toute.ca -- home of Termite and other random stuff: "Termite

Termite is an Erlang-like distributed programming system written in Scheme. It requires the latest version of Gambit-C.

Download Termite using darcs with the following command:

darcs get http://toute.ca/termite

You can also browse the repository here, or download a potentially out-of-date tarball.

Finally, there's a paper written about Termite.

Questions, comments and error reports should be sent to Guillaume Germain (guillaume.germain [at] gmail.com)."

Genetic Algorithms and Evolutionary Computation
Very long, very cool explication with plenty of examples.

Windows PowerShell: "Windows PowerShell

Windows PowerShell is a new command line shell and task-based scripting technology that provides comprehensive control and automation of system administration tasks. Windows PowerShell allows Windows administrators to be more productive by providing over 100 system administration utilities, consistent syntax, and improved navigation of common management data such as the registry or Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI). Windows PowerShell also includes a scripting language which enables comprehensive automation of Windows system administration tasks. The Windows PowerShell language is intuitive and supports your organization’s existing scripts and command line tool investments. Exchange Server 2007 and System Center Operations Manager 2007 will leverage Windows PowerShell to provide improved command line automation."

Scripting Tools and Utilities: "Script Center
Scripting Tools and Utilities

If you want something done right, why not let someone else do it for you? All the tools you need to create great scripts are right here. If it’s not here, it doesn’t exist. Or it’s somewhere else, but you’re on your own there."

Threaded code - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "Threaded code
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search

For multi-threaded programming, see Thread (computer science).

In computer science, the term threaded code refers to an implementation technique for programming languages that produces very compact code. Threading is a form of code consisting entirely of subroutine calls, written without the subroutine call instruction, and processed by an interpreter, which jumps to each successive subroutine in turn.

Threaded code is used in the Forth and early versions of the B programming languages, as well as many implementations of FORTRAN, BASIC, COBOL and other languages for small minicomputers.

The benefits of extremely compact code, in some cases, come at the expense of slower execution speed. However, in other cases there is a synergistic effect -- sometimes threaded code is smaller and faster than non-threaded code. In systems with virtual memory (where memory is simulated with a mechanical disk drive), threaded code may be hundreds of times faster than a less-compact design that does not fit in the available physical memory, because disk drives tend to be roughly a thousand times slower than random-access memory (RAM)."

Two PhD theses on reliable, distributed systems:

From Lambda the Ultimate:
E Thesis: Robust Composition

Mark S. Miller's PhD thesis on Robust Composition: Towards a Unified Approach to Access Control and Concurrency Control is now online.

When separately written programs are composed so that they may cooperate, they may instead destructively interfere in unanticipated ways. These hazards limit the scale and functionality of the software systems we can successfully compose. This dissertation presents a framework for enabling those interactions between components needed for the cooperation we intend, while minimizing the hazards of destructive interference.

Great progress on the composition problem has been made within the object paradigm, chiefly in the context of sequential, single-machine programming among benign components. We show how to extend this success to support robust composition of concurrent and potentially malicious components distributed over potentially malicious machines. We present E, a distributed, persistent, secure programming language, and CapDesk, a virus-safe desktop built in E, as embodiments of the techniques we explain.

E rates as a (very) important language for anyone interested in ideas of messaging, distribution and security. The nice thing about a thesis (such as this one and Joe Armstrong's) is that it gives a nice historical account of the related work and influences.

By Chris Rathman at 04/16/2006 - 16:33 | Parallel/Distributed | Software Engineering | other blogs | 8 reads

And from Joe Armstrong SICS home page: "Programming reliable systems (Ph.D. thesis)

making reliable systems in the presence of software errors.

Here are some ideas on how to make reliable systems that function even in the presence of software errors. This thesis describes the thinking behind Erlang, Concurrency Oriented Programing, UBF and building reliable systems from communicating components."

From Erlang:
Related links:

Joe Armstrong's PhD presentation Making reliable distributed systems in the presence of software errors

.NET Decompiler: "It was only a matter of time before decompiling of .NET Exe's and DLLs to MS Interlingua became a reality. Here are a couple of industry strength .NET decompilers which produces some incredibly accurate results.

