ale machina, Bryant Cutler's blog

IIW 2008A - Day One

Monday, May 12th 2008

Well, another year, another Internet Identity Workshop. This has been the first time that I've been to IIW that I'm here for community and not really for the various conference sessions.

My hard thesis deadline is looming fast, so I'm glad for the chance to talk to the people who created all that stuff in my "related works" section. In particular, Paul Madsen has been great about answering our ID-WSF and SAML questions, making these implausibly complex specifications nearly understandable to mortals like me and Devlin.

Outside of the valuable thesis-related conversation with Paul over dinner, the best part of the conference is hearing all the nice comments on the logo I did this year... always nice to see one's work appreciated.

Welcome to the blog and online resume of Bryant Cutler, currently a graduate student in the BYU Enterprise Computing Lab. If you like reading this stuff, follow my blog feed or my bookmarks feed.

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Java.next: Common Ground: This summary of everything Scala, JRuby, Groovy, and Clojure have in common is a good tutorial on the new wave in programming language design, moving away from formalisms and towards real utility.
Font Conference: This video is stupid funny. Type geeks will get it, non-type geeks may like it as well. Too bad they miscast the hero :)
Sinatra: Sinatra looks like an interesting framework, but I'll never even try it: not only do they use HAML (ugh), the site's javascript commandeers CTRL+L and other browser shortcuts. ANNOYING!!!
Django-Graphs: Finally, a server-side charting package designed to fit in with an existing web framework. All the other charting tools I've seen are either client-side JS or standalone servers.
jQuery Sparklines: I've been meaning to write one of these for *so* long. Hooray for the lazyweb!
Substance skins: Wow, slightly-more decent looking Java GUI themes. Why oh why can't SUN adopt one of these?
2008 Cannondale Bad Boy Ultra: My dream bike... I love that it's jet black, sort of understated, and yet it's got these freaky-expensive proprietary Cannondale parts all over it.
Identity Crisis in Computer Science Education: We've been having this discussion in the lab for some time - should our department be training software engineers, code gurus, or mathematicians? It's a hard problem; to be good at any CS subdiscipline, you need to have a bit of all the others.
Plainview: a full-screen WebKit browser: This could be really useful for presentations, when you just can't stand to have that extra browser chrome. Even the best mozilla browser for full-screen (Camino + MegaZoomer) can't match this.
Google AJAX Libraries API: FINALLY Google will be edge-caching jQuery... looking forward to seeing the immediate performance increase web-wide :)