Conference announcements
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From: Dirk Craeynest <Dirk.Craeynest@cs.kuleuven.be> Subject: No Ada at FOSDEM 2010 (was: Ada at FOSDEM 2010 - Call for Interest) To: ada-belgium@cs.kuleuven.be Date: Thu, 3 Dec 2009 21:00:11 +0100 (MET) [...] This is a short status report on what has happened since we posted the appended Call for Interest roughly one month ago. Based on the feedback we received, we have prepared a new proposal for an Ada Developers Room during the 2 days of FOSDEM 2010 next February. Our proposal, including the full list of presentations and speakers, is available on the Ada at FOSDEM 2010 web-page at <http://www.cs.kuleuven.be/~dirk/ada-belgium/events/10/100206-fosdem.html>. Unfortunately, we were recently informed by the organizers of FOSDEM 2010 that our proposal has not been accepted. They wrote: "We realize that this must be disappointing news, but unfortunately we don't have a sufficient number of rooms to our disposal to cover all requests. Just to clarify: your request is perfectly valid, but we had to pick." So, after successful Ada DevRooms in 2006 and 2009, we didn't make it for 2010. Thanks, everybody involved with the proposal this year. Stay tuned for next year... Valentine, Ludovic, Dirk The FOSDEM Team of Ada-Belgium = From: Dirk Craeynest <Dirk.Craeynest@cs.kuleuven.be> = Subject: Ada at FOSDEM 2010 - Call for Interest = To: ada-belgium@cs.kuleuven.ac.be = Date: Mon, 2 Nov 2009 05:10:52 +0100 (MET) = [ 70 lines deleted; see original version below -- dc ]
Ada-Belgium made a proposal for a Developer Room to hold presentations on Ada and related technologies at the Free and Open Source Software Developers' European Meeting (FOSDEM 2010) on 6-7 February 2010 in Brussels, Belgium.
We really enjoyed the opportunity the FOSDEM organizer gave us with the 2-full-day Ada DevRoom at FOSDEM 2009 and as it received a true warm welcome (several talks given in front of a full room), the European Ada community has once again a real motivation to attend FOSDEM 2010.
At the time of writing (Sun Nov 22 2009) speakers from various countries (Denmark, France, Spain) have already proposed seven interesting hour-long presentations on Ada connections to the Free Software world. The addressed topics are as various as coverage analysis (Couverture), real-time (MAST), and "back to childhood project" (with LEGO(c) MINDSTORMS). We also plan to organize a one-hour "open forum" on each day, for informal discussions and short presentations by participants, as we learned last year it would be nice to offer more time for interactions with the audience. And finally, a few more presentations may be confirmed in the coming weeks or months.
We apply on the same basis as last year, as we completely follow the collaborative model you gave this year to the FOSDEM devrooms project. The 7 talks we are presenting below, together with the two open forums, would be enough to fill a DevRoom for the entire duration of the FOSDEM event (i.e. Saturday 7th from 12:00 to 18:00 and Sunday 8th from 10:00 to 17:00). However, if necessary, we could try to make our program fit in a single day by reducing the number of talks or the time allocated to each of them.
http://www.cs.kuleuven.be/~dirk/ada-belgium http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_(programming_language) http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Ada_Programming http://www.adaic.com http://www.cs.kuleuven.be/~dirk/ada-belgium/events/09/090207-fosdem.html
This presentation exposes the main features of the Ada language, with special emphasis on the features that make it especially attractive for free software development. It addresses also how Ada handles the ob ject oriented paradigm, and especially how its model is different from what is commonly found in other languages, as well as the benefits and drawbacks of this original approach.
http://www.adalog.fr/compo2.htm (free Software from Adalog)
http://adaic.org/standards/95rat/RAThtml/rat95-p2-4.html
http://adaic.org/standards/05rat/html/Rat-2.html
http://adaic.org/standards/05rat/html/Rat-TOC.html
A simple presentation of Ada's features in this parallel/multicore area, given in such a way that it offers enough for people to start experimenting and doing "interesting stuff".
AWS is the Ada Web Server, a software component that allows applications to embed an HTTP server. It allows stand-alone Ada applications to offer a web interface, or use HTML for the GUI, without resorting to an external server.
