Professor Fish

Dear Skype, thanks for assuring me that you take care of my issue. Great also that you do send this confirmation (see below), in response to the painful support chat you impressively offered. Cleverly, you do not provide any means of updating you on the matter. This is troublesome in so far as I managed to work around the issue and I would prefer to let you know that you please do not change this running system so that I can stop wasting my time on getting the surface working. Anyway, if you run into customers with my issue (such as Microsoft Accounts with confused country/region codes and trouble to merge or unlink skype and microsoft accounts), please get in touch and I might want to do some moonlighting. :-) Thanks, Ralf PS: I do think that the Microsoft Surface RT is pretty impressive, but it looks like the efforts towards identity integration cannot work. In fact, it looks like this platform has amassed so much legacy in terms of identity platforms and constraints and aggre

Preamble In this post, I work towards  a vision towards 101companies vNext . The version of the vision is Pre-alpha ; thus the title of this post. I am submitting this post as a position paper to  SL(E)BOK @ SLE2012 . Before I start, I want to make sure to list those individuals who have helped me to arrive at this vision: Jean-Marie Favre, Dragan Gasevic, Martin Leinberger, Thomas Schmorleiz, and Andrei Varanovich. Good news The 101companies community project aims at aggregating and organizing knowledge about software technologies, software languages, and software concepts. The project is getting somewhere in that "interesting" source code is added to the  101repo  continuously and "relevant" technologies, languages, and concepts are added continuously to the 101wiki for the last two years or so. Also, the project starts to "make sense" for teaching and professional education . Further, the project also starts to be "a viable scientific matt

I am visiting LogicBlox  (and hence, transitively, Predictix ) in Atlanta to re-learn logic programming properly and see what our SLE super-weapons of massive engineering can do for them. Hence, it probably makes sense to give a talk as a kind of  potpourri . Speaker : Ralf Lämmel (University of Koblenz-Landau) Title :  A software language engineer's potpourri  Abstract : In this talk, I present some of our recent research results and interests; they all relate to and, in fact, enhance software language engineering in a broad sense. The first topic is the 101companies project , which is developing into an advanced, structured, linked knowledge resource for software developers. At its heart, 101companies is a software chrestomathy , which illustrates 'many' software languages, technologies, and concepts by implementing a Human Resources Management System 'many' times; each implementation selects from the set of optional features for such a system. The ne

This is an announcement for a talk at University of Brasilia  on 8 Aug 2012. Title : Rule-based metadata annotation for software repositories Abstract : Take any non-trivial software project; how do we quickly and usefully enough understand what software languages and software technologies are at work in the project; how can we systematically represent very much related knowledge about software concepts or product features exercised in directories, files, or fragments thereof in the project? How can we, in fact, gather architectural understanding on the grounds of "tags" for languages, technologies, concepts, and features; what can we do to visualize, validate, and otherwise leverage such information for the benefit of understanding projects specifically and computer science generally? In this talk, the language 101meta and the technology 101explorer will be described in an effort of responding to the aforementioned challenges; 101meta and 101explorer are grown in the 10

Tonight,  Henrique Rebêlo will take me to the sea in Recife , which is notoriously known for the occasional shark attack . This means that this could be my last post, and I try to get some stuff done before we go there. This also includes posting the abstract of the talk that I was just giving. There is, in fact, a submitted paper to back up the new content in the talk (such as a rule-based language for metadata association with repository and wiki entities), but I was planning to work a bit more on the paper before I reveal it. Chances are that this will never happen; please contact the co-authors in case necessary. Title :  Understanding a multi-language, multi-technology software chrestomathy Abstract : The 101companies community project implements a human-resources management system time and again while using many different software languages and software technologies. A key challenge of this project is to handle, in fact, to make good use of the diversity of languages and tec

I am visiting  Zinovy Diskin  and  Tom Maibaum at the Department of Computing and Software at McMaster University  to get some work going on patterns of bidirectional transformations (BX), which we started at CSXW 2011 , satellite event at GTTSE 2011 . I am not going to say more, though, about BX here. Instead, I would like to make an announcement of the talk at McMaster. Not too much surprisingly, I am going to speak about megamodeling. As it happens or just in time, the  megamodeling paper  by Jean-Marie Favre, Andrei Varanovich, and me has been accepted for MODELS 2012 .  Title : Megamodeling for software technologies Abstract : The term of megamodeling has arisen specifically in the MDE context as referring to a form of modeling at the macroscopic level such that the model elements in megamodels would be models themselves, e.g., metamodels, conformant models, and transformation models. A more general notion of megamodeling takes shape, when we go beyond MDE, i.e., when we

I am visiting the Generative Software Development Lab in Waterloo. Specifically, I am visiting and working with  Krzysztof Czarnecki ,  Zinovy Diskin , and  Thiago Tonelli Bartolomei . Today, I was giving a lecture on 101companies and because it was part of Kryysztof's advanced software architecture / quality class, I focused on 101companies' execution and design qualities. This is an area of 101companies, like so many others, which are still under development. Hence, I closed my lecture with a kind  request , which I also open up to others: Request for help : Submit software quality-related feature proposals for 101companies. Each proposal should contain information like the following: a "headline" (<= 66 characters), a "description" (What's is it? How does it make sense for 101companies' HRMS?). Send your requests to gatekeepers@101companies.org. Do you have an implementation handy? Regards, Ralf Slides : [ .pdf ] Title : Design

