As of yesterday, I am an Edinburger. On that basis, you can adjust your opinions of me just as quickly as I can adjust my speech patterns to charmingly mispronounce various kitchen appliances and append "like" to the end of every sentence.

With relocation comes a hint of déjà vu. Four years on, and I'm a fresher again. All the obligatory excitement at new beginnings notwithstanding, it's a little chastening to know that I'm currently fifty miles away from anyone I know. At least this time round I have a flat.

What shall I be doing for the next week? There's a fairly punishing two-day induction spell at EPCC on Wednesday and Thursday, and various postgraduate-related events on Monday and Tuesday. There's an Indie Society that runs a couple of club nights and holds fortnightly meetings that may or may not involve the making of zines. They namecheck Belle & Sebastian on their events listing, so there's reason to believe I could be in Cat and Girl heaven. There's also a CompSoc! Though it's hard to imagine that it would rock as hard as our Glasgow version, it might be worth popping in. However, as Matt has already relayed, the BLOGS society isn't the forum for discussing Wordpress templates that I might have imagined.

Should be fun then. Expect infrequent updates for the next week as I either (a) will be too busy to keep you posted, or (b) will artificially throttle the posts to create the appearance of (a). If you want to know which, ask Neil!

Cheers,

Derek.

I usually try to avoid posting links, but (via Going Underground), I have learned to

Take a break. Go ahead. The world won't end just because you've stopped contributing to the vast info-detritus of the world. Have some donuts. Chill.

What better way to spend a Tuesday morning than to pass on the pamphlet (such a word!) on Blog Depression. Some tips therein for those of you who're too busy to blog much these days, and Neil can get something out of it because it slags blogs!

Cheers,

Derek.

(Apologies for the title: it is my punning tribute to Professor Emeritus Peter Wegner, who was a special guest at the ECOOP banquet this year.)

Last week was a bit different. Since my boss was the Organising Chair, I was given the opportunity to be the only conscripted student volunteer at the 19th Annual European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP). Never having been to a conference before, I was somewhat nervous about the proceedings, but it turns out that I needn't have been. Herewith, a day-by-day tale of my week:

On Monday, it was to the SECC for 8am to help set up for the tutorials. Of the ten concurrent workshops and tutorials, in the morning I was able to attend Steven Kelly's tutorial on Domain Specific Modelling. The demonstration of meta-CASE software left me impressed by the technology, but I wondered if there is possibly a better way to perform code-generation than gratuitous use of string literals. (Perhaps not in the most-general case, but it seemed—from the time-constrained treatment they received—that we lack patterns for code generation.)

After lunch in the Moat House Hotel, it was back for another tutorial: this time Jeremy Gibbons on design patterns in datatype-generic functional programming. The first half of the tutorial passed as a straightforward refresher on second-year Haskell; unfortunately, I found the second half (on the meat of datatype-genericity) rather inscrutable. The take-away message of the tutorial was this: Haskell already lets us parameterise by type, so we can have lists of any type, trees of any type, and so on. Datatype-genericity goes one step further, allowing functions to be parameterised by the datatype, i.e. that which works on a list can work equally on a tree. How this is achieved, and how this relates to design patterns as I understand them, I am less sure.

The Monday evening saw a reception for all conference attendees in the Glasgow Science Centre. Having been to one of these many years ago (when I met Heather the Weather!), the free wine made a refreshing difference. Afterwards, it was to The Goat for some ill-advised tequila.

After the intense activity of Monday (social, intellectual and metabolical), Tuesday was rather more sedate. Under the instruction of ex-DCS lecturer, Dr. Tony Printezis (did you know that he's also at the right end of a certain list? He certainly does!) Most of the day, however, was spent wrestling with installing Fedora Core 4 onto some ex-DCS computers. They've been pretty badly treated, and half of them were kaput in either the CD-ROM, video card or both. One had a copy of a recent IM2 exercise protruding from the CD-ROM… it subsequently failed.

Wednesday saw the beginning of the technical paper sessions. Unfortunately, I knew too little of Aspect-Oriented Programming to make much sense of the presentations thereon, though I've resolved to read up on it (and I can already see some potential uses in my own work). Betrand Meyer's invited talk as the senior winner of the inaugural Dahl-Nygaard prize was rather interesting though, concerning methods of statically eliminating null-pointer exceptions in Eiffel code. The main thing I took away from his talk, however, was the following quote from Kristen Nygaard:

In a research team the function of the executioner is important. The executioner in this context is a person (or persons) trying to kill ideas that are not robust enough. In many teams a new idea is cherished, cuddled and shielded so it may grow. Grow up to become a weak attenuated result or finding, being alive only through the fierce protection by its parents. New ideas should be confronted with the executioner, with cruel attacks, with subtle attempts to prove them faulty or useless. Ideas surviving such a fight are worth building upon.

I think this will help me to rationalise any future brutal project demonstrations or presentations!

