Dan Weinreb’s blog

The SPLASH Conference is my favorite technical conference every year. Wait, don’t stop reading just because you’re not a “researcher”!

I started this blog so that I could post a trip report from the conference in 2007. The name has since changed from “OOPSLA” to “SPLASH”. Actually it now has three tracks. Here’s what each is about:

• OOPSLA: High quality research work that uses established scientific methodologies, written using high standards of academic technical publications.
• Wavefront: Original and innovative architecture, design, and/or implementation techniques used in actual leading-edge software system. Our goal with Wavefront is to engage the software developers who are actually creating next generation of software systems and to make sure that their innovations are captured in the technical archives of computing.
• Onward!: Innovative ideas that challenge existing beliefs, or early work well written and well argued for; essays and ideas worth hearing about. (This includes things too “far out” to get published in existing journals and other conferences.

If I am judging my own audience properly, Wavefront is what most of you would be interested in. Here is a great blog post by Allan Wirfs-Brock, who has been a leader in object-oriented and dynamic programming for decades. The Wavefront track is to revive what made the early OOPSLA conferences so energetic and valuable: interaction between researchers and people out there getting stuff done. Both groups have a lot to tell, and learn from, the other.

I am the “Panels Chair”, and I’m actively seeking people who would like to lead a panel, be on a panel, and/or suggest topics for panels. Panels are fun to be on. It’s far less work than submitting a paper. All you have to do is come up with five minutes of something to say, after which it’s all questions and answers. Let me know! Tell your friends!

The overall theme of the conference is The Internet as the world-wide Virtual Machine. This theme captures the change in the order of magnitude of computing that happened over the past few years. These days, software systems are rarely designed in isolation; they connect to pieces written by 3rd parties, they communicate with other pieces over the Internet, they use big data produced elsewhere, and they touch millions of interacting users through an ever larger variety of physical devices. In other words, the “machine” is now a global computing network. What does this entail for software development itself?

SPLASH 2011 will be in Portland, OR, October 22 – 27; the main tracks will probably be from Tuesday Oct 25 to Thursday Oct 27. The information is all here, including the calls for papers for each track. If you want to submit a paper, the deadline is April 8, 2001.

Just to get you started, and to show how broad the scope of the conference is, here are some possible areas. You could come up with something that impinges on one of these, but that’s not necessary. Panels can be in any of the tracks of SPLASH (OOPSLA, Wavefront, or Onward!).

• Any aspect of software development, including prototyping, design, testing, evaluation, maintenance, reuse, static or dynamic analysis, frameworks and toolkits.
• Language design issues, such as dynamic or static programming, type systems and type inference, use of modularity and parallelism, patterns. Dynamic languages are welcome. JavaScript, in particular, has become important lately, but any language is fine.
• Language implementation issues: virtual machines, garbage collectors, compilers/interpreters, power efficiency.
• Tools designed to reduce the time, effort, and/or cost of software systems.
• And any of a wide range of topics: cloud computing and web platforms, mobile platforms, security and privacy issues, UI technology, location-awareness, storage, reliability.

I hope to see you there!

John Kane will perform a hilarious one-man show called There, I’ve Broken My Neck! (An Evening of Theatrical Disasters), at 8:00 pm on Friday Nov. 7 and Saturday Nov 8. He performed this three years ago and everybody loved it; now he’s added many new funny stories of life in the theatre, and everything that can go wrong.

John is an amazing actor, as well as a writer of plays, TV shows (over 200!), and operas. He played the role of Puck in one of the most famous productions of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, the Peter Brook Royal Shakespeare Company production of 1970, with Patrick Stewart and Ben Kingsley.

He wrote the liberetti of two of the operas we’ve performed at the North Cambridge Family Opera: Antiphony and Kids Court.

The performance features humorous anecdotes and readings suitable for audiences aged 10 and up. Tickets are $35. All proceeds will benefit North Cambridge Family Opera and Central Square Theater.

8:00 pm Friday Nov. 6 and Saturday Nov. 7
Central Square Theater
450 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA  02139

And please pass on the word to your friends and family, so they too can enjoy an entertaining evening, while supporting NCFO and Central Square Theater.

I greatly enjoyed the Adrian Belew Power Trio last night at the Natick Center for the Arts. I mentioned this concert in an earlier blog posting. Adrian Belew is a great electric guitar player and composer. He’s a member of Robert Fripp’s band King Crimson, and has performed with some of my favorite bands and musicians, including Laurie Anderson, Talking Heads, and Mike Oldfield.

The trio includes Julie Slick on bass and Eric Slick on drums. Julie is 23 years old, and her brother is 22. As a 50-year-old, I’m never quite sure whether to characterize people that age as “kids” or not. Friends of mine who I consider to be my age have children in their early 20′s, but these people are adults. I have to learn to change the way I deal with one of the most basic characterizations/classifications in life! Adrian referred to them as his “youthful compadres”. What I can say for sure is that I would have been quite impressed with their musicianship even without seeing them or knowing anything about them, but that they can play that way at such a young age is stunning. What will they be like in ten or twenty years? I definitely want to keep track of them!

Their mother, Robin, sold CD’s and tee shirts. Although I aready have enough tee shirts, as my wife keeps reminding me, I bought theirs, both because I want to support them and because I like the design.

For some reason, the otherwise-nice packaging of the CD of “e” does not include a track list. From what Adrian said at the concert, I expected to find five tracks named “a” through “e”. However, there were 11 tracks. The Gracenote CDDB did not find a track list; that’s also very surprising, as the CDDB has never failed me before, even for some pretty obscure stuff. I tracked down an email address for Robin Slick, who helpfully sent me the track list. It’s “a”, “a2″, “a3″, “b”, “b2″, “b3″, “c”, “d”, “d2″, “e”, and “e2″. I told iTunes to submit this to the CDDB, and I hope it’ll be installed so you won’t have to type these in manually. Thanks, Robin!

