Allegro CL General / Technical Announcements: 2016

Tuesday, November 22, 2016

Franz's (+ Lisp Graph) Newsletter - December 2016

In this issue

Allegro CL 10.1 - Call for Beta Testers

ACL 10.1 New Features

64-bit Linux ARM (aka ARM64 or ARMv8): both SMP and non-SMP
New external format: GB18030
For macOS and Windows: executable signing
Character tables updated to Unicode 9.0.0
OpenSSL is dynamically loaded rather than statically linked (this was available as a patch, so you can remove this if you want)
defstruct slot-option validation

xmlrpc now uses the SAX parser rather than the older, deprecated XML parser
The IDE's trace dialog reports the elapsed time for each traced call
Iimplements "grab_fast_mutex" for all architectures, leading to performance improvements for multiprocessing on some architectures
GC improvements
- find-gcpath: A new tool to help locate the reason specific objects are being kept alive across garbage collections (see documentation)
- collected-newstuff: A tool to help analyze the heap allocations made while executing a block of code. (see documentation)
- Handle exceptions during gc: Exceptions during gc are now reported, with a mechanism for using a low-level (non-lisp) debugger to analyze the problem
- Misc performance enhancements for the global gc
With more than 200 fixes and 150 enhancements (see the release notes for the highlights), this release focuses on stability and some important new features.

Users interested in becoming beta testers should contact info@franz.com for more information.

Tech Corner Article: The New Interface to OpenSSL

The interface between Allegro CL and OpenSSL was significantly changed in updates released in July, 2016. Before the update, an OpenSSL library was included with the Allegro CL distribution and newer OpenSSL libraries had to be included in an Allegro CL update before they could be used. Now, OpenSSL libraries are loaded dynamically on startup so Allegro CL and its applications can benefit from new releases as soon as they become available.

See The new interface to OpenSSL for more information about this change.

The 10th European Lisp Symposium, April 3-4, Brussels, Belgium

The purpose of the European Lisp Symposium is to provide a forum for the discussion and dissemination of all aspects of design, implementationand application of any of the Lisp and Lisp-inspired dialects, including Common Lisp, Scheme, Emacs Lisp, AutoLisp, ISLISP, Dylan, Clojure, ACL2, ECMAScript, Racket, SKILL, Hop and so on. We encourage everyone interested in Lisp to participate.

This year's ELS will be co-located with the Programming 2017 Conference!

For additional information about the conference, see here.

The Express Version's Expiration Date has been Updated

The original 10.0 Express expired on 2016-12-16. Downloads after August 15, 2016 include a license that expires on 2017-12-16. If you downloaded prior to August 15, 2016 and do not wish to download the new version, you can download just the new devel.lic and replace your current one with this new version. Look in your devel.lic for the Expiration date to find out if you need to update it. If you are not running version 10.0, then please download the latest Express version.

See here for additional information and to download the software.

KM World article - How does precision medicine become a reality?

One of the prominent problems plaguing the current healthcare system is the narrow scope of patient data used to facilitate most aspects of care, from initial diagnoses to treatment. According to Dr. Parsa Mirhaji, director of clinical research informatics at Montefiore Health System and Albert Einstein College of Medicine, the vast majority of research findings are based on averages of middle-aged white males: "We don't really know much about women, other ethnicities, children, you name it - there's no evidence," he says.

The White House launched The Precision Medicine Initiative in 2015 as a means of redressing the situation and expanding the breadth of patient data to personalize treatment for individuals and historically underrepresented groups. Achieving that objective requires not only amassing patient-specific data for wider demographics, but also storing, accessing and analyzing them with a number of avant-garde data management technologies...

See here to read the full article.

ODBMS Industry Watch article - On data analytics for finance. Interview with RavenPack's Jason S.Cornez

Roberto V. Zicari interviews RavenPack's Chief Technology Officer - "Understanding human language remains a difficult problem. The challenges here are not only technical, but there is also a perception from popular culture that computers today perform at the level we see in science fiction. So there is a gap between what is expected and what is possible." - Jason S.Cornez.

