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May 29, 2003
Idaho Gem
Scientists at the University of Idaho and Utah State University announced today that they had succeeded in cloning a mule. The clone is named "Idaho Gem." Gordon Woods, one of the chief scientists on the project was my next door neighbor when I taught at the University of Idaho.
As with each new species cloned, Idaho Gem opens another door in the understanding of animal systems. Woods, who calls the mule "a 1,000-pound mouse that kicks," says the cloning may also help in the study of cancer. Key differences between horse and human cells may account for why horses have radically lower cancer rates.
11:06 PM | Recommend This | Print This
Final Project
A few items of note for the final project.
- You should be in the same group you were in for the first project. If that's not possible, let Grant know as soon as possible.
- By tomorrow evening at midnight you should have emailed your languages preference to Grant. This is simply an ordered list of languages from the list in the report with three others that aren't listed there. There are hundreds of programming languages, so just pick some.
- You'll need to find a working implementation of the language you're assigned. You may want to consider that before you order your list.
- You won't be assigned anything that is familiar (like Java or C, so don't bother putting them on your list.
- The write-up suggests you have a week to find and install an implementation of your language. You don't have anything like that. You've got a few days at the most. Part of this assignment is the finding and installing. If you don't think you can find an implementation of the language assigned to you, I'd better know very early (like Tuesday). Grant can help here as well.
- Here are a few other language choices: XSLT, SR, MDP, PIC, Euclid, Miranda, Lucid, Juno, Mathematica, Pizza, GJ, etc.
- If you're going to use Powerpoint for your presentation, You'll need to email it to me by noon the day of your presentation.
Relax and enjoy this. You're not supposed to be comfortable with these languages. That's the whole point. Just do a little research, pick some, and when you get your assignment, dive in.
10:39 PM | Recommend This | Print This
Utah Interlinx: Broadband for St. George
This story in Wasatch Digital IQ discusses the utah Interlinx project which hopes to bring better broadband access to St George in Southern Utah. "The first stage includes buildingÊtwo new,Êredundant long-haul fiber opticÊlines into St. George,Ê and the second stage is to build a newÊnext-generation metro area network (MAN) utilizing both SONET and Gigabit Ethernet technologies." The story also talks about building a smart building in St. George. St. George is one of the fastest growing areas in Utah, so its not surprising that this kind of project is interesting to many, but its not clear to me from this article how its being financed or why it makes sense economically.
06:50 PM | Recommend This | Print This
More Organizational Blogging Questions
Phil Wolff has posted a list of questions to add to mine. I'm posting them here in their entirety so that I can edit them a little. Here they are:
- Does IT blogging start at the top? CIO and direct reports? Any holdouts?
- Some people have deep resistance to writing, let alone writing in public. How do you bring them in to blogging? Is it OK for them to "just read?"
- How do you accommodate the visually impaired, both in blogging and in reading blogs? Are your blogs accessible?
- Have you tried any more formal knowledge management systems? How do blogs stack up against these?
- Are blogs primarily for communicating within your own organization or do your internal customers read your blogs as well? How is it changing your relationships with your stakeholders?
- How much have you adopted project blogging as a common practice? How is it changing project statusing, problem detection, newbie socialization, and project risk?
- Are you generating RSS feeds from your ERP, CRM, and project management systems for alerting and prompting?
- What tools do you use? Are they officially supported by IT? Does IT support blogging for other departments?
- Have you deployed RSS newsreaders?
- What blog community servers have you used? For example: weblogs.com ping server (what's new), blogroll service (perhaps linked to enterprise directory service?), RSS aggregation portals, intranet Google/search, DayPop (what's hot on the intranet), geourl service (find blogs physically near me), referral logs (who's sending traffic to me), link analysis (technorati, link cosmos), email-to-blog gateway, blog-to-email gateway, SMS/MMS-to-blog gateway, machine translation. Which of these are useful tools to add to your organization's blogs?
- How are you managing personnel transitions? Are blogs personal or are they tied to positions? When does the new person take over the old blog and when should they start a new one?
- Does your IT organization span countries? If so, are you encouraging people to blog in their native language or in an enterprise standard language?
- Do new hires automatically get a blog along with their badge?
Of course, there's much more here than we can cover in an hour, but just thinking about these ahead of time will help the discussion.
10:14 AM | Recommend This | Print This
Language Design isn't Compiler Design
An article in Lambda, the Ultimate, points to a piece by Chris Brumme on memory models in CLR, Microsofts Cimmon Language Runtime. CLR is the virtual machine that C# and other Microsoft languages compile to. Chris says:
So what is a memory model?Ê It?s the abstraction that makes the reality of today?s exotic hardware comprehensible to software developers.
I can remember the days when CPUs weren't so complicated. But what with n-way semetric multi-processing, multi-level caches, and whatnot, its gotten to the point where understanding the CPU design is a job for experts. CLR, JVM, and other VMs allow those experts to create a useful abstraction that the compiler writer to target. Compiler writers, of course, are another class of expert who write translators from the semantics that the language designer specifies to the semantics of the VM.