This presentation describes this alternative approach to web development, and the many features provided by AWS (including SOAP, LDAP, Jabber, SMTP...)
Project Couverture aims at producing a free software coverage analysis tool suite, together with the ability to generate artifacts that allow the tools to be used for safety critical software pro jects undergoing DO-178B software audit process. The tools will also be usable in a more general context for non-safety-critical projects, thus benefitting the open source community at large.
Unlike traditional coverage analysis tools requiring source code instrumentation, the key contribution of Couverture consists in providing unobstrusive coverage assessment by leveraging recent advances in hardware virtualization. Native target code is executed in an instrumented simulation environment where traces are collected. These traces are then analyzed off-line to determine whether a given coverage ob jective is achieved by the executed tests.
This presentation introduces the context of Couverture. We describe the various open source technologies used in the project, as well as the new tools specifically developed in the context of the project. We show how these tools can be applied to both safety-critical software in DO-178B context and non-safety-critical open source applications.
GNAT for LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT is a GPL port for the GNAT compilation system to the LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT robotic platform. Originally born as an education-oriented project at MIT Media Lab, the LEGO MINDSTORMS has evolved into a successful commercial product for education in robotics in a multitude of universities and high schools across the globe. The latest revision of the platform includes a 32 bits processor and supports several different sensors able to detect distance, colors and sounds and to communicate via the Bluetooth protocol.
GNAT GPL Edition for the LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT platform brings the possibility of experimenting with embedded systems development using the Ada 2005 and SPARK languages to an education-oriented robotic platform. Entire embedded systems, including software, hardware and sensors intercefacing, and wireless communications can be developed and verified using the GPL editions of GNAT and SPARK.
http://libre.adacore.com/libre/tools/mindstorms/
http://mindstorms.lego.com/
MAST is a Free(GPL) set of real-time analysis tools developped in Ada by the Real Time Computing lab of University of Cantabria. The user submits a decomposition of his application in: (a) task, activities network messages, (b) scheduling parameters and constraints, and (c) event stimulus pattern. MAST calculates response times (worst-case and average), jitters and slacks (time percentage that the activities can be increased while still achieving schedulability).
A quick tour of systems programming and low-level network programming using Florist and GNAT.Sockets. Florist is an open-source implementation of IEEE Standard 1003.5b-1996, the POSIX Ada binding.
Some of the topics I will cover are files, pipes and I/O, memory maps and shared memory, memory locking, user and group database, TCP and UDP sockets, and running external programs. The tour will include examples, simple implementations of Unix commands, and a working HTTP server.
Jean-Pierre Rosen graduated from ENST (French engineering school) in
1975, and obtained PhD in 1986. He started as a software engineer at
the computing center of ENST, then as Professor, where he was
responsible for the teaching of Software Engineering and Ada. He has
formed Adalog, a company specialized in high level training,
consultancy and software development in the fields of Ada and
associated technologies (software engineering, object oriented
methodologies).
Jean-Pierre Rosen is Chairman of the AFNOR (French standardization
body) group for Ada and a member of the ARG (Ada Rapporteur Group), the
group of experts in charge of maintenance and evolution of the Ada
language. He was a member of the expert team who controlled the
development of the validation suite for Ada 95.
He is the author of "Methodes de Genie Logiciel avec Ada 95" (Software
Engineering Methods with Ada 95) and "HOOD: an industrial approach for
software development".
Thomas Quinot holds an engineering degree from Telecom Paris and a PhD from Universite Paris VI. The main contribution of his research work is the definition of a flexible middleware architecture aiming at interoperability across distribution models. He is now a Senior Software Engineer with AdaCore, a leading provider of tools and solutions for embedded, real-time and criticial systems, where he is responsible for the distribution technologies.
Miguel Telleria de Esteban is a Free Software engineer, Ph.D student and computer science researcher from the north of Spain. He started using Debian GNU/Linux in 2002 and keeps collaborating ever since with Linux User Groups BxLUG (Brussels) and Linuca (Cantabria region, Spain). He discovered Ada in 1998 through the lectures of Prof. Michael Gonzalez Harbour in Cantabria. After a 5 year period of IT consulting work in Brussels (where he discovered Free Software), he returned to his home University of Cantabria to start a research career on Real-Time systems in the European FP6 FRESCOR project.
