I’m always on the lookout for new music sources since the radio makes me want to tear my ears off (except NPR, where I get my news/get woken up) and MTV is…well, whatever…so I was pretty excited when I found the archives for SubFM last night. There’s somewhere in the neighborhood of 200 hours of dubstep there, which will keep me company on this cold boston day.

Yesterday we (being me, Marc, Sam, and Joey Lott) went to Mashup Camp at MIT which was…well Ted Patrick bought me lunch. We were talking about Flex and it’s potential, I pointed out that the best thing Microsft has to offer is the integration from MSSQL-C#-ASP.NET/WPFE/XBAP and he agreed. I think everyone knows that trying to link Flex to CF is kind of a dead end. He said that in releases 2.5 and 3 of Flex that there’s going to be far greater ease of creating corresponding serverside code in PHP, RoR, or Java and that (if I heard this right) FDS is going to get dropped down into the price realm of non-enterprisey apps. I might be wrong about that. There was also something about Flash 10 too, essentially that it will have hardware integration, which is very exciting, and that because of that it can provide mesh deformation. Sounds cool.

I’d really to continue this post and talk about openCV and my friend Lucas but something in WordPress keeps crapping out intensely, time to upgrade I guess. I owe him a lot for helping me out with gnu compiler issues and more importantly for getting me away from the Apple Quicktime libraries. Man, those are seriously tough to work with.

In the same way that I sometimes enjoy odd tastes like raw sheeps milk cheese or strange conversations, sometimes a very odd bit of C++ makes me very happy. As I was reading a comp.C++.std group I subscribe to this morning I came across this absolute gem, which unless I’m mistaken, is a fantastically beautiful hack:

b = *(0? (type_of_b const *) 0: &a);

And this leads me to think of the wonder of the beautiful hack. Yes, this should not be and yes, this is a fairly egregious violation of a few rules of good sense, but in it’s particularity, it’s inventiveness in the face of adversity (whatever adversity necessitated it) it is quite beautiful. And for that, I thank the author. I should note though, that I haven’t tried to compile this and in fact, I’m almost afraid to : )

Note: the explanation of where this came from is listed here kind of an esoteric discussion about casting with const values.

from theWPFBlog

This is (was) an obscure note by a CS professor from New Zealand on why Vista might not be as great as Microsoft claims it is. It’s apparently now an extremely popular article and as such I thought that I should read it. And now that I have, I don’t really want to work with Vista any more. All my excitement for C# and XAML is slowly getting re-routed to Java and Flash. Mostly because in order to use .NET I’ll have to use an OS that I, on philosophical grounds, hate.

Vista might make a giant sucking sound. Actually, Vista might already be a giant sucking sound. It’s not really MS’s fault though, they just got caught at the tail end of obsolescence. It’s really the DVD manufacturers. I’m starting to think that Hollywood is not simply stupid, but stupid and evil and fantastically manipulative.

What does this really mean? There’s an old engadget article about it. This all really comes down to HDCP, which MS agreed to support. Having worked with Disney a little and having seen how they act, I’m guessing that all this done because they really need another trillion or three dollars. It’s a brave new world. And what’s going to happen will probably be pretty simple: someone will figure out a way to turn off the PVP-OPM in Vista and MS will fix it and someone will figure out a way to turn PVP-OPM and MS will fix it and eventually Sony/Disney/etc will say: “no more DVD’s on computers, no more DVD’s, you can only get it streamed from us” which will end a lot of this crap.

This is a pretty good series of articles really, they cover the basics of using Active Records and Active Record Associations in RoR and setting up your MySQL client and how to use the Remote Object with Flex 2 and RoR.

Part 3

Part 2

Part 1

Pretty good. I usually check out anything from Midnight Coders.

About time! The 2.0.1 release lets you use 3.2. Now I just want Apple to get around to doing a Java 6 release!

here and a video about the LHC here

the abstract:

If the scale of quantum gravity is near TeV, the CERN Large Hadron Collider will be producing one black hole (BH) about every second. The decays of the BHs into the final states with prompt, hard photons, electrons, or muons provide a clean signature with low background. The correlation between the BH mass and its temperature, deduced from the energy spectrum of the decay products, can test Hawking’s evaporation law and determine the number of large new dimensions and the scale of quantum gravity.

the Large Hadron Collider will be the worlds largest supercollider, for the smashing of particles and such…apparently it will also produce black holes, and potentially destroy the earth and our solar system. Makes the atomic bomb look rather benign, no?

Trying to do this:


public function set sort(...args):void
{
_sort = ...args;
}


instead of telling me that you can’t pass multiple arguments to a setter method, which you can’t, and was stupid of me to do, instead of just telling me, it threw an internal build error with no further information. Looking in the error log I saw


!ENTRY com.adobe.flexbuilder.project 4 43 2007-01-04 18:47:59.964
!MESSAGE Uncaught exception in compiler
!STACK 0
java.lang.NullPointerException
at macromedia.asc.semantics.ConstantEvaluator.evaluate(ConstantEvaluator.java:2285)


not so helpful. Finally figured it out around 7:30pm. Hey-ya.

Apparently it’s coming out in 4 days. I think I’m excited….wait, no, I already have it : ) And Apollo is coming out in…wait, no, already have the alpha of that too. Hmm. Well, I’m excited that other people are excited. I still can’t figure out how to read a URL variable with a ServerSocket, but I have a feeling it’s not really for a ServerSocket to do, probably more servlet related behavior.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwzCsOFxT-U&mode=related&search=