Salamander is a .NET decompiler that converts executable files (.EXE or .DLL) from Intermediate Language (IL) binary format to high-level source codes, such as C#, managed C++, Visual Basic.NET, etc. For more than 8,000 classes that have been tested, Salamander always produces equivalent and recompilable codes that are remarkably close to the original source codes.

you can try it online here

Another very interesting decomplier is Ankarino, a very powerful command line tool which is provided as an open source utility, so you can get under the covers and see how it works.
give it a whirl here"

Canonical OPC .NET (DotNet) interoperability article on Google Groups (Dave Adair): "This is the source for my implementations at work. I believe the Dave in the discussion is Dave Adair.

http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&threadm=eWoEy3V8BHA.1380%40tkmsftngp03"

Slashdot | Debugging Asynchronous Applications?:

Some great suggestions from this article!

"Debugging Asynchronous Applications?
Posted by Cliff on Wednesday February 08, @08:20PM
from the mind-your-breakpoints dept.
Communications Programming
duncan bayne asks: 'I'm attempting to debug a complicated telephony application, written in C#, that's almost entirely event driven. This is the first time I've debugged a large asynchronous application that isn't a GUI, and I'm curious to know what advice the Slashdot crowd has to share - have you any recommended tools, best practices, or common pitfalls to avoid?'"

I'm not sure if you are 2.0 yet, but if you are, start by taking a look at VS2005. In the debug department, enhancements include better JIT debugging, stepping into XML/Web services from a client, and state-driven object inspection. Object Test Bench (OTB) is a simple object-level test utility. You create instances of your objects, invoke methods, and evaluate results... to shorten the task of coding, debugging and re-coding. I'm not sure about telephony specifically, but WSE/WS* SOAP layers can be hard to manuever through in a debugger, yet VS2005 does it quite nicely via WSDL.

One other suggestion... "event bus" apps like you describe are good candidates for capturing as much runtime data as possible, so make sure you adjust your build parameters and do as much of that as possible, especially in problem assemblies. Oh, and don't forget to build nUnits. Sounds like you're walking into some prewritten code, but the effort might be worthwhile.

Programming Languages: Application and Interpretation | Lambda the Ultimate: "Programming Languages: Application and Interpretation

A new release of Shriram Krishnamurthi's programming languages book is available."

Scheme, Haskell, Prolog. He implements a lot of this crap in the book.

On this site you'll find some quick links to several sites about .NET, ASP.NET, upcoming technologies etc as well as links to my own articles and other projects I'm participating in.

I hope you enjoy your visit on my site! Also check out my technical blog which is updated far more regularly than this website :-).

Author: Bart De Smet, MVP on Visual C#

C Sharp - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "C# (see section on naming, pronunciation) is an object-oriented programming language developed by Microsoft as part of their .NET initiative. Microsoft based C# on C++ and was influenced by some aspects of Java. C# has a procedural, object oriented syntax that combines aspects of several other programming languages, most notably C++, Java and Delphi. Since C#'s principal designer was the designer of Borland's Turbo Pascal, Turbo Pascal for Windows, and Delphi, concepts from those languages are apparent in C#. Other contributions can be traced on a programming language history chart. C# attempts to fit well for both rapid development, like Visual Basic or Delphi, and for complete full-featured desktop applications."

Programming Language transformation? | Lambda the Ultimate: "Intentional Programming

There was Microsoft's Intentional Programming which does something along the line of what you want though less ambitious. SCID is a similar thing that was thought up earlier.
By Derek Elkins at Thu, 01/26/2006 - 18:59 | login or register to post comments
Re: SCID

SCID looks neat, thanks for the link! (Although, at least at first blush it reads like a hyper IDE vs. something which can transmogrify between horribly different languages.)
By raould at Thu, 01/26/2006 - 21:24 | login or register to post comments
Not automated but...