Maria Cue Sampedro is a physicist and computer science researcher of the University of Cantabria. She has a degree in Physics since 2007 and she finished a Master in Computing Science in June 2009. She is now working at the Electronics and Real-Time Computing Lab at the Unican.
Jacob Sparre Andersen holds a Ph.D. in experimental physics from the Niels Bohr Institute. After his Ph.D. he worked in bioinformatics, taught physics, statistics and software engineering, and worked in an investment bank. His current activities include teaching physics of complex systems, modelling bankruptcy avalanches, innovating for the computer gaming industry, developing an automated data mining system for travel blogs -- and using Ada on Unix systems.
From: dirk@asgard.cs.kuleuven.be (Dirk Craeynest)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada,fr.comp.lang.ada
Subject: Ada at FOSDEM 2010 - Call for Interest
Date: Mon, 2 Nov 2009 05:09:25 +0100 (CET)
Organization: Ada-Belgium, c/o Dept. of Computer Science, K.U.Leuven
Summary: Please act ASAP and definitely before 2009-11-09
Keywords: Ada,open source,free software,technical presentations,FOSDEM
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Call for Interest
A d a at F O S D E M 2 0 1 0
6-7 February 2010, Brussels, Belgium
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FOSDEM [1], the Free and Open source Software Developers' European
Meeting, is a free and non-commercial two-day event organized each
February in Brussels, Belgium.
The goal is to provide Free Software and Open Source developers and
communities a place to meet with other developers and projects, to be
informed about the latest developments in the Free Software and Open
Source world, to attend interesting talks and presentations by Free
Software and Open Source project leaders and committers on various
topics, and to promote the development and the benefits of Free
Software and Open Source solutions.
At previous FOSDEM events, Ada-Belgium [2] has organized some very well
attended Ada Developer Rooms, offering a full day program in 2006 [3]
and a two-day program earlier this year [4].
Each year the number of applications for DevRooms outnumbers the
available space, presenting the organizers with a difficult selection
[5]. For 2010, the conditions specify "a preference for requests with
a general topic, e.g. from projects with similar goals/domains" and
"be involved in Free or Open Source Software (the projects produce and
release software under an open source license or otherwise contribute
to open source activities and communities)". Many Ada-related topics
and projects fit those conditions very well, so we are considering to
submit a proposal for FOSDEM 2010, and thus need to show that this
would attract sufficient interest.
To increase our chances to be allocated a DevRoom, we'd like to have
a proposal with the full schedule of all presentations ready by the
deadline for DevRoom requests.
Therefore, Ada-Belgium calls on you to:
- Inform us at ada-belgium-board@cs.kuleuven.be about specific
presentations you would like to hear in an Ada DevRoom.
- For bonus points, subscribe to the Ada-FOSDEM mailing list [6] to
discuss and help organize the details.
- For more bonus points, be a speaker: the Ada-FOSDEM mailing list is
the place to be!
We look forward to lots of feedback! Please act ASAP and definitely
before November 9.
The FOSDEM Team of Ada-Belgium
PS: This Call for Interest is also available online [7], including
versions in PDF format [8] suitable for printing (72 KB) and in plain
text format [9] for further distribution (4 KB).
[1] http://www.fosdem.org
[2] http://www.cs.kuleuven.be/~dirk/ada-belgium
[3] http://www.cs.kuleuven.be/~dirk/ada-belgium/events/06/060226-fosdem.html
[4] http://www.cs.kuleuven.be/~dirk/ada-belgium/events/09/090207-fosdem.html
[5] http://www.fosdem.org/2010/call-developer-rooms
[6] http://listserv.cc.kuleuven.be/archives/adafosdem.html
[7] http://www.cs.kuleuven.be/~dirk/ada-belgium/events/10/100206-fosdem.html
[8] http://www.cs.kuleuven.be/~dirk/ada-belgium/events/10/100206-fosdem-cfi.pdf
[9] http://www.cs.kuleuven.be/~dirk/ada-belgium/events/10/100206-fosdem-cfi.txt
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Last update: 2009/12/03.
Dirk Craeynest