Visual Studio 2010 Released

If you haven't heard the news already (which I hadn't because I typically don't keep up with such things), Visual Studio 2010 came out earlier this month. I've been playing around with Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate (a 90-day trial version is available) and I must say I'm impressed. Microsoft has finally added common features like block editing and text-zoom, an Extension Manager to extend the IDE à la Eclipse, and support for jQuery. If I were a Fortune 500 company hacking out Windows code all day I could justify a couple of licenses if it really helped my developers efficiently produce a more secure and stable application, but the price tag puts it far out of reach for my needs. I'll stick with either VS2005 or C# Express 2010.

I'll probably post a few follow-up entries as I explore more throughout the next 90 days, so be sure to keep an eye out!

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Writing a Minimal PSR-0 Autoloader

An excellent overview of autoloading in PHP and the PSR-0 standard was written by Hari K T over at PHPMaster.com , and it's definitely worth the read. But maybe you don't like some of the bloated, heavier autoloader offerings provided by various PHP frameworks, or maybe you just like to roll your own solutions. Is it possible to roll your own minimal loader and still be compliant? First, let's look at what PSR-0 mandates, taken directly from the standards document on GitHub : A fully-qualified namespace and class must have the following structure \<Vendor Name>\(<Namespace>\)*<Class Name> Each namespace must have a top-level namespace ("Vendor Name"). Each namespace can have as many sub-namespaces as it wishes. Each namespace separator is converted to a DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR when loading from the file system. Each "_" character in the CLASS NAME is converted to a DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR . The "_" character has no special ...

Composing Music with PHP

I’m not an expert on probability theory, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. And even my Music 201 class from years ago has been long forgotten. But if you’ll indulge me for the next 10 minutes, I think you’ll find that even just a little knowledge can yield impressive results if creatively woven together. I’d like to share with you how to teach PHP to compose music. Here’s an example: You’re looking at a melody generated by PHP. It’s not the most memorable, but it’s not unpleasant either. And surprisingly, the code to generate such sequences is rather brief. So what’s going on? The script calculates a probability map of melodic intervals and applies a Markov process to generate a new sequence. In friendlier terms, musical data is analyzed by a script to learn which intervals make up pleasing melodies. It then creates a new composition by selecting pitches based on the possibilities it’s observed. . Standing on Shoulders Composition doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Bach wa...

Learning Prolog

I'm not quite sure exactly I was searching for, but somehow I serendipitously stumbled upon the site learnprolognow.org a few months ago. It's the home for an introductory Prolog programming course. Logic programming offers an interesting way to think about your problems; I've been doing so much procedural and object-oriented programming in the past decade that it really took effort to think at a higher level! I found the most interesting features to be definite clause grammars (DCG), and unification. Difference lists are very powerful and Prolog's DCG syntax makes it easy to work with them. Specifying a grammar such as: s(s(NP,VP)) --> np(NP,X,Y,subject), vp(VP,X,Y). np(np(DET,NBAR,PP),X,Y,_) --> det(DET,X), nbar(NBAR,X,Y), pp(PP). np(np(DET,NBAR),X,Y,_) --> det(DET,X), nbar(NBAR,X,Y). np(np(PRO),X,Y,Z) --> pro(PRO,X,Y,Z). vp(vp(V),X,Y) --> v(V,X,Y). vp(vp(V,NP),X,Y) --> v(V,X,Y), np(NP,_,_,object). nbar(nbar(JP),X,3) --> jp(JP,X). pp(pp(PREP,N...

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