Cygwin is a marvelous idea: run a Linux-like shell under Windows. It allows me to run Python, CVS, Perl… almost everything I use under Linux, under Windows. Well, it doesn’t quite work as well, but for small things, it does the job.

One thing that has annoyed me is their implementation of vim. The keyboard support is bad. In my .inputrc, I have these lines

# enable 8-bits characters ...
set meta-flag on
set convert-meta off
set output-meta on

They seem to clash with vim in a bad way. Ah! But you can also install a version of vim running directly on top of windows. If you do this, then you can use this other version instead of the one that comes with cygwin.

All I had to do was to create this little script:

 "/cygdrive/c/Program Files/Vim/vim63/vim.exe" `cygpath -w $1`

The trick here is that you need to convert Linux-like paths (like /tmp) into Windows path (C:…). My little script is bad in many ways, but it will work if you call vim with only a file name as an argument.

My solution does fail in some nasty ways. For example, when I do a CVS commit, I can’t enter my comment. Bad.

See also my post Grep is just not for matching lines anymore.

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My favorite Toronto conference has issued its call for papers:

Sheraton Parkway Toronto North Suites & Conference Centre (NEW LOCATION)
Richmond Hill, Ontario, Canada

Sponsored by:
IBM Toronto Software Lab
IBM Centers for Advanced Studies
in Partnership with
National Research Council Canada

CASCON 2005, the 15th Annual International Conference hosted by the IBM Centers for Advanced Studies, is the premiere computer science and software engineering conference held in Canada. CASCON is an excellent venue for exchanging ideas, showcasing results, experiences and tools, and networking with researchers and practitioners from academia, industry, and government.
The Meeting of Minds, as CASCON is otherwise known, is an opportunity to present, discuss, and learn.

CASCON 2005 comprises keynote presentations, technical paper tracks, challenging workshops, Best Paper and Best Student Paper Awards, and the technology showcase - a key attraction of the conference. The proceedings from CASCON 2005 will be included in the ACM Digital Library, a “window into the world’s core computing literature”.

CASCON 2005 is focused on five main themes:
- Software Models, Tools, Practices and Engineering
- Database Management, Technologies and Data Mining
- Distributed and Web-Based Systems
- Systems Management and Autonomic Computing
- Privacy, Security and Trusted Systems

Topics within these themes, as well as detailed paper submission information, can be found at http://witanweb.ca/cascon05/

The important deadlines for paper submission are listed here:
Abstracts for technical papers due - Friday, May 13, 2005
Full technical papers due - Friday, June 3, 2005
Acceptance notification - Monday, July 25, 2005
Camera-ready papers due - Friday, August 12, 2005

Yuhong worries about CS students. She points to two recent articles on the CS job market:

• Endangered species: US programmers (David R. Francis ,The Christian Science Monitor ,October 14, 2004)
• Study finds dramatic loss of tech jobs (Ed Frauenheim, CNET News, October 18, 2004)

Here is what she has to say based on the people she talked to:

I recently talked to some master CS graduates. (…) They both said programming jobs are no more and many new hires are master graduates.

Here are two quotes from the second article she cites:

There are certain areas in the technology sector that are thriving. Demand is high for those who specialize in network and IT security.

Technology services companies like IBM and BearingPoint are hiring in the United States, though they are increasingly looking for employees who can combine technology chops with business savvy.

The message is quite clear, I believe. If you want to train yourself or students to produce software (programming or software engineering), you better be damn good because the job market is not there anymore. Will jobs come back? Automobile workers in North America are still waiting for the jobs sent to Mexico or elsewhere to come back. Now, programming or software engineering are not useless skills, far from it, but it might be a better strategy to aim for a business jobs where your programming or computer networking skills can be put to good use, for example. It seems that the job market is moving toward information technology (security, networking, using the right technology at the right time, understanding the implication of a given technology for business).

Yesterday, I gave a talk at the Centre de recherche en géomatique. I was invited by Yvan Bédard to visit his lab, meet his students and discuss his projects. To give you an idea, Yvan published 400 papers, he has 4 full-time contract employees, two post-doctoral fellows and something like 15 graduate students in his lab. He has for $750k in software alone in his laboratory. He must be one of the top researcher in “spatial OLAP” (which he calls SOLAP) in the world. He works at the geomatics department in Laval University. It is one of 3 geomatics departments in Canada. (While I don’t have a definition of geomatics… it is all about mapping and measuring distances, and so on.)