Visit here to read the full article...

Building a Fun Ethereum Game, by Conrad Barski

Conrad Barski is building a Fun Ethereum Game. (Author's note: The goal of this series of posts will be to build a minimally viable multiplayer game on the ethereum blockchain, with support for scarce resources and appropriate protections against economic attacks.) Edwalt had finally found the nightshade, obsidian vapors, and mantis mushrooms he needed to open the magic portal into the next realm...

Visit his website to get in the game...

Recent Articles about Franz - AllegroGraph

	HealthIT Analytics article - Semantic Computing, Predictive Analytics Need Reliable Metadata
	insideBIGDATA article - The Magic of Visual Querying
	Knowledge Management World article - Text analytics and beyond
	ModernMedicine Network article - Making sense of big data: Data projects spur progress
	DB Engines article - Enriching Property Graphs with Relationship Objects
	AnalyticsWeek article - Enterprise Data Modeling Made Easy

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Training Schedule

BECOME ALLEGRO CERTIFIED - To obtain your Allegro CL Certification enroll in our LIVE Program which offers developers an opportunity to learn and improve their Lisp programming skills from the comfort of their home or office while interacting with the Franz instructor.

Lisp Programming Series Level I: Basic Lisp Essentials - Feburary 8, 15, and 22

Lisp Programming Series Level II: Specialized Components of Lisp - March 8, 15, and 22

For additional information and to register, see here.

Wednesday, November 16, 2016

Allegro CL v10.1 Beta - Now Available

New Allegro CL 10.1 features

64-bit Linux ARM (aka ARM64 or ARMv8): both SMP and non-SMP
For macOS and Windows: executable signing
Character tables updated to Unicode 9.0.0
OpenSSL is dynamically loaded rather than statically linked
defstruct slot-option validation
xmlrpc now uses the SAX parser rather than the older, deprecated XML parser
The IDE's trace dialog reports the elapsed time for each traced call
Implements "grab_fast_mutex" for all architectures, leading to performance improvements for multiprocessing on some architectures
GC improvements
- find-gcpath: A new tool to help locate the reason specific objects are being kept alive across garbage collections
- collected-newstuff: a tool to help analyze the heap allocations made while executing a block of code
- Handle exceptions during GC: Exceptions during GC are now reported, with a mechanism for using a low-level (non-lisp) debugger to analyze the problem
- Miscellaneous performance enhancements for the global GC
New external format: GB18030
Source-level stepper improvements (these are not yet documented but will be during the beta period):
- Top-level stepper is less verbose and stays with source forms, instead of macroexpanding
- IDE stepper is better integrated with the base Lisp, and shows steps more intuitively
With more than 200 fixes and 150 enhancements (see the release notes for the highlights), this release focuses on stability and some important new features.

Download - http://franz.com/beta10.1_ae3527fb/index.lhtml

Monday, May 2, 2016

Franz's (+ Lisp Graph) Tech Corner - May 2016

In this issue

The 9th European Lisp Symposium, May 9-10, Krakow, Poland

The conference will be held at the Department of Computer Science, AGH University of Science and Technology, in Krakow, Poland.

For additional information about the conference, see here.

Tech Corner Article: New JSON-RPC interface

JSON-RPC is a "lightweight remote procedure call protocol similar to XML-RPC" (to quote from the website json-rpc.org/). #AllegroCL now has an API within Lisp to JSON-RPC. The module depends on the ST-JSON open source module. The API was releaased as a patch so Allegro CL must be updated before the module can be used.

See the JSON-PRC API documentation for further information and examples.

Franz Inc. named to KMWorld Magazine's 2016 "100 Companies that Matter in Knowledge Management"

As knowledge management evolves, so does their list of 100 Companies That Matter in KM. Featuring basic imaging technology when it was first published years ago, the list has expanded to include a galaxy of technologies and capabilities to meet the knowledge needs of a mobile workforce. Whether the designated companies specialize in collaborative, cloud or cognitive computing or a host of other categories, their solutions represent the best in innovation, creativity and functionality.

