Rick Jelliffe says "well done"

This is very cool! Rick Jelliffe has been reading my Master's thesis and commented on it on his blog: "I recommend any student wanting to get a grip surveying the capabilities of schemas and the classes of grammars involved should start with this thesis: well done Janus (and Anders!)". This is very nice indeed, I didn't think anybody would ever read my thesis besides me, my superviser, and the examiner!

I my thesis I compared six schema languages, DTD, XSD, Relax NG, DSD, Summary Graphs, and Schematron. My conclusion is that the relation between the schema languages is very complex and not very nicely explained or comprehended - many subtle differences exists. This complexity is not well depicted by Venn diagrams and is bettet explained by the kind of diagrams mentioned by Rick, where various shades of grey is used to indicate how much of the language is convient to use. Most schema languages covers areas of application where the schema is not intuitive to use and some careful thinking has to be done inorder for it to work, thus the darker a region is the more inconvient the language is. These kind of diagrams show the proportion of the application areas where a given language is convient compared to the areas where it is less convient.

I see Schematron as a very good suppliment to Relax NG, because most XML languages are very nicely described in Relax NG, and in the few cases where the constraints are impossible to express in Relax NG, Schematron steps in and saves the day. But I would rather not write intire schemas in Schematron it is too unstructed and if the schemas span more than a page it becomes impossible to figure out where if anywhere a given constraint is inforced!
This also leads to the conclusion that Schematron is disproportionally large compared to the other schema languages in the diagram on Rick's blog. And expecially the white part showing the areas where Schematron can be used conviently is just too big. Schematron is good but not that great.

The 2-Party DGK SMC Protocol

Today I presented my final project in the cryptography course about the 2-Party DGK SMC Protocol, a protocol for secure multiparty computation on integers. I have implemented a limited version of the protcol in the Secure Multiparty Computation Runtime(SMCR) and expect that I(or somebody else) will implement the whole version when the SMCR has stabalized.
I have prepared some slides for the presentation todo, which went well. The slides should give a good overview of the present SMCR architecture and are available here along with the project report.

Restaurants

Interessting restaurants in Aarhus:

I will try to write a little about reach restaurant when I have visited them. The texts will most likely be in danish, sorry.

La Forchetta
http://www.laforchetta.dk/
Mefisto
http://www.mefisto.dk
M IB
http://www.restaurantmib.dk/
Kocherier
http://www.kocherier.dk/

JDotGraph v. 0.2

JDotGraph has been updated to version 0.2, including a new set of interfaces which divides a graph into immutable and mutable graphs, along with corresponding abstract classes which makes it less complicated to implement the interface e.g. the AdjacencyList class only implements addEdge, addVertex, getVertices, getEdges, clone and the internal representation of vertices and edges.

Download: A jar is available at http://www.fagidiot.dk/downloads/JDotGraph-0.2.jar. It is released under the BSD license.

JDotGraph

JDotGraph is a Java API for generating DotGraphs and Graphs in general, especially useful for visualizing control flow graphs :) More info to follow at a later time... e.g. when I get more time... For now the JavaDoc is available at http://www.daimi.au.dk/~fagidiot/JDotGraph/doc/ and a jar contaning the API is available at http://www.daimi.au.dk/~fagidiot/JDotGraph/JDotGraph.jar. It is beta and released under BSD license. See my later post on version 0.2 of JDotGraph.

Nice blogs on the Java Programming Language

Being interested in programming languages and compilers in general and a TA on the dOvs course, where the students are to build a compiler for a subset of Java i occasionally read Peter Ahé’s Weblog which gives a very good insight in the current and future development of the Java language and the Java compiler in particular. But there are a number of other good blogs from the people around Java like James Gosling, Jonathan Gibbons, Neal Gafter and others Gilad Bracha.

Weblog usability

I just updated my about section after reading Peter Ahé's Weblog and then Jakob Nielsens guide on Weblog Usability: The Top Ten Design Mistakes you should go and read it too, if you do any blogging your self.