Live Chat Programs

Java’s design is often intended to protect programmers from themselves, not allowing certain constructs that might produce unintended consequences. This post address the peeve of operator overloading in Java and a workaround to its limitations.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/techtarget/tsscom/blogs/~3/244474932/thread.tss

When Is A Functional Program Not A Functional Program? , John Longley. ICFP 1999.

In an impure functional language, there are programs whose behavior is completely functional (in that they behave extensionally on inputs) but the functions they compute cannot be written in the purely functional fragment of the language. That is, the class of programs with functional behavior is more expressive than the usual class of pure functional programs. In this paper we introduce this extended class of “functional” programs by means of examples in Standard ML, and explore what they might have to offer to programmers and language implementors.

After reviewing some theoretical background, we present some examples of functions of the above kind, and discuss how they may be implemented. We then consider two possible programming applications for these functions: the implementation of a search algorithm, and an algorithm for exact real-number integration. We discuss the advantages and limitations of this style of programming relative to other approaches. We also consider the increased scope for compiler optimizations that these functions would offer.

I like this paper because it shows how some of the most abstract bits of formal logic (realizability models of higher order logic) suggest actual programs you can write.

As a barely-related aside, even a brief look into this realizability stuff also taught me a good deal of humility — for example, it seems that at higher types, wh (more…)

The reality is that even though we may index everything and anything digital and use search engines thinking we truly have access to everything, that is far from the truth. Google users “choice” goes as far as their search algorithms take the first results page. Rare is the search that goes beyond the 1st page. Which is exactly why SEO is so important to so many

We don’t hunt through pages and pages of Digg or any other “wisdom of the crowds” engine. in fact, I’ve begun to use Mahalo (disclosure, Im an investor) more and more simply because it has a real person extend options beyond the basic algorithm.

Advances in storage technology have taken us to the point where we can and do put everything and anything on a hard drive and then make it available online. The choices far exceed our capacity to consume.

So how will we find new stuff ? New entertainment choices ?

Will it be purely from friends on social networks ? Will we verticalize and go to movie and music sites (or any other interest we may have) and join their social networks ? Will we just continue to trust Google and search engine algorithms to get us “the most relevant:” options with a suggestion here or there? Will it be a combination of the two ala Mahalo ? Or will we find “trusted brands” to guide us.

I know that TV ne (more…)

Internet, December 16, 2007—The Revised Maclisp Manual , originally published in hardcopy at MIT in 1983 as the Saturday Evening Edition, is now available on the web as the Sunday Morning Edition.

Nicknamed The Pitmanual, The Revised Maclisp Manual describes the programming language MACLISP, which ran on the DEC PDP-10 and Honeywell 6180/6880. This newly-updated Sunday Morning Edition features many editorial corrections, an enhanced hypertext index, and a Common Lisp Conversion guide that offers advice on upgrading old MACLISP programs to run in Common Lisp.

By Kent Pitman, who also brought us the Common Lisp HyperSpec ,

From “Microsoft Watch” (newsletter):

“More and more Microsofties (past and present) are setting up Weblogs. Some are chronicling the debates inside Microsoft and the rest of the software industry. Others completely shy away from any mentions of their employer.

We’ve been building out our collection of Microsoft blogger bookmarks. Not too surprisingly, many of these folks are connected to Microsoft’s developer/Web services divisions.

Here are a few of our favorites:

Joshua Allen’s Better Living Through Software

(Allen’s site includes a list of other Microsoft bloggers)

Simple Geek: Chris Anderson’s Blog

Microsoft Web Services Kingpin Don Box

For more Microsoft Web Services-related blogs, check this site.

New Microsoft Hire Peter Drayton

Dare “Carnage4Life” Obasanjo “

No commentary on the rest of the article, but it is interesting to see how much blogging is in the mainstream (more reason I’m frustrated at my complete ignorance of this before december…)

For those of you who attended this week’s Applied Silverlight course in Oslo, thanks for coming! Here, as promised, are the demos.

For those of you who didn’t attend, where were you? But feel free to look at the demos anyway.

One of
the recurring requests for a blog is related to TransparentProxy, RealProxy,
Contexts, Interception, etc.  As
usual, I’m typing this where I don’t have access to our corporate network and
the sources, so some details might be a little off.  (When will my dentist provide free
wireless to his customers?)  And, as
usual, none of this is going to help you in developing applications.  In fact, I postponed writing about this
topic – despite all the requests – because it seems so obscure.  But if you are struggling through the
Rotor source base, it might explain some of the code that you see.  I say ‘might’ because I’ve never
actually looked at the Rotor sources. 
I’m just relying on the fact that they are a pretty faithful of a
cleansed snapshot of our desktop CLR sources.  Anyway…

size=2> 

size=2>Normally, a reference to a managed object is just that: a native memory
pointer.  This is reported
accurately to the GC so that we can track reachability and so we can update that
pointer if the object is relocated during a compaction.  But in the case of an object that
derives from MarshalByRefObject (MBRO), it’s possible that the object instance
is actually remote.  If this is the
case, a proxy stands in for the server instance.

(more…)

I recently got a copy of Microsoft AJAX Library Essentials: Client-side ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 Explained   by Cristian Darie   and  Bogdan Brinzarea  .    I think it is very, cool that there is a whole book on the Microsoft Ajax Library (download )… I think this is a far two unsung asset of the ASP.NET 3.5. 

The first half of the book is really an Ajax and javascript overview.. the big take away from this section is that you DO NOT want to be doing this stuff by hand.  You gotta use a framework.  Of course, I am slightly partial to the Microsoft Ajax Library, put Dojo, Prototype, or any of the many others would be better than doing this by hand!

The second half of the book is a good walk through of the Microsoft Ajax Library.. how to do basic networking, create classes and components, etc.  The authors also do a great job of highlighting the tools of the trade for Ajax developers including Nikhil’s web developer helper and of course FireBug.  The book also includes a handy class reference in the appendix. 

I think the book misses out on talking about how to use the Ajax Control Toolkit completely from client side javascript, but maybe that is for the 2nd edition

Enjoy!

I havent been blogging much over the past several months.  The main reason is time, or the lack thereof.  Since I dont have time to write a “proper” blog post, I’m just going to start sharing some link love…

Here are a few interesting links I have spent time perusing today:

• Thirteen Simple Rules for Speeding Up Your Web Site  - a great checklist to review before releasing any public website into the wild.
• dhtmlxGrid - an open source (but commercial) editable DHTML grid with AJAX support.
• Edit Individual GridView Cells - an article on how to make clickable ASP.NET gridview cells to allow for a rich editing experience.

Scenario: You have two web applications www.mydomain.com and login.mydomain.com. The login site provides a centralized login application and www contains any number of web applications that should use the auth ticket issued by the login site.

The auth ticket can be setup to be shared across the two 3rd level domains no problem. The problem with this setup is that when the user requests a page on www and gets redirected to login the ReturnUrl query string parameter contains a relative path. As far as I know there are not any extensibility points on the FormsAuthenication or FormsAuthenticationModule classes that you can use to fix this. A quick and dirty fix is to use the EndRequest event in your global.asax like this:

 1:  protected void Application_EndRequest(object sender, EventArgs e)

 2:  {

 3:  string redirectUrl = this.Response.RedirectLocation;

 4:  if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(redirectUrl))

 5:  {

 6:  this.Response.RedirectLocation = Regex.Replace(redirectUrl, “ReturnUrl=(?’url’.*)”, delegate(Match m)