Lambda the Ultimate

Maxine VM is an open source meta-circular JVM from Sun.

Maxine is a VM designed for and written in the Java(TM) Programming Language with an emphasis on leveraging meta-circularity, componentized design, and code reuse to achieve flexibility, configurability, and productivity for academic and industrial virtual machine researchers.

The Maxine Inspector [5min, YouTube] seems pretty neat! Bringing VM research to the masses :)
A longer presentation by Bernd Mathiske at the JVM Language Summit 2008 provides a good introduction.

Laurence Tratt: How can C Programs be so Reliable?

Henry Spencer said, "Those who don't understand UNIX are doomed to reinvent it, poorly." And that's probably why so many of the programs written in C are more reliable than our prejudices might suggest - the UNIX culture, the oldest and wisest in mainstream computing, has found ways of turning some of C's limitations and flaws into advantages.

A nice post about one man's experience with C.

In seL4: Formal Verification of an Operating-System Kernel, Communications of the ACM, June, 2010 Klein et al

...report on the formal, machine-checked verification of the seL4 microkernel from an abstract specification down to its C implementation. We assume correctness of compiler, assembly code, hardware, and boot code.

seL4 is a third-generation microkernel of L4 provenance, comprising 8,700 lines of C and 600 lines of assembler. Its performance is comparable to other high-performance L4 kernels.

We prove that the implementation always strictly follows our high-level abstract specification of kernel behaviour. This encompasses traditional design and implementation safety properties such as that the kernel will never crash, and it will never perform an unsafe operation. It also implies much more: we can predict precisely how the kernel will behave in every possible situation.

Overall the paper is more of an experience report than an in depth exploration of the kernel and its proofs but there is a some meat to be found. More information can be found at the sel4 website.

If the general idea wasn't enough to make you mad, or if you wrote it off as being purely an Apple/Adobe spat, this ought to cut a bit closer to LtU's heart...

Apple removes Scratch from iPad/iPhone/iTouch.

My wife has taught a couple of classes using Scratch with young kids, and to see the pride they feel at their creations is a marvelous thing. I think restricting their ability to share that feeling is really reprehensible. And the damage done to the programmers of tomorrow? Hard to say...

(Apologies for this being on the front page twice now, but I think this really deserves a post of its own...)

the ANSWER project:

ANSWER will produce a notation system for describing the creation of multimedia content, thus offering a bridge between digital media production and animation for game design.

with a demo in flash; watching it makes me think it would be nice if the visual language had a textual representation and one could switch back and forth between them.