Tech Blog
By Joab Jackson
Social networking fatigue
It was a few years ago when we first signed up with Friendster. Then we were excited to be part of the shiny new world of social networking: We filled out profiles, uploaded photos of ourselves and added friends to our little group.
After awhile, though, we could tell all the excitement was happening over at MySpace. So we set up an account there too, dutifully filling our profiles, uploading pictures and linking with the same friends. After that, it became obvious Tribe.net was truly the hip place to be, so we cut and past our profiles over there.
By the time we got requests to join LinkedIn and Facebook, we barely could find the time to set up the account.
Are we doomed to joining a new social networking site every few years, leaving an increasingly long trail of old places behind? A funny short from the Current TV cable channel sums it up pretty well (Warning: Some mature language):
(Tip o' the hat: Baron Earl)
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By Joab Jackson
Fortress does the math
SAN FRANCISCO--Earlier today at JavaOne, held this week in San Francisco, Christine Flood of Sun Microsystems offered a preview of Fortress, a programming language for writing math-heavy programs that will run in multicore and multiprocessor environments.
Funded in part by the Defense Department, Fortress has been positioned as Fortran killer. A lot of Fortran code still runs in government, especially for scientific duties, thanks to the fact that the ancient language has an ease with mathematical formulas that newer languages has yet to match.
If the preview is any indicator, Fortress will be very friendly to scientists. "We're going to do to Fortran what Java did C," Flood said.
Last month, the development team has shipped the first reference implementation of an interpreter for Fortress (available on the site). Flood admitted that it runs slow and doesn't reflect recent developments. The team hopes to have a working compiler by the end of the summer.
One of the strongest features of Fortress is that it allows users program directly in mathematical notation. For those scientists and other number-crunchers who think in terms of mathematics symbols, Fortress could simplify programming immeasurably.
As an example, Flood displayed a mathematical formula for the NAS Conjugate Gradient benchmark. Even in small type, it took up almost half the presentation slide. Along side the formula was the Fortress code that carried out the formula. The two looked very, very similar.
The Fortress language incorporates a mathematical syntax, meaning that mathematic symbols are operators and can be used to write a program. As a result, mathematical operations look exactly the same in the code as they would as they do in the mathematical textbooks, or on the professors' whiteboards.
This is a big jump for programming languages. As a contrast, Flood displayed on the next slide the same formula as rendered in Fortran. It took up the entire slide
Of course, the immediate problem with using notation is that keyboards don't have mathematical symbols. There is no keys for, say set notation. This is a problem the development team is working on, Flood admitted. Right now, they have an ASCII-notation substitute for those characters.
"We don't know if they will ever be on the keyboard," she said. The team is thinking of working on an on screen editor with all the characters.
Fortress has a number of other strong mathematical features as well. For instance, units of measurements are types, assuring that no mistakes will be made multiplying, say, kilometers with miles. It allows for functional programming, allowing methods that recursively reference themselves.
Fortress also has generators and reducers. With generators, you can specify the range of an array, and it will fill in the numbers. Likewise, a reducer can reduce all the numbers in an array, perhaps by summation.
***
While strong in mathematical notation, Flood positioned Fortress in her talk as a general usage language, though one still very early in development. She mentioned that it borrows the best ideas from a lot of other languages and takes on problems earlier languages did not address.
Flood mentioned a whole mess of design improvements. One is contracts. Borrowed from the Eiffel program language, contracts assures a function will not execute unless all the needed inputs are ready, and in the proper form. This is a good technique for cutting down on bugs and strengthening security. Another improvement is multiple inheritance, in which a class can inherit trait from multiple parent classes.
Perhaps the most prophetic feature, though, is that Fortress is a language for writing programs that run in parallel. Few of the languages today anticipated multicore processors, which require different programming techniques in order to be fully utilized.
Fortress features both implicit and explicitly parallelism, Flood said. Unlike every other programming language, Fortress assumes that the functions you write can run in parallel. A programmer has to specify when this is not the case. It will also divvy out work among multiple processors.
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By Joab Jackson
OpenOffice offers macro alternative
SAN FRANCISCO--As anyone who uses them knows, macros can be both a blessing and a curse.
While macros automate routine tasks in an office suite, they are also notoriously brittle. Embedded in each document, they only work for the application they were created in. If the office suite is upgraded, the macros may no longer work.
And if the task that the macro is completing needs to be changed, then the macro needs to be updated in each and every active document in which the code is embedded—which could be a nightmare for the system administrator.
