Some unrest has been created by the visible impact (that is, banning from the Apple AppStore) of the enforcing of certain clauses in the license agreement all developers need to sign in order to get access to iPhone development.

This license agreement has been in the news earlier. It is an interesting license agreement, since part of the agreement is that the agreement itself may not be publicly discussed (section 10.4). In fact posting this blog about it may itself be interpreted as a violation of the agreement and result in all my iPhone/iPad development being banned!

The banning of the Scratch app, based on section 3.2.2 of said agreement, has also created quite a buzz in the developers community. The ESUG mailing list (ESUG is the European Smalltalk Users Group, and a representative of a large part of the Smalltalk programmers community, Smalltalk being a programming language that seems to be violating section 3.2.2 of the license, and consequently cannot be used to program any software for the iPhone) sent some heated mails around. But this response in itself may be brought to court based on this paragraph!

Met dank aan Frank Leemhuis en Pieter-Joost van de Sande, die hard gewerkt hebben om enkele uren overpeinzingen op een Usquerts terras in een podcast om te zetten, hierbij de link naar de podcast van deze sessie: Devnology Podcast 001 - Rob Vens

Tjeerd Hans Terpstra heeft een verslag geschreven van de Reinventing Programming avond bij Devnology. Op die avond mocht ik een presentatie geven met die titel. Ik hoop dat het een inspirerende maar vooral ook prikkelende avond is geweest voor veel mensen.

Voor zijn verslag, ga naar:

http://devnology.nl/blog/7-verslagen/44-verslag-re-inventing-programming 

Een groeiende ergernis bij het aanhoren van nieuws- en weerberichten is de gewoonte om de volgende soort uitspraken te doen:

"De temperatuur morgen is 17 graden, ca. 7 graden meer dan normaal." (nadruk van mij)

Wat is in hemelsnaam normaal? Is het normaal dat de temperatuur altijd gemiddeld is? Is iemand met een IQ van 140 abnormaal? (gezien het feit dat een IQ van 100 een standaard definitie is van de gemiddelde intelligentie). Zou het "normaal" zijn als iedereen een IQ van 100 had?

Trygve Reenskaug is still active, although approaching 80, and I am actively reading his articles on his website. His work has been undervalued, at least in my country. Trygve has been one of the first people actually thinking about object oriented modelling and design, and his work on OORAM (role oriented modelling) is groundbreaking.

Together with Jim Coplien, whom I often refer to as one of the few computer people who actually understand metaprogramming, he is currently working on an approach to object oriented programming, and they have published an article called The DCI Architecture: A New Vision of Object-Oriented Programming.

I heartily recommend reading this since it attempts to incorporate cognitive aspects into the area of modelling, which is structurally avoided by most authors.

In my country, The Netherlands, a discussion between creationism and evolutionism has been rekindled. In this blog I want to share with you a few observations. I think this event is of interest to anyone involved in requirements engineering because it shows that we can become blind in our understanding if we are not aware of the metaphors that colour our vision.

Curious enough the discussion was prompted by a private initiative to distribute door-to-door a folder that attempts to discuss the theory of evolution. The folder attempts to show weaknesses in the theory, and wants to place at least some question marks to the "absolute belief" in the theory. The folder does not explicitly attempt to "convert" the reader to creationism and is set in a relatively reasonable tone.

The curious thing was not the folder itself, but the intensity of the response. This was out of proportion: the person behind the initiative has been threatened, hours have been spent discussing whether the distribution of the folder was "appropriate". In short: the folder struck a nerve!

At 200, Darwin Evolves Beyond Evolution | Wired Science from Wired.com

People who have heard me talk know that I try to take a different approach to the theory of evolution. Especially the popularised version that circulates among the populace. Since this is the year of Darwin, many articles appear on the subject.

What bothers me about these articles is that they as a rule remain on the main road, the popularised version. In that myth evolution is the result of the battle for survival, and solely engineered through the ministrations of genes. I hold a quite different view, and actually modern biology has gone much further than the myth - but for some reason biologists don't speak up. Maybe they think "normal" people are not equipped to understand, I do not know. But this blog on Wired made at least an attempt to broaden the scope and I recommend reading it (including the links).

A new open platform for devices is in the making.

A group of several tens of developers are working hard on a new open platform that is an alternative for Android.

But while Android is targeting mobile devices and will include an operating system, middleware and key applications, the MOSQ project is actually delivering a system that is targeting mobile devices, smartphones, ultra-light computers, laptops, desktops, mainframes, set-top boxes and what not. And it includes more: a complete embedded development environment is part of the system, making it much more open than the Android system which needs an SDK, usable only on a developer machine, and requires knowledge of Java, C, and C++ to develop applications in. The project is well under way to be deployable on the Apple iPhone as well, completely replacing the Apple software, or behaving like a more adapted citizen by running into the iPhone operating system.

The system is not only open, but free of costs and licensing as well. The development community behind MOSQ is betting its business case on the selling of services and applications, comparable to the AppStore on the iPhone.

Multitasken is te leren - Deze week - intermediair.nl

Interessant en dit keer redelijk objectief getoonzet artikel over een veelbesproken onderwerp. Vaak hoor ik van collega's dat moderne kinderen "anders" zouden zijn, dat ze veel meer in staat zouden zijn tot multitasken. Je ziet het beeld voor je van je kind dat zijn huiswerk zit te doen met televisie aan, mp3 speler in één oor, met een computer waarop zes chat sessies draaien en ondertussen een maaltijd verorberend. Het idee is dan dat "normale" mensen hier gek van zouden worden maar kinderen niet want "die kunnen zo goed multitasken".