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

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Rent-free Thoughts

Some thoughts that have been living rent-free recently in my head about AI... We should be more precise when we talk about it. We’ve had "AI" for decades. Google Translate, Alexa and Siri, computer vision in video games, OCR in mail sorting, protein folding models all fall under artificial intelligence, but there’s no mass panic over these. The current progress is in generative AI, and that's where most of the public concern is. I’m guilty of the shorthand myself, saying "AI" when I mean "generative AI". People are afraid of generative AI, but the real problem is concentrated power and corporate greed. Someone wanting to sow disinformation could do so without generative AI models, and deep-pocket organizations of state could finance extreme actors if they wanted to. The tools evolved, but the risks aren’t new. The bigger problem that few are talking about is corporations who are aligning the technology for their own goals; they increasingly dicta...

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