An eclectic-pencil blog

Curl International to merge with Sumisho

Administrator — Sun, 02 May 2010 12:40:44 +0000

A news item in Japanese at http://curlap.com/ reports that at their April 28, 2010 annual meeting, Sumisho Computer Systems Corporation (SCS) announced that Curl International, their wholly owned subsidiary, would merge into SCS.

Curl Corporation and Curl International were formed in 2004 following the Sumisho acquisition of the MIT spin-off Curl.

While tech journalists have been noting the issues between Apple and Adobe over the use of Flash, there tends to be little mention in the press of Curl as an alternative to Flash + HTML + Javascript + CSS.

Curl was developed at MIT as a web content language and is now used almost exclusively by Japanese corporate clients of Sumisho. An exception is the widespread use of Curl by corporate clients of Paisley, now owned by Reuters.

In 2009, Curl Corporation in Cambridge MA had relocated from the square at MIT to few blocks away and then had down-sized further late in the year. Curl Corporation should be unaffected by this merger.

Curl 7.0 was the last release of the Curl environment; several open-source Curl projects are hosted at sourceforge.net

As an alternative to HTML + Javascript + CSS, the notable requirement for Curl, like Flash, Air or Silverlight, is the Curl runtime environment – either for desktop or as a web browser plugin. Curl had not developed a server-side solution and had failed to protect their trademark (Curl is often confused with haxx.se cURL.)

In the USA the corporate office of SCS in New York.

Bing and MSCONFIG

Administrator — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 19:10:08 +0000

Oddly enough the “related searches” suggested for a search on “msconfig” at www.bing.com do not include a suggested search on Windows 7. Vista, yes. XP, yes.

ICON 9.5 released

Administrator — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 19:47:35 +0000

This was posted to the ICON news group:

Version 9.5 of Icon is now available for downloading from the Icon
website,
www.cs.arizona.edu/icon/v950

This release incorporates accumulated bug fixes, code cleanup, and a
new feature allowing loaded C code to return opaque external data structures.

For more information, see the release notes at
www.cs.arizona.edu/icon/v950/relnotes.htm

Gregg Townsend
Computer Science (retired)
The University of Arizona

Congratulations to Gregg, Carl Sturtivant and others involved.

Other ICON developments continue at ObjectIcon over at code.google

For other text processing languages, see our posts on REBOL, Converge and Curl (not, cURL, but Curl)

iPad and eBook app’s

Administrator — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 20:59:03 +0000

I posted a note over at aule-browser in response to David Frum on the iPad.

ICON 9.5 beta underway

Administrator — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 21:58:47 +0000

I did a build of the latest ICON programming language beta – there were a few little hitches building for X graphics under Windows.

First the browser brought in the file as a .tar (it is a .tar.gz) so I just renamed it when saving it. WinZip opened it fine.

Then built the configuration for X by starting Cygwin and going to the ICON beta directory and running

make CONFIGURE name=xcygwin

which ran fine, and then

make name=xcygwin

which took a few minutes but ran fine as well.

Then xwin & to launch an X manager and a right-click on that icon to select an Xterm.

There the next hitch: after changing to the ICON bin directory, no ./vib.exe or other would run until I did an

export ICONX=./iconx.exe

then all was well.

The most important changes are for interfacing with C.

For more information visit the ICON project at http://.cs.arizona.edu/icon

French poem example in Curl

Administrator — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 23:09:43 +0000

Paul Valéry example in bare Curl {pre } block

http://poems.aule-browser.com/fr/cime_marin_001.htm

Poetry annotations browser

Administrator — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 16:15:09 +0000

For the coming International Day of Poetry, I have a “guess that poet” up at the aule-browser blog.

Literary Browser for Digital Content

Administrator — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 19:27:11 +0000

A literary browser is not an e-reader. It is a tool for annotating, linking alternative translations, comparing citations and a host of other research tasks.
Today my library obtained a copy of a volume from the new collected works of poet X.
X wrote in more than one language, but published little. The tome that I have on loan is massive. His estate has permitted the editors to print everything that is not prose which he left behind. Their object is to aid the scholar. In their zeal, the great tome contains translations. Here we enter the absurd.
Set my tome aside – do not consider the green footprint of the volume or the repeated transfer by vehicle each time borrowed, by freight each time sold.
Let’s consider the Canetti Nachlass due to be available to scholars in 2024. I can only hope that in the 14 years remaining, that Johanna Canetti will have authorized the preparation of a virtual archive. A recent example may be the Arendt archive.

Icon key generator

Administrator — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 23:02:59 +0000

Over at my other blog I have a post on Icon, the language.

One thing that Python did not pick up from Icon is key()

The method to obtain keys from a dictionary object in Python is keys().

The procedure in classic Icon is key(a_dict). Why key() and not keys()?

Because key() is a generator.

key() provides one key at a time.

Curl RTE and processing.org

Administrator — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 16:55:51 +0000

I was visiting a Curl 2-D demo page when I noticed a minor over-sight and a minor worry: the page appears not to mention that to run the demos you should click on either of the two images: one of “smoke rings” and one which creates a pattern of pseudoantherium. The minor worry was about which browsers to use for the demo, so I took a moment and tried a few from my XP desktop. No problems with my handful of current up-to-date browsers.

The intent of the demo’s was to show the ease with which the same results could be obtained in Curl as in another language from MIT: Processing.

Given the hype around Flash Catalyst these demo’s seemed worth a visit.