As the definition of knowledge management has changed over the years, so too has the list, including both familiar companies that have appeared multiple times and first-time recipients of the coveted designation. New or well known, all the companies offer solutions designed to help users and customers find what they need whenever and wherever they need it... and what they need is the ability to access, analyze and share crucial knowledge.

Read the full article here.

Bloor Group's Inside Analysis article - How Many Trips to the ER Does It Take?

The Precision Medicine Initiative (PMI), announced last year, seeks to leverage big data to better understand the relationships between people, disease and other factors and harness that information to make individualized diagnoses and treatments. Although it's a top-down initiative, it's up to the health networks themselves to develop and implement the technology.

No relational database could manage a spread of structured data, unstructured data, images, clinical narratives, geolocation data, etc. Such enormous volumes of complex data seem destined for Hadoop or a data lake. However, the most feasible way to understand patterns and relationships buried in this data is by using semantic graph analytics.

One of the collaborations poised to capitalize on the PMI is Montefiore Medical Center and Franz Inc. They have teamed up (along with Intel, Cloudera, and Cisco) to create a Semantic Data Lake(SDL) for healthcare, helping to make precision medicine accurate and reliable. At the core of the SDL is Franz's flagship product,AllegroGraph, a semantic graph analytics product integrated with Hadoop.

Read the full article...

Recent Articles about Franz - #AllegroGraph

	TechTarget article - TechTarget article - Semantic graph database underpins healthcare data lake
	Computer Technology Review article - Cognitive Computing is Turning Precision Medicine into a Reality
	Information Management article - The Unparalleled Utility of Graph Databases

Follow us on Google Plus, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube

Training Schedule

Lisp Programming Series Level I: Basic Lisp Essentials - June 1, 8, and 15

Lisp Programming Series Level II: Specialized Components of Lisp - July 6, 13, and 20

For additional information and to register, see here.

Wednesday, March 2, 2016

Franz Inc. named to KMWorld Magazine's 2016 "100 Companies that Matter in Knowledge Management"

Read the full article here.

Monday, February 22, 2016

Franz Inc. (+ Lisp Graph) Tech Corner - March 2016

Tech Corner News

March, 2016

In this issue

Allegro CL Application: Fast-Square's Coil Cut Optimizer (CCO)

Coil Cut Optimizer (CCO) is an Optimization software application for Steel Service Centers, which helps human programmers generate Optimized Cutting Patterns for Slitting and Cut-To-Length machines, minimizing Trim-Loss (Scrap) and Set-up time.

The Optimization algorithm used in CCO has received the IAAI award from the American Association for Artificial Intelligence as best Industrial Application of Artificial Intelligence: E.Bertolotti, E.Castaldo, G.Giannone "Near Optimal Objects Packing Through Dimensional Unfolding", in "Proceedings of the Eight Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence" (pg. 1433-1442); The MIT Press.

To read the full article, see here.

Edi Weitz's New Book: Common Lisp Recipes

This book is a collection of solutions to problems and answers to questions you are likely to encounter when writing real-world applications in Common Lisp. Written by an author who has used Common Lisp in many successful commercial projects over more than a decade, this book covers areas as diverse as web programming, databases, graphical user interfaces, integration with other programming languages, multi-threading, and mobile devices as well as debugging techniques and optimization, to name just a few. It is also the first Common Lisp book to tackle such advanced topics as environment access, logical pathnames, Gray streams, delivery of executables, pretty printing, setf expansions, or changing the syntax of Common Lisp.

For further information about this book, including how to buy it, see here

The 9th European Lisp Symposium, May 9-10, Krakow, Poland

The conference will be held at the Department of Computer Science, AGH University of Science and Technology, in Krakow, Poland.