Before Bertrand's talk, I was privileged to meet the aforementioned Professor Wegner—a leading light in object-oriented programming—whose very attendance at ECOOP was a miracle. In 1999 (at the age of 67), he had been due to deliver the banquet speech at ECOOP in Lisbon that year, but he was knocked down by a bus in London en route to the conference. He was given a 10 per cent chance of survival and a 5 per cent chance of retaining the use of his brain. Remarkably, he defeated both of these odds, and was able to attend ECOOP 2005 as a special guest at the banquet. Given his pre-eminence, I was particularly touched that he showed an interest in my research, nascent though it is.

On the Wednesday evening, we went to the City Chambers for a civic reception in splendid surroundings. More free wine and vol-au-vents, and a speech from Bailie Alan Stewart welcoming us to the city. ("What language is he speaking?" asked one of our overseas visitors. "Broad Glaswegian," was the only answer.) After that, a large crowd of delegates and volunteers headed to Pizza Express, and thence to Bar Ten on Mitchell Lane. Unfortunately, our visitors from Leuven were unable to purchase Stella Artois there.

Thursday had the best of the paper sessions from my point of view. As the junior winner of the Dahl-Nygaard prize, Gail Murphy's invited talk on The Emergent Structure of Development Tasks, and how that may be used to improve the use of development tools, such as Eclipse, was rather interesting. The language design session was my favourite, since it had two talks regarding Microsoft's Cω, which I think should make C# 3.0 a very interesting language indeed. Unfortunately, I missed Amy Williams' paper on Static Deadlock Detection for Java Libraries, which I gather was particularly impressive.

Thursday night was the banquet, and I didn't have a ticket. However, as a student volunteer, I was entitled to come along to The Arches at 8pm, and go on stand-by, as it were, for any empty seats. Thus it was that I dressed in my finest (only) suit, and things looked good for getting a seat: six no-shows at the start of the meal. The pre-dinner surprise was a falconry display, made all the more impressive by the constrained setting. We were treated to the sight of both a falcon and a Bengali owl flying up and down the room, and around some brave volunteers. The pièce de résistance was the appearance of a massive bald eagle, born in Scotland.

After the birds had gone off to their beds, I was still in a seat. Then the latecomers arrived. As paying customers, they had more right to a seat than us as freeloading volunteers, so it came down to a coin-toss. I called it right, and kept my seat. (Those who didn't weren't thrown out on their ear, however, as Peter treated them to dinner in the main restaurant. I gather they got better food.) The meal was a well-lubricated feast, and damn enjoyable too. Afterwards, The Garage was ill-advised, messy and thorougly necessary.

See above for why I slept in on the Friday, but I made it in nevertheless. I didn't see any of the technical talks, unfortunately, but I did see Peter's closing address, in which he thanked just about everyone who made the conference possible. Having seen but the tip of the iceberg of work that he's had to do to make this conference a reality, he deserves the biggest vote of thanks.

Aside from the technical content, which has given me much to consider, one of the best aspects of the conference was social. I met a lot of great people at ECOOP, and made some good friends too (especially Dora, Na'ama, Oliver and Steven). Without these guys, it wouldn't have been half as enjoyable. If you ever get the opportunity, I'd recommend student volunteering at a large conference. Unfortunately, it's too late for OOPSLA '05, but there's always next year….

Cheers,

Derek.

Dear NPL attendee,

I hope that you enjoyed last Friday's National Pop League. There certainly was much to enjoy—the particularly choice Belle & Sebastian tunes (The Loneliness of a Middle-Distance Runner being my personal favourite), not to mention the high point for me: Neighbourhood #3: Power Out by The Arcade Fire.

The Arcade Fire. Everyone's new favourite band, and a neat segue into my next point. The Woody certainly gets warm, doesn't it? Of course, this is common knowledge: why else would they install huge industrial fans on the dance floor? Surely it's not so that my shirt-tails rise up coquettishly each time I pass the, though this is an undeniable fringe benefit. And I know that you know this, for why else would you have stood in front of said fan all night?

Three things I noticed:

1. You didn't dance at all. In fact you stood perfectly still in front of the fan, not even moving side-to-side in order to grant beautfiul cool air to us manic dancers. (But perhaps inside you is a passion so great that it causes you to perspire—who can say?)
2. Despite wanting to cool down, you appeared to be wearing a jacket over your buttoned-up shirt. I, however, had unbuttoned my shirt so far that not a little manly-chest-brillo was exposed. One gentleman went topless.
3. You chain-smoked cigarettes, throughout the night. Probably in an attempt to seem more interesting.

These three facts puzzle me as to why you should need the whole fan, the whole time. If you never dance, why should you be hotter, for example, than me, a particularly spastic dancer? As a last resort, you could consider removing that heavy suit jacket, embrace the smart-casual look—I did!

But, most of all, if you're feeling too hot in all the hustle and bustle, perhaps you could stop setting the sticks of tobacco in your mouth on fucking fire.

I hope you find this chat productive.

Hugs,

Derek x.

The humble compilation album can be many things. A touching gift, a favour, a cryptic message, or simply a way to assert musical credibility. Often it is all four, but it is the last that concerns us today.

I was lucky enough to chance upon an MP3-blog offering downloads of the entire C86 compilation. What more sublime result of a compilation than to spawn an entire genre that influences music to this day?

