2011: music

Happy New Year! Wishing you a great 2012!

Over the holiday period, I was looking back over 2011. One of the things I enjoyed doing was seeing some great bands play live. Whilst Cambridge is not the most hip place, we get quite a few good bands playing. In 2011, I saw:

• White Lies [Great! Saw them first supporting Glasvegas at the Junction, so fun to see them now they have hit the big time]
• The Hold Steady [Definitely the loudest gig of the year; Matt and I got right down the front]
• Warpaint [Hot! Love these ladies...]
• Wild Beasts [Breathtaking. Really love their album. Go and treat yourself...]

I also went to Glastonbury, which was fantastic. Highlights there were U2 (natch), Coldplay, Pulp, Metronomy, The vaccines, and many more. I also played in a gig, although not at the Junction, but that is one of my hopes for 2012!

Thanks to Matt for being the Gig Master!

New WinPhone 7 advert

It seems that there will be some new Windows Phone 7 adverts. This one features my favourite new feature: the "I'll be a little late button". When you view a meeting in the calendar a little button with a picture of a running man appears at the bottom. Click that and it emails the other recipients a boilerplate note saying that you're on your way and will be a little late. Anyone who knows me, knows how much I will use such a feature!

Semantic subtyping with an SMT Solver

After what seems like a very long time, I'm happy to report that - just in time for the holiday season - the extended version of our ICFP paper is now available (here). Enjoy!

XML vs the web...

According to James Clark, the web is winning. Or rather, JSON is winning.

[Speaking as someone who's spent a long time dealing with XML in programming and query languages, I'm not surprised. XML comes from good intentions, but what was delivered was broken. As Phil Wadler and Jerome Simeon put it:

So the essence of XML is this: the problem it solves is not hard, and it does not solve the problem well.

]

The joys of SQL

Verity Stob on SQL: here

(I think if you use your favourite search engine you'll find quotes from my database course where I have less than complementary things to say about SQL! These quotes were taken without my knowledge by the students in the audience.)

Shipped!

Yesterday, Microsoft launched Visual Studio 2010 (in particularly nice boxes!). I just finished installing it on all my machines - I recommend you do too:-) Amongst many features, you get a nice improvement to C#: dynamic types (as detailed in our forthcoming ECOOP 2010 paper). You also get a whole new language: Visual F#. Congratulations to Don Syme for probably the biggest tech transfer out of our research lab.

(Unlike other companies, Microsoft clearly loves multiple programming languages!)

Design matters!

Please, somebody, start marketing this!

Congratulations Chuck!

MSR's Chuck Thacker has just been awarded the 2009 ACM Turing Award - which is the "Nobel Prize" for Computer Science. This is richly deserved - Chuck essentially built the first machine that we would recognize as a PC (The Xerox Alto) and the first Tablet PC, and many other contributions besides. A worthy winner (and the fourth recipient from MSR!).

Bummer

HD2 Not getting Windows Phone 7 Series OS - Official

Project Natal

I've been surprised to meet up with people recently who haven't heard about Project Natal. Err...guys...this is like the coolest thing ever!! [Even better is that some of the key technology comes from our lab!]

I just found out that we have a nice webpage full of cool videos here. Once this comes out, it's time to buy an XBox!

F# milestone

I've blogged earlier about important F# milestones. Here's another one. I went to make a mug of peppermint tea this afternoon, and it seems that F# has reached the important milestone of Mug Manufacture. Whoo! Congrats Don and co!

Windows Phone 7 Series

Like many people I was anxiously waiting for news from Barcelona concerning the next generation of MS Phone.

I have to say I'm pretty impressed. You can watch a nice video at Channel 9 here.

I blogged before about how nice the Zune HD UI is, so I'm really pleased to see that this look-and-feel has been deeply embedded.

Modern Times

I took the girls yesterday to see the latest exhibition at Kettle's Yard: Modern Times responding to chaos. We all really enjoyed it - the girls sat on the floor with their sketchbooks and copied the pictures they liked. It's a very interesting collection of drawings and film, combining some well-known artists (de Kooning, Mondrian, etc.) with some lesser-known artists (including some very recent work. My favourite was a lovely piece by Katharina Hinsberg.)

Apparently the subtitle refers to the times that the pieces were made. I'm not sure this really works, as many of the pieces don't seem to refer to that chaos at all. However, as an exhibition it's really very good. (I'm already planning to sneak out one lunchtime and see it without the kids!)

Small

I take my hat off to this chap for his interior design of his 19.5m2 apartment!

F# news

Hot on the heels of the RC release of Visual Studio 2010 is the latest release of F# (here). The version number has now been bumped up to 2.0, so this represents a big milestone in the productization of F#. Well done Don and Co!

[If you plan to install it, please read carefully Don's advice about deprecated features at the bottom of the post.]

Mobile madness

There's been some discussion in the blogosphere about the screens that will be appearing on mobile phones in the near future. Much of this has been thought to be impossible, but take a look at this phone, just announced. OMG: a 1280x1024 4-inch screen! That's crazy!

I'm off

OMG! Muji have made a village? I need to move.

Lost in translation

Some people will know that I'm quite keen on source-to-source language translators. I read today that the facebook guys have just built a translator from php to C++, called Hiphop. By doing so, they get a 50% reduction in CPU usage.

Red

Last weekend, Mateja and I went with our artist friend, Jo, to see "Red", a play about Mark Rothko by John Logan. It was fantastic! It's intense theatre: just two actors (Alfred Molina and Eddie Redmayne) and a very spartan set (the inside of Rothko's studio). However, you are completely spellbound for 100 minutes.

It's essentially like a philosophy lecture: it tackles very interesting questions about art and artistic intent. Why make art? Who's art for? What is art for? How can art be subject to fashion? At least for me, the heart of the matter is exploring the paradox in Rothko's work: that from a distance it looks simple, but when you study it closely, it is intensely complex.

The performances are astonishing - the scene where both characters "prime the canvas" is particularly memorable, with both ending up drenched in blood-like paint.

Another fantastic play at the Donmar!

Interesting bug

One of my research areas is verification of software. We'd like to check that software does what it is intended to do. This is tricky. Part of the problem is specifying what your intent was in the first place. Picking the right language to do this is important. A recent example in Birmingham shows a different language problem surrounding software bugs.