For additional information about the conference, see here.

Tech Corner Article: 32-bit Lisp on Ubuntu

Ubuntu Linux ceased supporting 32-bit libraries and as a result, we believed that 32-bit Allegro CL would not work reliably on that operating system. (64-bit Allegro CL was not affected.) So we documented that 32-bit Allegro CL was no longer supported on Ubuntu. However, one of our intrepid users figured out how to get 32-bit Allegro to work and we verified his procedure.

Read the full Tech Corner article here.

Tech Corner Article: New Express avoids 'cannot reserve aclmalloc' problem

Particular with Windows 10, but also on other OS's, users have reported problems when Allegro CL attempts to start: an error with a message similar to "Could not restore the image file" or "Aclmalloc heap has to be relocated" is signaled and Lisp fails to start.

Allegro CL has to map several areas when it starts, two being the Lisp heap and the Aclmalloc heap. The location of the Lisp heap is flexible but the Aclmalloc heap must be mapped to the location specified when it was built. Historically, there has been no problem doing this, but, particularly in 64-bit OS's, more of the area used by 32-bit Lisp is being used by the OS (mapping libraries and such). As a result, it is more common for there to be mapping problems on startup, with messages like the ones listed.

If this happens to you, you can try restarting your computer (which may change where things are mapped) but beyond that, there are no easy solutions. To address this problem, we have created a new version of Allegro CL Express with heap locations more carefully chosen.

Express users should replace their current 10.0 version with the new one, available from http://franz.com/downloads/clp/survey.

Gruff v6.1 Now Available

New Features Include:

CONSTRUCT queries are now handled (though not with SPARQL endpoints). The constructed triples will be browsable as part of an ad hoc federation with the currently open store, and so the store is not modified.
On Windows, SPARQL queries in the query view can now be canceled (though not for SPARQL endpoints or on Agraph 3.3). The "Run Query" button turns into a "Cancel Query" button to indicate this.
The new command "Help | Activity Logging" can be used to generate debugging information to send to Franz, especially for actions that take too long or if a bad state arises in the graph view.
When using "Display | Display a Class Node by Class Hierarchy" or "Display | Display an Instance Node by Class Hierarchy", you can now select multiple classes to display them all or an instance of each one.
The command "Link | Display Linked Nodes for the Current Predicates" is now more interruptible (with Escape or Q as usual).
Fixed: A few commands could sometimes take a long time due to accidentally not limiting the number of triples that they fetch from the server. These commands include "Display | Display an Instance Node by Class Hierarchy", "Edit | Edit Node by Type" and selecting a predicate according to domain and range specifications. (This was discovered by using the new activity logging.) You can also cancel Edit Node by Type as usual with Escape or Q if it's still taking too long.
Fixed: The background pixmap in the graph view could get lost and no longer displayed because it pointed to a file in an earlier version of Gruff that you deleted.
The table view will now indicate when the displayed set of triples is incomplete due to "Global Options | General Triple-Fetching Limit".
Miscellaneous refinements to the new lisp evaluation view. You can also now change the fonts on the Evaluation Options menu.
Still more tweaks to the new tree layout algorithm for neatness and reduced link lengths.
Other small efficiency improvements.

For additional information, see the Gruff Documentation

Franz awarded Corporate America's Best in Semantic Web Technology - USA & Leader in Graph Database Products

Franz Inc., an early innovator in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and leading supplier of Semantic Graph Database technology has been recognized As "Best in Semantic Web Technology - USA & Leader in Graph Database Products" by Corporate America Software and Technology.

"At Corporate America, it's our priority to showcase prominent professionals who are excelling in their industry and outperforming their competitors," said Hannah Stevenson, Managing Group Editor, AI Global Media. "Franz Inc. have a reputation for innovation, utilizing their expert knowledge to create complex and exciting Graph Database solutions. Franz's unique platforms offer highly scalable technologies for solving complex Big Data challenges."