Julia and Erik studied at The Paul Green School of Rock in Philadelphia, which was showcased in the excellent documentary film Rock School (not to be confused with the fictional film School of Rock). The Paul Green school seems to be training a whole new generation of progressive rockers. The best-known is C. J. Tywoniak, who was so awesome in the Rock School documentary playing “Inca Roads” by Frank Zappa; he has performed extensively with Jon Anderson of Yes. (Eric Slick has also performed with Jon Anderson.)

The performance featured the songs “a”, “b”, “c”, “d”, and “e” from their new album, “e”. They also performed two King Crimson songs: Neurotica (from Beat) and Three of a Perfect Pair (from Three of a Perfect Pair). Here is a (low-quality) video of them performing Neurotica in Budapest, and you can find more such videos on YouTube. Here is an Animoto MTV-style video of the beginning of Three of a Pefect Pair from Eric Slick’s web site. They also did two of Adrian’s own songs, Big Electric Cat and Lone Rhinoceros, both from Adrian’s first solo album, Lone Rhinoceros, and several other songs.

If they perform in the Boston area again, TourFilter will let me know. TourFilter is a wonderful free service. You tell it what bands you like, and it tells you when and where they’re coming. Thanks to Chris Marstall for creating and operating this gem.

I enjoyed the Yes concert last night very much. I made some new friends, who told me that Adrian Belew is coming soon. And when I got back to my car, there was a sheet of paper under my windshield wipers about the Belew concert. (This must be the first time I ever got one of those sheets under the wipers that I actually appreciated!)

The Yes concert was very much like the last one I had been at, at the Hampton Court Casino Ballroom. Jon Anderson is still ill, and is replaced by Benoit David, who is superb and sounds uncannily like Anderson. Rick Wakeman no longer tours, and is replaced by Oliver Wakeman, his son. Wakeman fils was not so impressive last time, but he seems to have gotten more virtuosic since then, although still not as great as pere. The other three are classic members of Yes: Steve Howe, Chris Squire, and Allan White.

The playlist for the two-hour set was:

• Siberian Khatru
• All Good People
• Tempus Fugit
• Astral Traveler
• And You And I
• (Steve Howe, solo acoustic guitar)
• Owner Of A Lonely Heart
• Machine Messiah
• Roundabout
• Heart Of The Sunrise
• Starship Trooper

I only like the songs from the 1970′s, although I am warming up to Owner Of A Lonely Heart somewhat. I could do without Tempus Fugit, Astral Traveler, and Machine Messiah. But the rest were great.

I hope someday they go back to doing the more ambitious works, such as Close To The Edge, The Gates of Delirium, and anything from Tales From Topographic Oceans. I’ve seen them about eight times in the last eight years, and I’ll keep going: it just never gets old for me!

The opening act, is their guitarist as well. (Howe played both Asia’s one-hour set and Yes’s two-hour set, and did solo guitar when the rest of Yes was resting. Squire said that now that James Brown is gone, Howe is the hardest working man in show business. That may not be literally true, but I think it was very fitting to acknowledge how much Howe was performing. He’s a truly great guitarist, and his powers have not diminished one bit; he’s now 62 years old!

But then they performed Fanfare for the Common Man (more or less in the style that it was recorded by ELP in 1977.

And then, to my surprise, they performed In The Court Of The Crimson King. I had not realized that Asia’s lead singer, John Wetton, had been a member of King Crimson, though not on that album. Many of the famous progressive rock musicians of the 1970′s moved between groups (Yes’s personnel is not uncommon; for a good time, look at the lineups of Jethro Tull!)

I had never been at this venue before. The South Shore Music Circus is a big circus tent, entirely theater-in-the-round, with a stage that rotates slowly so that everybody gets all the views. Had I been sitting up front, I would have been very, very close to the musicians! Next time, I’ll get my tickets as soon as they go on sale. The downside is that it’s rather hot and stuffy, or at least it was in yesterday’s weather, but the weather was hardly extreme by Boston-area standards. But you can get up and walk around outside the tent and still hear fine, if you want to cool off. I did this during some music that I didn’t care about as much.

I have been a fan of Adrian Belew for many years now. I’ve seen him live at the Paradise in Kenmore Square doing songs from his first album, Lone Rhino, in 1982 with my friend Jim Davis. (From the eponymous song: “I know the zoos protect my species / They give me food, collect my feces / But I can’t help it, I miss the past / I’ll never again see my good old mud bath…”). In 1990, I saw him at the Orpheum in Boston, doing the tour for the album Strange Angels. He’s done lots of amazing work with many great musicians, as documented in Wikipedia. He can make an electric guitar sound like any of a wide array of animals, beautifully. Here’s his own web site.

He’s performing at the Narrows Center for the Arts on Saturday, Sept. 5. Doors open at 7 and the show starts at 8, “followed by meet-and-greet” (!). It’s at 16 Amawan Street in Fall River. Tickets from Brown Paper Tickets, the wonderful people who do tickets for our family opera company.

This information is all from the flyer left on my car. The flyer came from a magazine I had never heard of, Limelight Magazine, which looks very interesting! Here’s their story about the Adrian Belew concert, which is actually “The Adrian Belew Power Trio” with Eric and Julia Slick, on drums and bass respectively (I think they’re siblings).

They are also playing the previous night, at the Natick Center for the Arts.

Don’t miss Birdsongs of the Mesozoic and No Static!

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!