The look into Tiobe index may give quite a surprising results if we pay attention into that is happening during the latest year. Java seems no longer declining, Python and C# are also kind of stable but we clearly observe the growth of C language popularity. It is even not C++ but a plain C.

I wonder it this is just some transient event or the reliable shift.

Want to find more technical conferences? Here's my hotlist.

Wikipedia recently posted a call for strategic proposals, and one subset of them looks quite interesting for me - it is a bunch of proposals to support some kind of the client side scripting. They have a choice between JavaScript, Flash, Java and Silverlight. After all that at the end happened with FOSS Java implementation, Java applets seem an interesting option so let's propose.

To be heard by needed people, this proposal have been uploaded to Wikipedia Strategic Projects space so it can also be viewed there. It is up to you where to make the comments.

There's a new article on my homepage titled "FOSS Licences Wars", which explains about the legal aspects, features and differences between various open-source licences and their categories, and then gives some recommendations for which licences to avoid using.

Good command line tools are more important than ever and not just a relict of ancient times in comparison to RIA or GUI applications. Experienced system administrators appreciate their power in sophisticated shell scripts and could probably not manage their environments without them. The question is how can we make command line tools smarter and more powerful than today? This article discusses some ideas and potential implementations always keeping in mind "Do not reinvent the wheel" and "keep it simple".

XULrunner, the technology behind projects such as Firefox, is both powerful and obscure. Even getting started with XULrunner is tricky, and even more so from dynamic languages such as python. pyxpcomext addresses these issues, and does so from the perspective where the developer creates a "bundle" which is registered with XULrunner. XULrunner is then started by the user, and the user opens a magic URL which triggers loading of the pyxpcomext-based application.

Thanks to the OLPC Sugar team, there is now another way, starting from the python prompt. "import hulahop" is where it begins. This article will show and explain the voodoo magic incantations necessary to bring up a window where you can begin to gain access to the DOM model of the XULrunner technology. In this way, you can begin to use technology which was designed for web browsers but has become something much much more powerful than originally intended by its designers.

Barelfish. Have anybody heard such a beast?

Not somewhere behind the steel walls - in the academic silence of ETH university Microsoft is building the next generation of its operating system. Maybe this single department is not the only place where it is trying – I am more toward thinking this is happening it at least ten places worldwide.

Those of us in the free/libre and open source software (FLOSS) community know the routine by now. Despite the fact that "free software" and "open source" refer to the same software and the same communities, supporters of "free software" like the FSF would have us advocate for FLOSS by talking about users' rights to use, modify, share, and cooperate; open source supporters like the Open Source Initiative would have us advocate for software by talking about how securing these rights produces software with "better quality, higher reliability, more flexibility [and] lower cost."

One reason I tend to stay away from "open source" claims in my own advocacy is that I'm worried by the way that these arguments rely on a set of often dubious empirical claims of superiority. Free software, on the other hand, can be seen as statement of principles. Regardless of whether we say "free software" or "open source," I've found that a focus on principled statements is both more robust against counter-arguments and does a better job of describing the motivations of most contributors.

Abstract: Because AI technology is so life-or-death valuable, not only for corporations but also for nations and for civilization itself, we must assume that the most advanced AI projects are being conducted in secret. In such an environment of presumed secrecy, an OpenSource AI project like MindForth may have special value in contrast with proprietary and secret AI.

Playing Tom Traubert's 'Waltzing Matilda with me'

Wasted and wounded
And it ain't what the moon did
I got what I paid for now
See you tomorrow
Hey Frank can I borrow
A couple of bucks from you
To go waltzing Matilda waltzing Matilda
You'll go waltzing Matilda with me

Splendid! crowed the witch. "Here's your fortune."

Otchky-potchky, itchky-pitch
pay attention to this witch
a donkey takes you to a knight
him you conquer in a fight
then you wed a princess who 
is even unglier than you
HAHAHA... cockadoodle
the magic words are "apple strudel"

I recently had an opportunity to develop a project in Python. I have previously had a largely neutral opinion about this language. However after more serious development I would like to share some doubts.

I will not be talking about the implementation - related issues. Also, Python do has positive, advanced features that are worth noting. Python code for the same task is really shorter: you need more C or even Java code to write something like a = b[:3], and especially b[-1] looks nicer then b.get(b.size()-1). But when line number rolls over the first thousand, more things began to matter.

The Program to CodeCon 2009 is now up, and registration is at the early rate of $75 for all three days until April 1st, after which the cost goes up.

happened to surf on Chuck H. Moore's new company IntellaSys.

I am browsing these whitepapers. Eash one seems to be a rare pearl by the SEA.

Extreme Forth by Steven Pelc on Sept. 2008 Dr. Dobb

IMHO, Chuck has deviced a simple yet holistic way to see that the power of language and the power of circuit wouldn't cancel each other out in the process of solving complex machine-human problems.

The stick + the word + the floor plan

IntellaSys’ 40C Processor Technology Creates Benchmark

ThinkingForth in Chinese

The British Broadcasting Company has made a request for contributions to an open standard to be made, for the distribution of audio and video, both offline and real-time broadcasting. Their plan is effectively to act as the mediator between box manufacturers and content producers, with themselves as one of the content producers, but definitely not as set-top box manufacturers.

Challenges faced include an assumption that it is reasonable to expect ISPs to insert cacheing boxes on their premises, and an assumption that "downloading" - especially at high speed - is "the way to go". Also, there is yet again the risk of some idiot content producers trying to DRM an open standard.

This article will provide some answers to these tricky issues, and they're not all "Technical" answers. For the most part, the solutions are psychological, and take comfort in the fact that most users are ordinary people not interested in blatant copyright theft, they just want to watch stuff. Ultimately, content producers are going to have to get used to the fact that they are simply going to have to trust people.

As part of a reorganisation of Pyjamas, best known as a python port of GWT, dynamic module loading using AJAX has been added. The deployment of dynamic module loading results in over a 60% reduction in the amount of javascript cache file sizes, as the modules can be shared across multiple platforms (GAE pyjamas users are hitting the app engine limit even with the simplest of apps, due to the old one-cache-file-per-platform design).

This article describes how the standard technique for dynamic loading of javascript scripts was used as a basis for bring python "import" semantics to a javascript compiler. The advantages of individual module loading - including third party javascript modules - should be clear.

The UK Government has made it clear that Open Source and Open Standards, with a focus on re-use of software development and deployment, is to clearly and unequivocably be part of the decision-making for UK Government I.T. procurement and contracting. Also part of the policy is a clear committment to engage with the Free Software community and to actively encourage the development of "Government-Class" Free Software products.

(tag keyword: #ukgovOSS at the cabinet office's request)

At FOSDEM 2009, Gary Benson of Red Hat presented Shark. (Slides at http://gbenson.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/fosdem-2009.pdf) Shark is a port of OpenJDK that uses LLVM to do JIT code generation. While Shark is pretty fast when compared with OpenJDK's C++ interpreter, it's still quite a lot slower than gcj. gcj is a fairly straightforward bytecode->native compiler and doesn't use many of the Java-specific optimizations in HotSpot, so I was of the opinion that Shark and gcj ought to be similar in speed. So, I wanted to find out why Shark was slower than gcj.

I thought I would make use of the 1000th advogato article to write to emphasise my pride in your accomplishments at the Samba "Franky" architecture, and also to emphasise to you that I am fully aware of its strategic significance.