Prototypes And Game Development
Jason Shankel, Maxis/Electronic Arts, Walnut Creek
05/05/2005
Gathering requirements for game development projects is challenging. Prototypes help designers address key questions and minimize production risk. In this talk, I will present several prototyping methods and discuss their applicability to game and general software design.
Spam And The Law
Ian Sweedler, Deputy Attorney General, CA Dept. of Justice
05/12/2005
For almost as long as there has been unsolicited commercial email (i.e., spam), there have been attempts to combat it through legal action. Spam has been the subject of litigation based on laws of advertising, trespass, fraud and other general theories. Several states led the way with legislation specifically addressing spam, and the U.S. Congress passed a national law in 2003. To figure out where we are and where we are likely headed, it's important to understand the evolution of these laws, and the issues inherent in efforts to enforce them.
An Introduction To Antlr And Domain-Specific Languages
Terence Parr, University of San Francisco
09/15/2005
Most people think of grammars and parser generators in terms of building compilers, yet the number of language recognition and translation tasks dwarfs the number of compilers being built. This lecture illustrates the wide applicability of parser generators to domain specific languages and other recognition and translation tasks. ANTLR codifies what programmers do naturally by hand, thereby placing the power of formal languages in the hands of the average programmer. This lecture is a practical introduction to ANTLR and uses numerous examples to demonstrate the power of simple grammars and their use in a variety of common tasks.
Project Management In It
Raúl D. Ocazionez, Informatix, Inc., San Francisco & Sacramento
09/22/2005
In today’s competitive IT world of, successful companies require a scalable, step-by-step methodology for planning and executing projects. This talk discusses the approaches, tools, and strategies that are being used to effectively monitor and manage projects that keep IT companies thriving in today’s competitive market. A certified Project Management Professional (PMP®) from the Project Management Institute (PMI®) himself, Mr. Ocazionez has transformed Informatix from its humble beginnings nearly 20 years ago into a formidable force in the areas of automated child support payment systems, electronic document management, and payment processing with plans to expand the company’s reach even further. Mr. Ocazionez will address the importance of project management in IT while providing anecdotes about his own recipe for success.
Event-Based Aspect-Oriented Programming
Robert Filman, Research Institute for Advanced Computer Science, NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field
09/29/2005
For many applications, most code is not devoted to implementing the primary I/O functionality, but instead addresses other concerns, such as reliability, availability, responsiveness, performance, security, and manageability. Conventional programming practice requires the programmer to keep all these other "ilities" in mind while coding and to explicitly invoke behavior at exactly the right places to achieve them. Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) is an emerging technology for allowing the separate specification and coding of multiple concerns, while nevertheless providing mechanisms to automatically meld these separate expressions into working programs. This talk presents a pair of AOP systems, past work on the Object Infrastructure Framework (OIF) and current work on event-based quantification, and provides some observations on the distinguishing characteristics of AOP technology. OIF is a distributed object technology that implements separate concerns as dynamic wrappers on object components. Interesting elements of OIF include its mechanisms for application and aspect communication, its dynamic nature, and its language for expressing where aspects apply to base code. Current work is on understanding AOP in terms of quantification over the structures of program text, the results of static program analysis, and the events in program execution. Initial work on event-based quantification, an attempt to map directly and widely the interesting properties of programs into transformations that realize those properties, will be mentioned also.