ICCM 2006

CSE and IT host missionaries from around the world for computing conference

Greg Beeley, Taylor CSE graduate ('96), teaches a class on PHP programming at ICCM 2006.

At the 17th-annual International Conference on Computing and Mission (ICCM), those attending found a PERL of great price.

Larry Wall, creator of the PERL programming language, was the keynote speaker at ICCM 2006 and talked about “Seeking First the Kingdom of God.”

The conference was hosted at Taylor University’s Upland campus in a cooperative effort between Taylor’s Information Technology and Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) Departments. ICCM had 144 attendees from 18 different countries. The diversity of those present was matched by the range of Wall’s discussions. Wall spoke about some technical aspects of PERL and open-source communities, and seamlessly integrated a talk about “geek evangelism.”

Attendees of ICCM gather together in Mitchell Theatre for a time of worship.

While at Taylor, ICCM took full advantage of the technology that CSE had to offer. ICCM used room 001 in the Nussbaum Science Center for a “Muddy Fingers” lab, where a variety of machines were configured for experimentation and testing. There were many different system set-ups: Windows XP, Windows 2003 Server, Fedora Core 4 and blank machines that conference attendees could test at their leisure. Also, there was one brand new Windows Vista machine that intrigued the conference as a whole.

In room 007, workshops were taught on virtual servers, Nessus scanning, exchange servers, SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer protocol) and PHP programming.