play­ing with eval­u­at­ing two new toys import­ant new pieces of tech­no­logy: an iPad and a Pulse Smart­Pen. The com­bin­a­tion almost makes we ready to ditch my net­book — or at least got me think­ing care­fully about why I still have one.

con­tinue reading…

Mon­ads are one of the hot­test top­ics in func­tional pro­gram­ming, and argu­ably sim­plify the con­struc­tion of a whole class of sys­tems. Which makes it sur­pris­ing that they’re so opaque and hard to under­stand to people who’s main exper­i­ence is in imper­at­ive or object-oriented languages.

con­tinue reading…

Context-aware sys­tems are inten­ded to fol­low and aug­ment user-led, real-world pro­cesses. These dif­fer some­what from tra­di­tional work­flow pro­cesses, but share some char­ac­ter­ist­ics. Might the tech­niques used to imple­ment busi­ness pro­cesses via web ser­vice orches­tra­tion fit into the context-aware land­scape too?

con­tinue reading…

I’ve been for­tu­nate enough to spend some of the past couple of days with a comic-writer who stud­ies the aca­demic exper­i­ence, and who might well have a greater aggreg­ate impact on sci­ence than almost any­one else I’ve ever met.

con­tinue reading…

Over the week­end there was a fas­cin­at­ing exchange of view­points in the Wall Street Journal tak­ing oppos­ing sides of the argu­ment as to what effect the inter­net is hav­ing on us: is it mak­ing us smarter and better-informed, or more shal­low and un-disciplined com­pared to our book-reading days? Per­haps more import­antly. is there any­thing we can do to lever­age the inter­net to pro­mote smart­ness more effectively?

con­tinue reading…

Many lan­guages have an under­ly­ing vir­tual machine (VM) to provide a more port­able and con­veni­ent sub­strate for com­pil­a­tion or inter­pret­a­tion. For lan­guage research it’s use­ful to be able to gen­er­ate cus­tom VMs and other lan­guage tools for dif­fer­ent lan­guages. Which raises the ques­tion: what’s the appro­pri­ate lan­guage for writ­ing exper­i­mental languages?

con­tinue reading…

I’ve spent this week at the Per­vas­ive 2010 con­fer­ence on per­vas­ive com­put­ing, along with the Pro­gram­ming Meth­ods for Mobile and Per­vas­ive Sys­tems work­shop I co-arranged with Dominic Dug­gan. Both events have been fascinating.

con­tinue reading…

I was talk­ing to one of my stu­dents earlier, and lent him a book to read over sum­mer. It was only after he’d left that I real­ised  that — for me at any rate — the book I’d given him is prob­ably the most sem­inal work in the whole of com­puter sci­ence, and cer­tainly the book that’s most influ­enced my career and research interests.

con­tinue reading…