At the CommunityOne, the annual Sun Microsystems-sponsored open source conference held today in San Francisco, Sun senior software engineer Juergen Schmidt gave an overview of how the Extensions feature in OpenOffice allows developers to add additional functionality to the office suite. Sun is a heavy contributor to the volunteer-led OpenOffice.org open source office suite. The company offers its own commercially-supported version, called StarOffice. Schmidt co-leads the Extensions project.
Extensions could open a new world of rich interactions between the open source office suite and other applications. And for a starter, they could also macros.
OpenOffice Extensions are a bit like Firefox plug-ins. They are programs written to run within OpenOffice that customize the office suite. Extensions could be written to add new features to OpenOffice. Such functionality could be accessed by the top-level menus, or via new toolbars. An extension could also contain configuration files, contain a collection of macros, or templates.
Writing extensions could be useful for organizations insofar as they can customize OpenOffice to their own specific needs, Schmidt said. The office suite can be tied directly to the document or content management systems, for instance, so that saving a file means it is directly saved in such a system. Smart tags could be defined that would highlight and offer to perform actions on any data that fit those formats, such as Social Security numbers.
Extensions could also customize documents. Schmidt offered the example of how a document template could include a call to a Web service that provides weather information. So when the document is printed out, such information could automatically be included and even appropriate images (a sun shining, an umbrella) could automatically inserted.
Of course, Extensions works only on OpenOffice, though Microsoft has long offered similar capability for its Office suite, through the Visual Basic for Applications, and--for larger tasks—the Visual Studio Tools for Office.
However, OpenOffice's Extensions does have some advantages over Microsoft Office application development, Schmidt argued. For one, a single extension can be written for OpenOffice instances running across on different operating systems.
Also, OpenOffice extension could support a wider variety of programming languages. Developers can build the functionality using any languages such as Java, Python, C#, StarBasic or C++. The key is that they use the Open Office's Application Programming Interface to communicate with the program.
"We have an API for nearly everything and if you missed something you can request it, and we'd probably implement it pretty quickly," he said.
Developers can also make use of extensions written by other parties. The OpenOffice Foundation also offers its own repository of publicly available extensions.
(Interesting sidenote [5/6/08]: Juergen Schmidt wrote in to note that "StarOffice 9 will be binary compatible with OpenOffice.org 3.0. Only the brand will be different and that all [of Sun's] code contributions go back into the OpenOffice.org project 100 percent. Sun provides more than 90 percent of the code contributions).
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By Wilson P. Dizard III
Remember: Not secure means not secure
The blogosphere and online news outlets have been buzzing since Saturday about a Fox News report that a Mexican government official took some BlackBerry devices owned by White House employees following a press event last weekend.
According to Fox, the Mexican press advance official identified as Rafael Quintero Curiel was apprehended by Secret Service agents, who recovered the personal digital assistants.
The incident, if it did indeed happen, serves as a reminder about the security risks wireless devices present.
A Wall Street Journal blog entry stated that the newspaper, also owned by Rupert Murdoch, had confirmed the essence of the story and Curiel had resigned as a result of the incident.
GCN is working to obtain confirmation or other on-the-record comment from officials in Washington and Mexico City.
But the somewhat anti-Mexican — not to say insulting — bias of the Fox News lead and Journal’s blog item's reliance on unnamed sources call the anecdote into question: "Whether he was up to no good or simply desperate to play BrickBreaker, a Mexican press attaché was caught on camera pocketing several White House [BlackBerrys] during a recent meeting in New Orleans and has since been fired, FOX News has learned."
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By John Rendleman
DOD wary of code written overseas
The Defense Department is increasingly concerned that software it procures from contractors is in some cases being written overseas and may include unexpected or harmful lines of code, according to the Pentagon’s chief information officer.
“It’s a big issue right now,” and is a growing concern in light of the DOD’s increasing reliance on contractors, and the contractors’ increasing use of overseas vendors for programming jobs, said Defense CIO John Grimes, speaking April 18 at an event sponsored by the northern Virginia chapter of the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association.
The Government Accountability Office reported that DOD’s reliance on contractor services increased 78 percent in the last decade, with its obligations on services contracts rising from $85.1 billion in fiscal 1996 to more than $151 billion in fiscal 2006.
“It gives us some concern about what may not be wanted in that piece of software,” especially since outsourcing and globalization make it increasingly difficult for the DOD to keep track of the origins of the different fragments of code that end up in the programs it buys, Grimes said.
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![1105 Government Information Group [valor]](/images/1105logo_website.gif "Government Computer News [valor]")
