Dan Weinreb’s blog

If any of you deal with the technology press, i.e. want them to publish stories on your stuff, you may know about the concept of a “press embargo”, where you send them info and say “don’t release this until X date”. Last night at a panel I found out some interesting info about this.

These used to exist and be widely used. They let a company manage the time at which it’s “big news” would come out, and it let reporters have some extra time to prepare their story and make it higher-quality without risking being out of date.

However, lately the whole thing has broken down. TechCrunch and the Wall St. Journal, in particular, have been undermining the “gentleman’s agreement” that made this work. A tech jouralist now has to assume that by following the embargo, he or she will end up being out of date (“scooped” is apparently not really a term-of-art any more). In general, journalists do not like them, and will not honor any that is more than one week out. They worry that someone else will discover the news and not have agreed to the embargo, or the news will leak some other way, or someone will just ignore the embargo. Also, some journalists now consider them just too problematic and too much trouble and ignore embargoed press releases entirely.

So, take this into account if you were thinking of doing an embargo’ed press release.

The panel session was called “An Entrepreneur’s Guide to Bootstrapping PR”. It was at last night’s Web Innovator’s Group meeting, at the Royal Sonesta Hotel in Cambridge, MA. The panelists were excellent.

The European Common Lisp Meeting will be in Hamburg, on the weekend of September 12 and 13, 2009.  I greatly enjoyed last year’s ECLM, in Amsterdam. It’s relaxed and gives you a lot of opportunity to meet great Lisp experts from all over the world. Arthur Lemmens and Edi Weitz did a superb job arranging for entertainment and space, and making sure everyone was happy.

I’m also looking forward to seeing Hamburg; I’ve never been there, and it sounds great.

I’m giving a talk entitled A Highly-Available Large-Scale Transaction Processing System in Common Lisp. It’s about the airline reservation system that we’re building at ITA Software, specifically about the issues involved in using Common Lisp, which is not widely thought of as being a language for writing large-scale transaction processing.

The lightning talks at the International Lisp Conference last March went so well that Edi and Arthur are trying out this format at the ECLM.  After the ILC, someone told me that at another sofware-related conference he had been to, the lightning talks fell flat: few people signed up to give talks, and they weren’t very good.  At the ILC, I thought they were nearly all great.  We learned about new tools, stories, and so on.  There was a great one about using Lisp in a Lisp-unfriendly world.  In a nutshell: if they force you to program in PERL, then run a PERL-coded Scheme interpreter and write in Scheme!  I anticipate more fun lightning talks in Hamburg!

So, I encourage you to join the fun!

XSITE 2009 is a one-day conference that will showcase innovative business in New England.  It’s at the Boston University School of Management, 595 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston MA, on Wednesday, June 24, 2009.

High-tech, life-sciences, and energy innovation may well hold the key to the nation’s economic health and long-term competitiveness. And as a hotbed of American innovation, New England is poised to become a key driver of economic recovery in the U.S.

There are many presentations by CEO’s of innovative companies, including many startups.  There’s a panel session on “Investing in Innovation”.  And there’s time for networking: you can chat with and ask questions of the presenters, or just meet the other attendees.  Here’s the preliminary agenda.

I’ve been to meetings like this before, and always find them valuable and interesting.  The Nantucket Conference is like this, but it’s by invitation only. XSITE is open to anyone.

XSITE is run by Xconomy.com. I attended their one-day conferences on cloud computing and on mobile applications, and both were excellent.  So I have high hopes for XSITE as well.  (Full disclosure: I am an investor in Xconomy.)

If you plan to register, the sooner the better, since the price goes up on June 1 and again on June 15.

Last December, I was invited to be general chair of the International Lisp Conference 2009.  Since then I have done a great deal of work, and it has finally all paid off.  The conference ran from last Sunday to Wednesday, and it went perfectly!  I can hardly believe it.  And we got at least 215 attendees, which was great!  (I had planned for 175; apologies to those of you who didn’t get a tee shirt and a tote bag.)

The only surprise problem was that two of the speakers were not able to show up.  However, we reallocated their time for more lightning talks.  These are five-minute talks on any topic bearing on Lisp.  Three of them were approved by the program committee and are in the proceedings.  The program committee then agreed that we could post a sign-up sheet, and let anybody talk about anything appropriate.  We ended up having about twenty-five of them.  They were almost all great!  We learned about fascinating new open source libraries, fun applications, great anecdotes, and so on.

