Preston L. Bannister { random memes }

Went to another “distinguished speaker” talk at UCI on Friday. Just finding a place to park was a bit of an adventure (they changed things – again).

Testing and Analysis of Next Generation Software

Have to admit I was a bit underwhelmed with the talk. Nothing really brain-stretching here, rather a straight-forward exploration of some simple ideas not entirely thought out (and not worth repeating here).

Perhaps my expectations are too high. Perhaps in light of the Internet the academic community loses meaning. Certainly none of the talks I have gone to at UCI in the last few years were worth the time. I keep going as some past talks were indeed very much worthwhile.

Come to think of it – seems practically all the interesting current work is communicated through web pages, mailing lists. and (on occasion) books. Could be the academic journals and the academic forums are now nearly irrelevant, or at least in the old form. Bummer. The local forum is nice, or would be if the presentations were a bit more worthwhile.

Noticed the guy sitting in front of me looked somewhat familiar. After twenty-odd years almost didn’t recognize Professor Standish – one of my old instructors.
Saturday, January 31, 2004

Lately started looking for a good C/C++ web protocol library. It would be extremely useful for my C++ code to have easy access to web/internet protocols as can be had from Java (or Perl for that matter).

Found libwww at w3.org (at rather suitable place). On the good side libwww has been around for a while and seem substantial usage – so there is a decent chance time has shaken out the bugs. On the other hand, it looks like development stalled out a few years back. Took a crack at building on Win32. The code by in large builds very cleanly (pretty usual in portable code), though the build itself is not entirely right. Could put in the time to update/contribute back the build files, but it is worth the time?

Found libcurl as an occasionally recommended successor to libwww. Active development is ongoing – a good sign.

Saw a reference to ACE. I’ve considered ACE interesting from it’s very beginning – though possibly overbuilt(?). Not sure ACE would be a good fit to the sorts of applications I usually produce.