At Jan Heering's retirement party, for the occasion of which I wrote a post on example-driven research, I took a bunch of photos. I finally came around to post-processing them. Here are three samples. More on flickr. By the way Anya Bagge was much faster and more productive. She took this meta-photo of me.

This is the kicking off the year meeting of the Software Engineering Research Group of TU Delft in January 2009. I took lots of pictures that day and this group portrait. The group shot didn't work very well as it had strong backlight. I never processed the photos of that day, despite starting several time. Now it turns out that a black and white rendering of the shot makes it work. Sometimes you have to see things in a different light.

That period was also the start of building up a large photo processing backlog. Today, I've decided to start doing something about that. Follow my progress on flickr.

Photos from the London meeting of the IFIP Working Group on Language Design held at the end of February 2012. More on flickr

Episode four of Everything is a Remix discusses the evolution of intelectual property tools from promoting creativity and a flourishing public domain to restricting ideas to a walled garden, inhibiting memetic evolution. "The believe in intelectual property has grown so dominant, it has pushed the original intent of copyright and patents out of the public consciousness."

Last week I started teaching a new edition of @TI1220, the first year, second semester, course on concepts of programming languages. Last year I taught the course for the first time and modernized it. Instead of using Haskell to teach functional programming I decided to use Scala. This was partially based on the observation that master's students who took the Haskell-based course had no FP skills to speak of. As Scala ties in more easily with real world application programming than Haskell, I hope more students will come back to FP. In the second part of the semester I teach C, in order to discuss memory management, and JavaScript, for its prototype-based inheritance.

For this second year I have decided to develop a web application to support the lab exercises as well as the exam. Last year I did a multiple-choice exam, which was good for grading, but not a good medium for asking programming language questions. Thus, I want a system that allows me to ask programming questions, but that I can still grade efficiently, preferably automatically. Thus, this year I have introduced the WebLab application in the course. (Due to authentication policy the application is only available to people with a TU Delft netid at the moment.) In this blog post a discussion of the first version of the system that we launched last week.