September 7th – Chad Jenkins and his students are demonstrating a variety of robotic and data visualization experiments at the CIT.

On offer:
DLR Hand
smURV
AIBO Soccer
Teaching Robots
ChemPad
MathPad
Diagramming Tool
and Pizza!

Robotics & Graphics Open House
Interactive Demos – Free Pizza
Friday, September 7, 2007 at 12:00 Noon
CIT 4th Floor

The Brown Forum for Enterprise will be hosting Case Presentations in Information Technology this Thursday the 19th in Kingston at URI’s University Club. Sounds very interesting. From the announcement:

This event will feature cutting-edge internet security and web-based advertising technologies. The CEOs of Activity Central Inc. and IAM Technology Inc. will give an overview of their business plans followed by an interactive discussion between a panel and the CEOs. The panel will evaluate their presentations and give feedback pertaining to their identified market, competitive position, funding strategy, intellectual property strategy, etc.

At the Providence Geeks Dinner earlier tonight, a large, enthusiastic crowd witnessed the unveiling of Flapjax—”a new programming language designed around the demands of modern, client-based Web applications.” Shriram Krishnamurthi led us through a fascinating demo-driven presentation. Suffice it to say, there were a lot of impressed geeks in the audience.

Flapjax is built entirely atop (and is syntactically identical to) JavaScript, and can thus run on traditional Web browsers without the the need for plug-ins or other downloads. The language has five essential features:

1. 
   
2. It is an event-driven, reactive language, ideal for writing browser-based client applications.
   
3. It provides a reactive, persistent store that automatically updates on all clients sharing the same data.
   
4. It enables convenient sharing of data with other users.
   
5. It implements access-control to channel this sharing.
   
6. It provides libraries to connect to external Web services (thereby enabling client-side mash-ups).
   

Update: As he notes in the comments below, Jim Willis has posted photos of last night’s event here.

Here’s some general advice on submitting proposals to tech conferences (this isn’t specific to O’Reilly conferences, it’s just some things I’ve picked up after speaking at a few conferences myself):

• 
  
• Check out the previous year’s conference to get some ideas of the talks that got accepted. But you also need to look through the CFP and understand what they conference organizers are looking for because it might be different than last year (for example, this year’s ETech is looking for magic that “makes complex things simple or makes the impossible possible”).
• 
  
• In general, avoid product pitches because in most cases you’ll be talking to geeks like yourself. Even the people who are there to learn about new companies will be basing their judgments on your tech chops.
• 
  
• And if you do get a paper accepted, you can usually expect to get free admission to the conference. Airfare and lodging is up to you. The only exception is with conferences that have tutorial tracks. If you’re doing a half-day tutorial, you might get a small honorarium and/or some travel allowance. But this varies among conferences and conference organizers.
• 
  

If you’re running OS X, check out Library Books. It logs into your library account(s) and gives you a status menu in your menubar. The date sort is waaaaay better than PPL’s web interface. It should work with the Athenaeum (and RISD?) too. It’s free, but the author does have a paypal tip jar.