Gabor Melis announced CoMa on c.l.l. A quote from the project homepage:

Similar to autoconf, but without the auto part, CoMa provides a uniform configuration mechanism for items. Intended to be used in component based development (buzz, buzz) where different software pieces are used in the context of more than one application or version of the same application, it provides a way to configure items and query, validate their configuration.

A special kind of item called kit acts as the descriptor for a whole product: it can check out the needed items and configure them to work together. At present it works best with HO-CVS, but it can get on with pure CVS, albeit with some loss of convenience.

CoMa is written and customized in Common Lisp.

Too bad it doesn't work with subversion yet. Seems like a natural fit. Anyway, VESTA is still my favourite for large scale projects. CVS with perl or shell scripts is evil.

Researchers at IBM Research used a new algorithm developed for computational biology to do SPAM detection.

The method uses pattern-discovery as its underlying tool and is another instance of a generic approach that has been the basis of previously successful solutions developed by our group to tackle problems in computational biology such as gene finding and protein annotation. Chung- Kwei can be trained very quickly; as new examples of SPAM become available, the system can re-train itself without interrupting the classification of incoming e-mail.

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Lorand Bruhacs sent me a transcription of a talk by Richard Hamming at Bell Communications Research Colloquium Seminar in 1986. The talk had the title "You and Your Research" [PDF] [HTML].

In order to get at you individually, I must talk in the first person. I have to get you to drop modesty and say to yourself, "Yes, I would like to do first-class work." Our society frowns on people who set out to do really good work. You're not supposed to; luck is supposed to descend on you and you do great things by chance. Well, that's a kind of dumb thing to say. I say, why shouldn't you set out to do something significant. You don't have to tell other people, but shouldn't you say to yourself, "Yes, I would like to do something significant."

I greatly enjoyed this transcription and it certainly should be required reading for all freshmen.

As a quick fix against comment spam I changed the writeback policy. Articles older than 7 days cannot be commented on anymore. It's only a temporary measure until I get the blacklist stuff working correctly. For now I run this simple find via cron to lock down older articles:

find path-to-writeback-dir -type f -mtime +7 -exec chmod 444 {} \;

The new Eboy site is powered by BKNR! Cool.

The images are amazing and strangely beautiful! (link via BoingBoing)

WIRED has an entertaining story about Craig Venter's new project: sequencing the genome of Mother Earth. Here's a nice quote from the article:

"The world is going genomic," Enriquez says. "If you do not perceive the possibilities in this shift, if you say no instead of yes, you will be left in the past. There will be whole societies who end up serving mai tais on the beach because they don't understand this."

I noticed today that richgold.org is offline. I made the PDF version of The Plenitude available here.

Yesterday night, while building a new kernel for lispmeister, I read Programming as an Experience: The Inspiration for Self by Randall B. Smith and David Ungar. Here's a nice quote from the Motivation section of the paper:

Programmers are human beings, embedded in a world of sensory experience, acting and responding to more than just rational thought. Of course to be effective, programmers need logical language semantics, but they also need things like confidence, comfort, and satisfaction — aspects of experience which are beyond the domain of pure logic. These concerns have traditionally been addressed separately by putting the logic in the language and providing for the rest of experience with the programming environment. The Self system attempts to integrate the intellectual and experiential sides of programming.

Sun Microsystem Laboratories published a volume of collected papers online. The First Ten Years contains some good papers from Guy L. Steele, Jr., Ivan Sutherland, Mick Jordan and others including two papers by David Ungar about Self.

Lars Bak [1], Self developer and former technical lead of the HotSpot team at Sun, founded OOVM a "company dedicated to creating a much simpler and more reliable software platform for the embedded software market". Rainer Joswig [2] [3] pointed out on c.l.l. that OOVM was just aquired by the swiss embedded software company Esmertec. See also this article in The Register.

OOVM produces a virtual machine that allows programmers to hook in remotely and modify code on the fly without needing to reboot the environment: which is very useful indeed. It makes software updates transparent to the user.

We visited Lille(FR) over the weekend and saw Erwin Redl's Fade I installation. He created curtains of blue and red LEDs and mounted them in an old church. The monochromatic light tricks your eyes. The light curtains fade from red to blue to red. The installation is mesmerizing!

On the way back I recharged my Powerbook using the utilities plug in the bar of the TGV (high speed train). There was some leakage current, it sparked and my battery and power supply were dead. Luckily the Powerbook is still working.