Yesterday, April 1st, was the traditional day for practical jokes, AKA "April Fool" day. The slideshare site has decided to do a practical joke on the people who post slides, sent Email entitled : "you are a slideshare rock star" saying: We've noticed that your slideshow on SlideShare has been getting a LOT of views in the last 24 hours. Great job ... you must be doing something right. ;-). Since I have just posted a presentation there, I went to see what they are talking about and found out that hundred of thousands of people have visited my slides in the last day, since I don't really think that event processing presentations are that popular, at first I thought they have their counts mixed, but it took me 20 seconds to remember the date, and realized is is a practical joke. However, some of the other people have taken it seriously and started to notify the whole world about their tremendous accomplishments. At some point during the day, the site clarified that this is indeed a practical joke, and got some angry responses like -- after notifying all world about it, I am left humiliated. Some humor will not harm anybody, also, people should also have some judgement on what is reasonable before notifying the entire world, well - today is April 2nd and the counts returned to normal. It turned out that there are 83 views of the presentation I have posted in Tuesday, not really a rock star scale, but not bad for the community size for a single day. BTW -- this Blog broke the record high of views twice last week, once in Tuesday, and then again in Thursday.
Yesterday, we also had a meeting (not a joke) of the EPTS language analysis workgroup. We are advancing by setting the criteria for analysis over the dimensions -- events, meta-data, state, computational/execution model and programming model. All EPTS members have access to the memberw Wiki, and can make comments. If you want to be part of this process, and not an EPTS member yet, you are invited to join, the public website of EPTS has instructions about joining -- one can join as an individual member, and there are no membership fees. While the criteria list is being constructed, we also construct the list of languages that will participate in the evaluation, the goal of the evaluation is not to do a "beauty contest" of languages, but to understand the different functions that exist today in languages in order to abstract out a semantic model of event processing functionality. Again, EPTS members can update the language list on the members Wiki. The languages are either languages that exist in the products, or languages that have been used in the research community, which also may contain interesting features that do not exist in product languages. More about this workgroup - later.