The lightning talks make the whole conference more participatory, rather than just “we give the talks, and you sit there and listen.”  Although I’m sorry that the two speakers were unable to present their papers, the lightning talks were great.  I recommend that other conference organizers in the future consider allocating plenty of time for such talks.

The Great Macro Debate went just as I had hoped. Lisp’s macros make the Lisp language extensible.  It’s only because of macros that Lisp has stayed sufficiently up-to-date to still be a relevant language after fifty years of life.  And macros are one of Lisp’s most distinguishing features, now that so many Lisp ideas have been adopted by other languages.

Earlier this year, I was having lunch with my former co-worker, Jeremy Brown.  He had been one of the senior engineers on the Polaris project at ITA Software, and we had worked together closely.  (He left to start his own company, Rep Invariant.)  We were talking about the use of Lisp in Polaris, and specifically about Lisp macros.  To my surprise, Jeremy opined that having macros in the language was a net drawback!  Many people have objected to macros, but Jeremy really knows all about macros; he’s a very proficient Lisp programmer, and has seen how we use macros in Polaris.

So I had the idea of having him debate someone about this at the Lisp conference.  Guy Steele, as program chair, took over the idea, and found people to be in the debate.  Pascal Costanza, who is one of the deepest thinkers about Common Lisp these days, was Jeremy’s prime opponent.  Guy Steele himself was Pascal’s “second”, and Dick Gabriel was Jeremy’s.  I moderated.

Jeremy prepared very thoroughly, with slides that presented all of his attacks, and were also very funny.  The debaters both made important real points, and kept the whole thing hilarious.  There was a great deal of contention and disagreement, to the point where audience members, unable to contain themselves, started shouting out questions and comments.  Indeed, I felt the same way myself, and misused my privilege of having a microphone to participate in the debate.  Finally Dick Gabriel said, “OK, Weinreb, enough of this.  SIt down at the table, and I’ll be the moderator!”  I replied, “Oh, thank you!  Now that I’m a panelist, I can say what I want to into this other microphone!” Sadly, we didn’t videotape this, but we all had a great time.

David Moon’s talk about how to do macros for a language with syntax was very innovative, to the point where, in his introduction, Dave said “some of you may think this is mad scientist stuff”!  It’s certainly fascinating, and the people who had worked on Dylan (and therefore grappled with the same problems) were particularly interested and felt that it looked very promising.

Tom Sgouros performed his one-man, one-robot show: “Judy, or, What Is It Like To Be A Robot”.  I had seen this once at ITA (Tom works at ITA) and knew that it was perfect for this audience.  It’s about the concept of intelligent robots, and the nature of consciousness, and it’s also very clever and funny.  Tom did a wonderful job.

I’ve been catching up on my sleep (really).  But now I’m busy again!  This year’s family opera show, The Weaver’s Wedding, is opening tomorrow.  I’ve been involved in the North Cambridge Family Opera company for about ten years.  While the conference was going on, my wife Cheryl was working very long hours of the day and evening getting the set and props finished, teaching the stagehands what to do, and so on.  (As you can imagine, it’s been rather crazy around at home, with both of those things going on at once!)  I hope to blog more about the conference and papers in the future.  In the meantime, I expect some of the attendees will write their own descriptions.

Thanks again to all our sponsors, who made possible the relatively-low registration.  Special thanks to ITA Software, our Platinum sponsor, and to my wonderful boss, Sundar Narasimhan (CTO and Chief Architect of Polaris), for allowing me to take part time off from my work at ITA in order to run the conference.

Thanks very much to everyone who attended!

Registration for the International Lisp Conference, 2009, is now open.

The conference will be from Sunday, March 22 through Wednesday, March 25, at the Stata Center, MIT, Cambridge, MA.

It features:

• Gerald Sussman, Shriram Krishnamurthi, and David Moon as invited speakers
• Five tutorials (no extra charge)
• Fifteen technical papers
• Seven demonstrations
• Lightning talks (you can give you own; first-come, first-served)
• An all-star panel on the future of Lisp
• The Great Macro Debate
• Birds of a feather sessions, and other informal discussions
• Banquet at the Hyatt-Regency, with special entertainment (no extra charge)

Come meet the top Lisp experts and practitioners in the world. Learn how to get the most out of Lisp. Find about about the latest developments from research and industry. The conference is a rare opportunity for face-to-face interaction, sharing knowledge and ideas with the experts of the worldwide Lisp community. Students are especially welcome. Everyone will have a great time!

Here’s where to find all the information.

Sponsored by:

• ITA Software, Inc.
• Franz Inc.
• LispWorks Limited
• Clozure, Inc.
• Ravenbrook Limited