Release 1.1 of the C++ Portable Components is available. Now featuring DBLite, NetSSL, C#-style events and much more.
Download it here. Online reference documentation is here.
Another pretty busy month is almost over. I spent the most part of this month doing organizational things and customer projects. My company - Applied Informatics - is now a public limited company (the new official name is Applied Informatics Software Engineering GmbH). I also visited CeBIT for one day. I went there mostly for the AutoID/RFID exhibition, but this turned out to be a little bit disappointing. There weren't too many RFID hardware manufacturers present, and the Metro Group Future Store, while certainly interesting to people new to RFID, had a bit of a "solution looking for problem" feeling to many parts of it.
Besides that, CeBIT is definitely too big for my taste. There were about 500 manufacturers of PC cases and PC loudspeaker systems present, mostly from Taiwan and China, and all presenting the same uninspired and dull products. Who the hell needs all this crap?
Now for the really good news. Next week I am flying to San Francisco. I'll give a talk at the Embedded Systems Conference Silicon Valley, and I also have planned a few days for vacation (including a visit to the Computer History Museum). Then, at the end of April, I'll be in Oxford for a week, attending and giving a talk at ACCU 2006. Definitely another highlight for me.
This year's ACM Turing Award goes to...
Dr. Peter Naur
best known as inventor of the Backus-Naur Form (BNF) for specifying the syntax of (programming) languages.
From the ACM announcement:
Dr. Naur was instrumental in establishing software engineering as a discipline. In 1960, Dr. Naur was editor of the hugely influential "Report on the Algorithmic Language Algol 60." He is recognized for the report's elegance, uniformity and coherence, and credited as an important contributor to the language's power and simplicity. The report made pioneering use of what later became known as Backus-Naur Form (BNF) to define the syntax of programs. BNF is now the standard way to define a computer language. Dr. Naur is also cited for his contribution to compiler design and to the art and practice of computer programming.
Congratulations!