Executive summary: a social evening with talky folks.

Olle and a new user added a shell account at kaos! We walked through explaining screen, irssi and Putty. All this to use IRC from a Windows computer. The IRC channel (#forskningsavd @ irc.freenode.org , use SSL on port 7000.), our proud communication platform, must be accessible to as many as possible.

Racket:

Plaid: “typestate”!

Plaid’s papers page

Plaid web terminal

http://plaid.isri.cmu.edu:8080/plaidWebTerminal/plaid.cgi

Distributed Systems Primer, compiled by Evan Weaver

http://blog.evanweaver.com/2010/08/12/distributed-systems-primer-update/

Most likely biased, but Hannes also talked about Scala

http://scala-lang.org/ - he didn’t mention that it just received a big (European Research Council) fund for parallel programming (http://www.scala-lang.org/node/8579)

For the algorithms corner, Hannes also discussed diffs on XML (or more generally, trees) and how that could influence revision control systems - just discovered http://diffxml.sourceforge.net/

Great meeting minutes were circulated on the mailing list, thanks. (To get on the mailing list, see the Contact page.)

Saturday at 09-15 o’clock is cleanup day. Be there and happy!

We had seldom-seen guests at the place, and we sat down and talked… philosophy.

Topics covered included problem-solving strategies; think before you code (in contrast to code first and discover problems which need fixing afterwards) - then general differences between scientists and politicians - whether it is a disjoint set or there might be intersections (I believe that was partially started by Tactical Biopolitics (editors: Beatriz da Costa and Kavita Philip)).

Also, some general criticisms on the science system in Sweden (and Denmark) (both are not sustainable, they educate engineers, not scientists), Microsoft ‘hire local experts - if there aren’t any, give up at that place’ - and why Danish people and Polish/Russian must be really similar (to allow MS not give up the Danish branch).