Dan Weinreb’s blog

Here are some upcoming music concerts in the Boston area that I’m interested in.  I hope to go as many of these as possible.  Note that the Van der Graaf Generator concert is only two days from now!

Van der Graaf Generator

Tuesday June 23 8:00pm, at the Regent Theater, Arlington Center.  This is their first American tour in 30 years, and the first time they’ve ever appeared in New England.  There’s also an opening act: The Acoustic Strawbs, which is the current version of The Strawbs.  Van der Graaf Generator is Peter Hammill’s group.  The lineup appearing here are the three surviving members of the original lineup of four who did “Pawn Hearts” and “H to He Who Am The Only One”.  My friend Olin Sibert (a huge fan of this band) and I are going.  If you like progressive rock, this is an opportunity not to be missed!

The Mahavishnu Project

Saturday July 11 7:30pm, at the Regatta Bar in the Charles Hotel, Harvard Square, Cambridge.  Greg Bendian’s band that plays the music of John McLaughlin’s Mahavishnu Orchestra.  (McLaughlin himself is a big fan.)  Greg is a close friend of my friend Tim Blackman, which is how I know about it.  Tim and I are going.

Beatle Juice

Saturday July 18 9:45pm, at Johnny D’s, in Davis Square, Somerville.  They are said to be an excellent Beatles tribute band, although I haven’t heard them.  Here’s their web site. There’s a video of them, performing at Johnny D’s, on their MySpace page.

Yes

Saturday July 25 7:00pm, at the South Shore Music Circus in Cohasset.  Asia will open.  Benoit David will substitute for Jon Anderson, who is still ill, and Oliver Wakeman will substitute for his father, Rick Wakeman, who no longer tours.  I’ve been to see this lineup before: Oliver is only OK, but Benoit is fantastic and sounds amazingly like Jon.  I’ve seen Yes seven or eight times and it never gets old, for me.  Asia is also an excellent progressive rock band. Tickets on Ticketmaster.

Birdsongs of the Mesozoic

Thursday July 30 9:00, at Johnny D’s, in Davis Square, Somerville.  I have a lot of recorded music by Birdsongs and have seen them live several times over the years. “Boston seminal art-rock.”  Check out their web site, and their MySpace page (which has music samples). Ken Field (sax, flutes, keyboard, percussion) used to be a software developer at BBN, but now he’s a full-time musician (and married to well-known local animated filmmaker Karen Aqua).

No Static

Friday July 31 9:45, at Johnny D’s, in Davis Square, Somerville.  They’re a Steely Dan tribute band.  I haven’t heard them yet.  They’ll be doing music from Aja, Royal Scam, and Gaucho, which are definitely my favorites.

Hint for Johnny D’s: come early and have dinner.  The food is fine, and then you get a good seat for the music.  Allow time to find parking in David Square if you’re coming by car, or take the Red Line.

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.

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

New England Database Day is a one-day mini-conference where participants from the research community in the New England area can come together to present ideas and discuss their research.  I highly recommend this event if you’re interested in cutting-edge database technology.  There will be eight talks plus poster sessions.

(I’ll say “database” to mean “database management system”, as is often done for brevity.)

Last year’s conference (the first one) was great. Here’s my very belated report.

David DeWitt’s paper on Clustera, which controls and runs large batch operations on a big cluster of machines.  There are three prominent classes of these, exemplified by (a) Condor, for running things like circuit simulations and weather models; (b) Gamma, for doing parallel database queries; and (c) Map/Reduce.  Clustera is designed to be able to do all three of these things reasonably well.  In fact, these three are just particular points in a whole space of possibilities, which Clustera can be used on.  Also, Clustera is simpler and smaller than other such systems, because it builds on a J2EE application server and a small relational database.  Prof. DeWitt has been in charge of the amazingly productive database system research at University of Wisconsin, Madison, although now he’s going to a new Microsoft research center to be created in Madison.

George Miklau explained about policy decisions regarding archival storage, such as privacy, accountability, retention policies, subpoenas, and redaction.  He talked about how technological decisions affect these things, too.

Stavros Harizopoulis of HP Labs described an experiment that demonstrates why main memory databases can be so fast, analyzing the costs of various modules that can be omitted such as logging (most kinds), locking, latching, buffer management, and other overhead.  No one of these takes the lion’s share of the time, it turns out.  You have to do all of them to get the best performance improvements.  A major point is that a database system designed to be column-oriented can be a lot faster than a general-purpose database acting as if it were column-oriented.

Ryan Johnson of CMU talked about many issues involved in executing queries in parallel on multi-core processors.  As you’d expect, this is a hot area, since the multi-core processors are becoming so widespread, and the number of cores is going up.  He examined work sharing, pipelining, working set size, and of course caching issues.  He presented experimental results as well.

Daniel Abadi of Yale (formerly of MIT) (not to be confused with Daniel Abadi of Microsoft Research) gave a talk called “How To Create a New Column-Store Database in a Week”.  The point was that you can do it, based on a regular row-store database, but he expains why this won’t work well.  A good column-store database must be built that way from the start.

Anastasia (Natasha) Ailamaki of Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne was honored by being the last speaker; she has won many awards and is a rising star in the database community.  Her talk was “Multi-Core: Friend or Foe?”  She explained a lot about how the memory/caching systems multi-core processors work.  She also explained some of the major design tradeoffs that the hardware designers can make: fewer, more complex cores, or the opposite, and whether hardware threads are used.  Then she talked about how all this particularly affects database systems.

The event will be in Cambridge, Mass. at MIT, in the Stata Center, room 32-123 (the big lecture hall on the first floor).  It’s be this Friday (January 30, 2009) from 9 am to 6 pm.  It’s free, but they’d like you to register so they’ll know how many people are coming.  I hope to see you there!

The schedule for the International Lisp Conference has been posted.  Registration will open shortly.

If you have any interesting in giving a short/lightning talk, you’ll be able to sign up for that at the conference.  You might want to let me know, too, but you need not.

A short talk can be on anything bearing on Lisp, Scheme, or related languages.  It need not be on a profound topic or a research project. It can be as simple as:

• Here’s a good application that we wrote in Lisp.
• Here’s a useful Lisp library that you might want to know about.
• Here are some interesting things about my Lisp development tool.
• I have this provocative/outrageous opinion.
• Please give me feedback about this idea.
• Alice and I will debate the following point.

The ideal duration is five minutes, but the talk could be extremely short, or up to about ten minutes.  There’s no Q and A immediately afterwards.  You can meet up with interested people later to continue talking, answer questions, etc.

This is an informative web page about short/lightning talks in general, and this is a longer one with advice.  But all you have to do is talk for a little while, so don’t worry.

I hope you can come to the conference!