Interviews

We chat with Luca Cardelli, a member of the Modula-3 design committee. Cardelli is a Principal Researcher and Head of the Programming Principles and Tools and Security groups at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, and is an ACM Fellow. Here he chats to Computerworld about the origins of Modula-3, including how the most exciting Modula-3 design meeting ever, was abruptly interrupted by the San Francisco 7.1 earthquake.

John McCool took over for Jayshree Ullal when the longtime and very visible Cisco data center chief resigned in May. McCool is no stranger though -- he came to Cisco in the Granite Networks acquisition during the industry's Gigabit Ethernet boom in the 1990s. Weeks into his new job as senior vice president of data center, switching and security, McCool shared some of Cisco's plans and visions with Managing Editor Jim Duffy.

Who: Mike Rowehl Title: Scalability architect

Wendell Odom, Cisco press author, instructor and blogger was recently a repeat guest for Network World chat. Attendees asked him the best ways to build a home lab, which certifications still have power in the market, and strategies for most easily passing the hardest exams.

This interview is dedicated to the investigation of YACC, and to chatting with AT&T alumni Stephen C. Johnson. Johnson is currently employed at The MathWorks, where he works daily with MATLAB. Computerworld snatched the opportunity recently to get his thoughts on working with Al Aho and Dennis Ritchie, as well as the development of Bison.

Network-access-control start-up ConSentry Networks has filled its long-vacant CEO position with Joe Golden, a partner in Accel Partners, a ConSentry investor. Golden was a partner in Accel Partners' London venture-capital office from 2001 until ConSentry hired him; before that he was Cisco's managing director of business development and strategic alliances for Europe, Middle East and Africa. With NAC in flux and with some start-ups having failed, Golden spoke with Network World Senior Editor Tim Greene about ConSentry, its strategy and the future of NAC.

While most major disk-drive manufacturers have developed or are already selling solid-state disk drives or hybrid drives, which use a combination of flash memory and spinning disk, Fujitsu has chosen not to develop a product for market. Joel Hagberg, Fujitsu's vice president of business development, said his company does not plan to launch any solid-state disk-drive products over the next two years because the value proposition of the technology is not compelling enough and won't be until technology breakthroughs change solid-state disk's performance and reliability.

For more than a decade, Aviel "Avi" Rubin, a professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and an e-voting activist, has been a vocal critic of e-voting systems across the nation. In 2006, Rubin wrote the book, Brave New Ballot: The Battle to Safeguard Democracy in the Age of Electronic Voting, which heavily criticized e-voting machines for security and reliability shortcomings. https://secure.idg.com.au/admin/index.php?jid=1&l=1Rubin talked with Computerworld about the recent presidential primary election cycle and his thoughts on e-voting going into the November elections. The following is an edited version of that interview.

Computerworld is undertaking a series of investigations into the most widely-used programming languages. Previously we have spoken to Alfred v. Aho of AWK fame, S. Tucker Taft on the Ada 1995 and 2005 revisions, Microsoft about its server-side script engine ASP, Chet Ramey about his experience maintaining Bash, Bjarne Stroustrup of C++ fame, and to Charles H. Moore about the design and development of Forth. In this interview, Computerworld ventures down a less series path and chats to Don Woods about the development and uses of INTERCAL

While perhaps best known as a major social networking site in the Web 2.0 vein, Facebook is becoming a popular place to interface with potential customers, similar to what companies such as Scribe and iLike have done. Facebook also is being viewed as a place for enterprise collaboration, with Serena Software leveraging the site for this purpose. To get perspective on Facebook, InfoWorld Editor at Large Paul Krill recently spoke with Aditya Agarwal, Facebook director of engineering. Agarwal formerly worked in the Oracle server technologies division.

Meet the man who could be your company's de facto customer service representative - a man you have never met and certainly isn't on your payroll. Thor Muller is founder and CEO of Satisfaction Unlimited, which runs an online community where customers air complaints about companies like Comcast, Apple, United Airlines, Whole Foods, Washington Mutual, Snapfish and Expedia to fellow customers and to the Internet at large.

Computerworld is undertaking a series of investigations into the most widely-used programming languages. Previously we have spoken to Alfred v. Aho of AWK fame, S. Tucker Taft on the Ada 1995 and 2005 revisions, Microsoft about its server-side script engine ASP, and Chet Ramey about his experience maintaining Bash.

It's been three months since Padmasree Warrior left Motorola to become Cisco's CTO. Since then, she's not been available for interviews -- until now. Jim Duffy caught up with her at the Cisco Live! customer conference in the US.

Computerworld is undertaking a series of investigations into the most widely-used programming languages. Previously we have spoken to Alfred v. Aho of AWK fame, S. Tucker Taft on the Ada 1995 and 2005 revisions, Microsoft about its server-side script engine ASP, and Chet Ramey about his experience maintaining Bash. We have also spoken to Charles H. Moore about Forth. In this interview, we chat to Bjarne Stroustrup of C++ fame about the design and development of C++, garbage collection and the role of facial hair in successful programming languages.

Open Source Law founder, Brendan Scott, discusses the legal implications of FOSS in Australian government and enterprise organisations.