Some of his projects include decision-support tools for trainers who work with top athletes: through fine-resolution GPS, you can track the an athlete, collect all this data, pour it into data cubes and make various comparison, see where, on the track, the athlete is improving, where he is not improving, and so on. He also built a tool to mine road conditions and help set repair priorities.

We discussed various research issues such as the fact that rebuilding the cubes is expensive in a spatial-temporal context, and how view maintenance appears to be lacking from current commercial tools like SQL Server (I’ll need to investigate this particular issue). He has committed to achieving real-time data cubes in 5 years (which implies continuous updates) for his current portfolio of applications.

The use some already available classical multidimensional indexing techniques such as R-trees and R+-trees. However, they are fairly dependent on currently available commercial (and open source) tools as they focus mostly on the application layer and specifically on the geometry and topology of the data.

I’m very impressed.

Myself, I presented some of the work I do with Owen Kaser as part of the Lemur project, including Attribute-Value Reordering and Relative Prefix Sum Methods. I got people laughing, so either they thought I was ridiculous or else, they enjoyed my style. There were many questions and people seemed to be interested, so maybe they thought it wasn’t silly work after all.

Harold has another great post, this time he lists some of the tangible benefits of blogging, for him…

After an intensive year online, these are the tangible benefits to my business:

• Using a feed reader (via RSS), saves a lot of time and bookmarking.
• The information I get from bloggers is usually weeks ahead of the mainstream press. Call this competitive intelligence.
• By blogging, I have raised my profile on the web and increased visits to my site by a factor of 1000 in less than one year. This is cheap marketing.
• I use my database of posts when preparing reports, proposals and presentations. It helps to have a searchable system like Drupal.
• Blogging forces me to think and reflect in order to write, so that what was just an idea in my mind becomes more concrete.
• The underlying technology of easy posting and RSS to keep track of things, makes a lot of sense for collaborative learning and collaborative work - two areas of interest for my business.
• Through blogging, I have met a number of business partners.
• Blogging keeps me in touch with a lot of interesting people and expands my view of the world, providing new ideas for my business.
• When I have a problem, especially a technical one, I post it on my site or someone else’s and usually get an informed answer within 24 hours. It’s like a large performance support system.
• It allows people to get to know my opinions before they engage me as a consultant; saving time and potential frustrations.

Like e-mail, blogs are practical tools for everyday business. There are abuses of both (spam) but I think that blogs are one more tool that give the small business operator a real competitive advantage.

To me, my blog has become the single more powerful knowledge management tool I use. The way I use it, it gives me a view of where I am, where I’ll be, where I’m thinking about being. My blog is like my intelligence department… it collects lots of data in an organized fashion and it sits there, waiting for me to go to. The fact that I’m read means I get feedback, and hence, people help me complete my information. I also find out about new, interesting people because they link to my blog, comment on my blog and so on. Like good clients, they come to me first, hence, they pass a compatibility test. My blog requires some effort, but very little in the end. The benefits far outweight the cost, so far.

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It seems like a bunch of schools in British Columbia got together to develop open source academic publishing software.

The University of British Columbia’s Public Knowledge Project (PKP), the Simon Fraser University Library and SFU’s Canadian Center for Studies in Publishing (CCSP) have formed a partnership to support the maintenance and ongoing development of the internationally acclaimed open source software developed by PKP.
(…)

At the heart of the partnership are three major software programs. Open Journal Systems (OJS) provides online management for journal submissions, peer reviewing, editing, and online publishing and indexing. Open Conference Systems (OCS) manages conference registration, programming and paper submission and publication. The PKP Harvester (PKPH) is used to automatically create an online index of materials from a variety of online sites including journals and repositories such as those housed at the Canadian Association of Research Libraries, which are harvested and reside on an SFU Library server.

(I got this through Downes’.)

Harold has a good post on Market Diversification:

In Canada, we continue to focus almost exclusively on exporting to the US. As Godfrey puts it, Wal*Mart does more business with China than all of Canada does. The business development strategies that I see presented at every “innovation” forum in the region have the same old story presented by analysts, bureaucrats and government. That story is about exporting our products and services to the US. The talk about diversified global markets is negligible. Given the warning signals on the state of the US economy, it would make sense not to put all of our economic eggs in one basket, n’est-ce pas?

I think Canada will probably suffer in the coming years given its very intense relationship with the USA. However, we have many young bright Chinese in Canada…