It rained last night, but it's clear and cool tonight, a fine Halloween. We've had the largest turnout of trick-or-treat artists since we moved to Lyons.

We drove down to Alamogordo, NM Friday to visit a friend and attend the X Prize Cup on Saturday and Sunday at Holloman AFB, and returned today. It was a fun weekend, though I was disappointed that Armadillo Aerospace didn't win the Lunar Lander Challenge. They were very close. Next year there should be more than one team competing and with two million dollars still on the table, it should be interesting.

I was more disappointed that the Space Elevator Challenge was not part of the X Prize Cup this year. I guess the Spaceward foundation wanted to go their own way, but I think there was a lot of synergy in having the events co-located last year.

On the positive side, the airshow held in conjunction with the X Prize Cup was outstanding. The F-22 Raptor was especially impressive.

I attended the APL2000 vendor presentation, a SaC (Single Assignment C) tutorial, a talk on 'Unicode and APL' Mike Jenkins talk on 'Programming in Arrays -- Lessons from Nial' (I need to look into array theory), and an APEX tutorial on compiling APL to SaC for improved performance. Afterward I had a nice Korean dinner with Bob Armstrong.

The conference WiFi was good on Sunday, but got progressively worse with each day. The seem to need more nodes to satisfy the demand.

Guy Steel gave an excellent keynote on 'What APL Can Teach the World (and vice versa)'. Using arrays for efficiently programming in the large is very useful. Concise notation is good, but too much terseness, or unfamiliar symbols, may scare off users.

I hunted down a copy shop to print fliers for the the 'Thinking in Arrays' panel discussion I was moderating. I discovered that the strap on my briefcase isn't suitable for hauling the full briefcase all over downtown Montreal.

The 'Thinking in Arrays' panel seemed to go over well. Bob Bernecky told us about his APEX compiler which can be used to accelerate a subset of APL. Sven-Bodo Scholz introduced to SAC (Single Assignment C). Bob Armstrong talked about 4th.cosy note computing system which includes an APL implemented in Forth. Mike Jenkins introduced us to his melding of Array Theory, Lisp, and APL called Niall. Loren Shure gave an entertaining lightning talk on Matlab. Jon McGrew introduced the group to A+, accompanied by a nice handout. I told them about NumPy. Morten Kromberg described Dyalog APL. John Randall described J. It was fun and I think we all learned something.

APL2007 is co-located with OOPSLA2007 at the Palais des Congres. Today was a tutorial day. Dan Baronet taught 'Arrays and Objects', an introduction to Object Oriented Programming using Dyalog APL. Ray Polivka taught 'APL for Today', an introduction to array programming concepts using classic APL. I sat in on Ray's tutorial when I wasn't attending to conference work. Ray is a knowledgeable and engaging instructor.

The Iverson Award was presented to the IBM APL2 development group at the banquet following the tutorials. It was good to meet many people whom I'd known only through their publications or via email. There was an outstanding buffet of traditional Quebec dishes. A good time was had by all.

I got up at zero dark thirty to catch my fight to Montreal, arriving late afternoon. I failed to make connections with the other conference volunteers until late, so I wan't any help to them. I booked too late and wasn't able to get in the conference hotel, which complicats logisticds, but does give me some extra exercise.

In a recent post, Becker writes about intellectuals and capitalism. Most academics and other intellectuals are anti-capitalist, though open advocacy of socialism is tempered by the 20th century disasters of nazism and communism. They see the world as a zero sum game, not recognizing that when two parties freely exchange things, both are better off. He speculates that perhaps this is partly due to jealousy because business people are generally better rewarded by markets than intellectuals.

Sputnik 1 was launched 50 years ago today. A dozen years later we landed people on Luna. Since then space exploration has been hit and miss. Rand Simberg has a nice retrospective on Sputnik and the first space race. Where do we go from here?