Live Chat Programs

In school, there were two kinds of tests. The regular kind where you learned and memorized all you could and then did your best on the test. The 2nd kind was the Open Book Test. Where you could use your notes and text books to figure out the answer to a question.

The 2nd was always preferable to the first because it was always a lot easier to prepare reference than to memorize.

Come finals time, a schedule of traditional tests meant packaging hours and hours to study. It was the ultimate experience of Information Overload. It also was the quickest way to forget everything you just learned the minute the tests were over. In fact, if you hung out with my friends and me, the minute tests were over, every penny we had was destined to be spent on beverages that killed more than a few braincells.

Today, life is so much simpler. I can’t remember the last time I had to go to the library or bookstore to search for a book on a topic that was important to me. I can’t remember the last time I HAD to invest the time to read a book as opposed to choosing to read a book that I wanted to read.

There was a time when I would scour online forums looking for any information that would give me an edge. Those days are long gone.

Today, I still read a ton of magazines that I both enjoy and which give me a solid foundation of information that help me professionally and personally, but I don’t stress that I might miss something. I don’t stress if I don’t read an issue immediately when it com (more…)

Should bloggers be allowed in the Mavs locker room ? Conceptually its not a big deal. A blogger, a beat writer, a columnists. The medium they use to deliver their content should be irrelevant. No question about it.

But then there is the question of realworld constraints. This is a picture of our locker room. This is the area the media conducts their interviews post game. As it is now, between reporters, photographers (both still and video), trainers and the players, it gets pretty full.

Right now we have a situation where a blogger that works for the Dallas Morning News would like continued access to the locker room. Prior to last week, I had no idea this person’s primary job at the Morning News is to blog. I hadn’t seen or read it. He was just one of the 4 or 5 people from the Morning News in the locker room post game. When it was brought to my attention I immediately made it an issue. Why ?

Not because I don’t want this blogger in the locker room doing interviews. What I didn’t like was that the Morning News was getting a competitive advantage simply because they were the Dallas Morning News. I am of the opinion that a blogger for one of the local newspapers is no better or worse than the blogger from the local high school, from the local huge Mavs fan, from an out of town blogger. I want to treat them all the same.

Unfortunately, there isn’t enough room to allow any and all bloggers in the locker room. There also are no standards that I have been able to come up with that diffe (more…)

John Baez and Mike Stay are working on a book chapter titled “Categories in Physics, Topology, Logic and Computation: a Rosetta Stone.” They previously asked for some help with the logic section, and now they’re looking for help with the computation section:

But now I really need comments from anyone who likes categories and theoretical computer science!

In fact, the final ‘computation’ section of the paper is still very rough. It introduces combinators but doesn’t really explain them well yet… and perhaps worse, it doesn’t say anything about the lambda calculus!

I plan to fix some of these deficiencies in the next week. But, I figure it’s best to get comments and criticism now, while there’s still time to take it into account.

This is already a great introductory paper, but the computation section is indeed quite rough. Obviously comments are welcome, but even if you don’t have anything to add, the first sections are sur

e to be enjoyable for many LtU readers. The paper does not assume any background in category theory, logic or physics and manages to be an excellent introduction to the surprising connections between these fields. If you have some background, it’s a very quick and fun read, and if you can offer feedback, so much the better!

http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/2705

I’ve had the Olympics on every day since Arrested Development went off the air, and I’ve found that the most consistently entertaining aspect has been the commentary of Mr. Dick Button.

I don’t know much about the guy, other than he skated in the 40s and 50s (not his 40s and 50s). One thing I do know is that he is not easily pleased. He doesn’t like the scoring system, the skaters are uninspiring, their choice of music is dull and so on.

A quick bit of research led me to the Dick Button Drinking Game. If you’re going to catch any figure skating, do yourself a favor and grab some friends and a keg of beer. You’ll need it.
Help Desk Software: Next generation of Live Chat. Jabber/XMPP Live Chat Service for your website.
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http://weblogs.asp.net/jkey/archive/2006/02/23/438934.aspx

If you watched the Mix keynote , I am sure you saw the very cool Silverlight Momentum video that shows off a lot of the cool apps we have already seen in Silverlight. 

In case you missed it, here it is:

[Mobile ] [Progressive download ] [streaming ]
[4M CBR ] [720p ] [640x360 ]

http://blogs.msdn.com/brada/archive/2008/03/10/cool-silverlight-momentum-video-posted.aspx

Fritz Onion and I just finished the pre-conference ‘Day of Silverlight’ talk at DevWeek. Demos can be downloaded from http://www.pluralsight.com/fritz/demos/DevWeek2008DayOfSilverlightDemos.zip

http://www.interact-sw.co.uk/iangblog/2008/03/10/devweek-sl-demos

Pure, Declarative, and Constructive Arithmetic Relations. Oleg Kiselyov, William E. Byrd, Daniel P. Friedman, and Chung-chieh Shan. FLOPS 2008. (source code)

We present decidable logic programs for addition, multiplication, division with remainder, exponentiation, and logarithm with remainder over the unbounded domain of natural numbers. Our predicates represent relations without mode restrictions or annotations. They are fully decidable under the common, DFS-like, SLD resolution strategy
of Prolog or under an interleaving refinement of DFS…

[The] attempts to define decidable multiplication even for the seemingly trivial unary case show the difficulties that become more pronounced as we move to binary arithmetic. We rely on a finite representation of infinite domains, precise instantiatedness analysis, and reasoning about SLD using search trees.

So you’ve read The Reasoned Schemer and were excited about the fact that unlike the built-in operations in Prolog, arithmetic relations (over binary numbers) were fully implemented. For example, addition could also be used for subtraction and multiplication for factoring numbers and for generating all triples of numbers related by multiplication. Now comes this paper to explain the motivation behind some of the more arcane definitions needed to implement arithmetic in a fully relational style, and to prove their properties formally. The paper develops unary and binary arithmetic relations in pure Prolog (with no cuts, negation or introspection). (more…)

Looks like my post went live over on the IETB regarding changes we made to the BASE element in IE 7. Previously the BASE element had some issues, primarily by design, that made certain actions within the guts of IE very easy to do, but polluted the exposed object model and overall tree hiearchy. Well, it was time to fix that. If you are interested in how we fixed it, go check out my entry All your <base> are belong to us.

There have been some comments on the post so I’ll try to cover them over here with what might be some interesting posts about how IE works.

http://weblogs.asp.net/justin_rogers/archive/2005/08/30/424084.aspx

I just ran across this over on parallels site:

http://parallelsvirtualization.blogspot.com/2006/11/installing-windows-on-mac-is-now.html

This sounds like a great feature for their virtualization product. Parallels for OSX is a top notch virtualization product and they just keep on adding features.

http://weblogs.asp.net/dfindley/archive/2006/11/02/Parallels-adds-_2200_Express-Windows-Installation_2200_.aspx