"Getting people to like me" is a rather prosaic ambition, compared to effecting a cultural revolution, but I nevertheless present my CDR05 — Good songs by bands you don't know:

1. PANG! Däg Är Hon! by Hemstad. (Via.) If the umlauted-a's weren't clue enough, Hemstad are gloriously Swedish, and this tune is two-and-a-half minutes of instrumental synth-guitar-pop at its finest.
2. Meet Me By The Water by Saturday Looks Good To Me. (Via (sadly defunct).) There's a charming Motown feel to this song, indeed so much so that it moved me to juxtapose it with Baby Love on my most-recent iPod playlist.
3. The Start Of Something by Voxtrot, (via) has the the Johnny Marr guitar and Andy Rourke bass of This Charming Man, but the Beans' piano of There's Too Much Love or another B&S track. All of which doesn't render it a cut-and-shut—it's perhaps my favourite track of these. There's perhaps little surprise in learning that there's a Glasgow connection as well.
4. Missing Pieces by Voxtrot, who have no qualms about wearing their influences on their sleeves. Given the previous, you might not guess that this has more of a Bloc Party air to it, except a bit less hectoring. I'd like Silent Alarm better if this were on it.
5. Starting Five by Dios Malos. (Via.) This is a song that contains the sound of children laughing. Not to mention gratuitous ooh-ooh-oohs Dios Malos are a sunny California band, tipped by some to be the next Beach Boys. If you were at their recording session, you'd be laughing too.
6. Karaoke Tribe by Bob Cuba. (Via.) I once learnt that one of my teachers had musical aspirations, and it turned out to be maudlin folk-pish about his failed marriage. When it turned out then that one of my lecturers was in a band, I wasn't expecting the infectious indie of Bob Cuba. Karaoke Tribe is, in my opinion, their best song, and was definitely the stand-out track when we saw them play Tom Tom back in June.
7. Rent A Wreck by Suburban Kids With Biblical Names. (Via.) More from Sweden! This time with lyrics, ba-ba-bas, and I think I detected a cowbell in there as well.
8. Final Day by Young Marble Giants. I first heard the Belle & Sebastian cover of this song on the Rough Trade Stop Me If You Think That You've Heard This One Before compilation, whereon they give it an electro-pop treatment; the original is far more minimalist. They're the only band to have been around, and split up, before 1986, so I imagine readers of a certain age would argue about the "bands you don't know" appellation in this case.
9. Here With You by Days Like Postcards. (Via.) Jangly-summer's-day-pop by a band about whom I can find very little in the way of details. I've read that they're Filipino, which would mark a first for my music collection, but I'm not sufficiently confident with accents to make that call for sure. Either way, it's very pleasant.
10. The Shape Is Me by Hexes and Ohs. (Via.) Plaintive accordion plays over a background of daytime television before the blissful female vocals kick in. If you don't like this sweet song, you don't have a heart. Or you've got diabetes.
11. Trumpets and Violins by Suburban Kids With Biblical Names. When you listen to this song, you're transported to mediæval Sweden, where you're riding on horseback through an enchanted forest. To get to a Belle & Sebastian gig.
12. A Europewide Search For Love by Ballboy. (Via.) This is two songs, somehow fused into one. On one hand, it's a post-9/11 meditation (but, coming from a band of Edinburghers, it's not a slice of maudlin sentimentality). On the other, it takes a stanza to go from seeking love to "wondering what will happen if they find what they really want and what they really need, and they lose it."
13. Disco: The Secretaries Blues by Beulah. That's Beulah, not to be confused with the British singer, or Belle & Sebastian, as this MP3 was when I downloaded it many years ago. John Peel liked them, and that's enough for me. Inexplicably, they shout "Titration!" at the end of the song, which is as good a reason as any to recommend it. (Did I mention John Peel liked them?)
14. Raised By Wolves by Voxtrot. Unimaginatively, a third song by Voxtrot. I can't think of the direct influences, but this one differs from the others due to its ska-tinged middle-eight. I couldn't leave it out, since they're one of my favourite bands at the moment.
15. Remember by The Boyfriends. (Via.) I've read comparisons with The Futureheads, but if these guys are anyone's boyfriend, they're Morrissey's. If you're a fan of the bequiffed one's solo output, then you might just like this.
16. Pirates by Spitfires & Mayflowers. (Via.) I don't know enough Sons & Daughters to draw a confident parallel, but the initial drumbeat at least is reminiscent. Maybe a little Modest Mouse too, and some Kings of Leon. All-in-all, a rousing record, and trumpets too!
17. Ljusdal by Sibiria. (Via.) Finishing as we started with a Swedish band, this time singing in their mother tongue. There's a certain similarity with My Lovely Horse, and, for all I know, the song might be about a lovely horse. Perhaps that horse from the enchanted forest. Who can say?

I recommend clicking around some of those vias, as they comprise the bulk of my MP3-blog reading these days (certainly they're where I get the best material). I also encourage comments wherein you lambast me for either (a) having poor taste, or (b) claiming ownership of these bands since you're a longstanding fan (perhaps you've seen them at Tut's?).

Cheers,

Derek.

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