XUL development

I have started to develop using XUL, the Mozilla/Firefox/Thunderbird user interface XML dialect.

Here is a very nice site that shows what you can do.

Managing a research lab

The collapse of the internet bubble has reshuffled the card deck in terms of how research is funded. AT&T Labs and Bell Labs have suffered a lot (and I know it first hand).

Here is an interesting article about some management issues at Sun Labs.

new iPod product

I found a funny post about how to transform your regular iPod into an iPod shuffle.
Read here.

Ideas for interesting (database related) computer science projects

Computer users keep complaining that someone should write an application X, doing Y.
Every year, hundred of thousand of computer students are given programming assignments, as part of their classes. Instead of having implement something useless, maybe we should suggest they implement something useful.

Here are some suggestions of computer projects. The list will keep growing, but here is a start.

- conference management tool (CMT):
Academic research is based on conferences where people submit papers that are reviewed by peers. The reviewing process is complicated. Some tools have been developed, but they are a but outdated, in the sense that they do not embrace the new communication modes of today.
The idea of the projet is to create an open source extensible state-of-the-art CMT (see Microsoft CMT) with some features such as: off-line reviews, chat, etc.

- calendar portal:
Each field (mine is databases) comes with a lot of events (submission deadlines, conference dates, etc.). Today the information is disseminated via email (e.g. dbWorld mailing list). It would be nicer to have variaous calendars (in the sense of iCal) people can subscribe to. For instance, ACM conferences, IEEE conferences, etc.
The idea is to build a web application where people can enter the event information and where people can subscribe to the various calendars.
See iCalShare, as a nice example of a calendar portal.

"registration required" content by-pass

If you are tired of having to create a new account, remember a new password and enter some personal information to access some content on the web, you may want to try BugMeNot.

There is also a Firefox extension that handles the process even more transparently (check the BugMeNot site).

My favorite research papers

Here is another paper that I like very much.
Computer scientists deal with programming languages, the same way authors (e.g. writers, playwriters, poets) deal with human languages.

Growing a Language at OOPSLA 98, by Guy Steele (one of the fathers of Java).

(to be continued)

My favorite research papers

There are some research papers that I wish everyone had read.
I will try to put them on this blog. Here is the first entry.

Composing contracts: an adventure in financial engineering. Simon Peyton Jones, Jean-Marc Eber, Julian Seward, ICFP 2000.

The paper shows how to use functional programming to represent and price arbitrarily complex financial contracts.
I wish this paper were available when I was working on the trading floor.

(to be continued)

Can a biologist fix a radio

I am a computer scientist working mostly on data management.
Sometimes, you wonder if your work makes a difference, if your field is heading in the right direction.

There is an old (Sep 2002) article from a biology journal (by Yuri Lazebnik) that provides a very insightful view about this issue.

I strongly recommend the reading.
You should be able to find the article on google. Try the terms "Can a biologist fix a radio".

You can also find it here and here.

Something from Microsoft to run on your iPOD

I was at the CIDR 2005 database conference where I met a very nice and funny guy from Microsoft. He made a rendition of American Pie for the IT industry: witty, funny and talented. American Idols contenders should secretely hope that IT does not die.

Mr. CIO Guy
A satire based on the song “America Pie”
Video , Lyrics