On 14 June, CWI (the Dutch Center for Mathematics and Computer Science in Amsterdam) organizes the CWI Lectures on Understanding Software . I quote from the website: "The lectures are organized in honor of Paul Klint having been awarded a CWI research fellowship, as well as his 40th anniversary at CWI. The program features internationally renowned speakers, that represent different visions on understanding software. Understanding how to build better software is as important as understanding how existing software can be maintained and improved. The lectures are accessible for software engineering practitioners, software engineering students, business practitioners and academic researchers alike." My years in Amsterdam (1999-2004), at CWI and VU, in the research groups of Paul Klint and Chris Verhoef have profoundly shaped me as a scientist and a software engineer. After all these years, I feel very much honored to deliver a lecture at Paul Klint's distinguished anniver

Of course, I won't, but perhaps I should! Then, I could turn to lower-hanging fruits in research, which I first need to spot, which I can't though because I am a bit obsessed with API migration (and admittedly some other stuff such as megamodeling ). Sigh! It was around 2004 that I became interested in API migration and I have talked about it here and there ever since. Perhaps I am thinking that talking about a difficult problem of interest helps in discovering the solution of the problem, or at least a sensible path to go. Wishful thinking so far! In theory , the objective of API migration made a lot of sense while I was on the XML team at Microsoft because there are obviously way too many XML APIs. In practice , nothing happened on this front because I didn't understand automated API migration well enough back then. Add to this that API migration is something that is potentially risky for the API provider and the API migrator . So you need to mash up a rocket scientist

Preamble : Ever since 1999 +/- 100 years, I have been working (sporadically, intensively) on grammar-based testing. The latest result was our SLE'11 paper on grammar comparison (joint work with Bernd Fischer and Vadim Zaytsev). I have tried previously to compile a comprehensive slide deck on grammar-based testing, also with coverage on this blog , but this was relatively non-ambitious. With the new SLE'11 results at hand and with the firm goal of pushing grammar-based testing more into CS education (in the context of both formal language theory and software language engineering), I have now developed an uber-comprehensive slide deck with awesome illustrations for the kids. If you are reading this post ahead of the lecture, if you are still planning to attend, then you are well advised to bring brains and coffee. You may also bring a body bag, in case you pass out or worse. As it happens, this is "too much stuff" for a regular talk, lecture, or any reasonable format

The inevitable has happened. I have committed myself to giving the first major talk on 101companies (not counting the AOSD 2011 tutorial, which described an early view on the universe). This outing talk happens to be at the CS Department at University of Nebraska at Omaha, as I will be visiting Victor Winter the next two weeks. Speaker : Ralf Lämmel (University of Koblenz-Landau) Acknowledgement : Joint work with Jean-Marie Favre, Thomas Schmorleiz, and Andrei Varanovich. Title : Technical space travel for developers, researchers, and educators Abstract : A technical space is a technology and community context in computer science and information technology. For example, the technical space of XMLware deals with data representation in XML, data modeling with XML schema, and data processing with XQuery, XSLT, DOM, and LINQ to XML. Likewise, the technical space of tableware deals with data representation in a relational database, data modeling according to the relational model or the ER

I had the pleasure to give a talk today on web privacy and P3P at Ecole des Mines de Nantes in the ASCOLA research team by kind invitation of Mario Südholt . The hidden agenda was to promote our empirical research on P3P but we also agreed upfront to attempt a more general discussion of web privacy. So you find little empirical stuff in the early parts of the slide deck. Title: More of a discussion on web privacy Abstract: The presentation begins with observations about the current state of web privacy on the internet today. The presentation continues to set up some challenges for web privacy to be addressed in practice, subject to contributions by CS research. The technical core of the presentation is a language engineer's approach to understanding W3C's P3P language for privacy policies of web-based systems. Discussion during and after the talk is strongly appreciated. Acknowledgement: This is joint work with Ekaterina Pek, ADAPT Team, University of Koblenz-Land

The Software Languages Team in Koblenz, with potent support by visiting scientist Jean-Marie Favre is getting increasingly excited and knowledgeable about megamodels for software technologies and software products. MegaL is the megamodeling language under development. During upcoming research visits, I expect to present MegaL: its rationale, some applications, and ongoing research. The first presentation of this kind is to take place in Nantes in the AtlanMod team. The talk announcement follows. Title : A megamodel of the ATL model transformation language and toolkit Abstract : According to http://www.eclipse.org/atl/ , " ATL (ATL Transformation Language) is a model transformation language and toolkit. In the field of Model-Driven Engineering (MDE), ATL provides ways to produce a set of target models from a set of source models. " We would like to deeply understand the linguistic architecture of ATL in terms of all the involved software languages, metamodels, technologie