It can't really be automated at this point, but there are efforts being done for more language interoperability. .Net is one of the examples, and a lot of people are now reusing the JVM in order to be 'Java compatible'.

However for both of theses you need to target either an high level language (by generating Java or C# sources) or directly the VM bytecode (JVM or CLR). That's why I wrote NekoVM which defines an easy-to-target intermediate language and provide the VM and the libraries to run it.

It should greatly ease the language compiler implementation by providing a common runtime. And if you write a Neko -> Your language converter, you will be able to reverse the process, and translate other languages targeting Neko back into yours."

C? vs. Erlang? | Lambda the Ultimate: "C? vs. Erlang?

I know there was C? topic before. But the discussion really had more to do with Xen (XML, DB integration) than the Polyphonic C# concurrency part. I'm an Erlang newbie myself, but I already can see that asynchronous communication is the common thread to both languages and this approach is going to be big - can be used from embedded system to biz process orchestration.

Looking at the Santa Claus sample, C? code seems to be quite compact and the syntax extension to C# is minimal. However process/thread creation is implicit, and it seems to be a little more difficult to reason. I would imagine a solution in Erlang clearer, but maybe longer.

Any thoughts/pointers on the pros and cons of different concurrency approaches? We really should have a 'great concurrency shootout'."

MochiKit – A lightweight Javascript library: "MochiKit makes JavaScript suck less

MochiKit is a highly documented and well tested, suite of JavaScript libraries that will help you get shit done, fast. We took all the good ideas we could find from our Python, Objective-C, etc. experience and adapted it to the crazy world of JavaScript.
Reliable

MochiKit has HUNDREDS of tests. We build real applications with this thing. So even though development can move fast, we make sure to get tests written. This also makes platform compatibility issues much easier to detect and resolve than the 'guess and check' style of quality assurance seen in some of the other libraries out there. It's not broken.
Documented

You're unlikely to find any JavaScript code with better documentation than MochiKit. We make a point to maintain 100% documentation coverage for all of MochiKit at all times. You don't have to fumble around reading our source code or leafing through examples to find out how something works.
Evolutionary

MochiKit can adapt to anything you throw at it. It makes no assumptions about how your code needs to act, and it has hooks (by way of the the adapter registries) that makes sure that you can define your own comparisons, programmer representations, iterators, or DOM node coercion for any object in any way you wish. We'll gladly serve you all the Kool-Aid you want, but we're not goi"

Javascript Inheritance | Lambda the Ultimate: "Javascript Inheritance

This seems like a nice summary of various approaches, and provides an interesting prespective on prototype based languages in general and on Javascript in particular. Some of the libraries mentioned were discussed here before.

It is tempting to compare this to various documents trying to show 'how to add objects to Scheme/Haskell/etc.' The solutions are rather similar..."

Slashdot | How To Choose An Open Source CMS: "How To Choose An Open Source CMS
Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Wednesday January 25, @08:56AM
from the focus-on-the-problem dept.

An anonymous reader writes 'Content management specialist Seth Gottlieb has written an easy to understand how-to on selecting an open source CMS. Gottlieb is also responsible for the whitepaper 'Content Management Problems and Open Source Solutions' which summarizes 15 open source projects and distinguishes between open source CMS and proprietary software selection.'"

36. Purple Cow. Gelett Burgess. Modern American Poetry: "36. The Purple Cow
(Reflections on a Mythic Beast Who's Quite Remarkable, at Least.)

I NEVER saw a Purple Cow;
I never hope to See One;
But I can Tell you, Anyhow,
I'd rather See than Be One. "

Cooperative Linux: "Cooperative Linux is the first working free and open source method for optimally running Linux on Microsoft Windows natively. More generally, Cooperative Linux (short-named coLinux) is a port of the Linux kernel that allows it to run cooperatively alongside another operating system on a single machine. For instance, it allows one to freely run Linux on Windows 2000/XP, without using a commercial PC virtualization software such as VMware, in a way which is much more optimal than using any general purpose PC virtualization software. In its current condition, it allows us to run the KNOPPIX Japanese Edition on Windows (see Screenshots)."

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