The "B" in "BNF" is gone. NY Times has a nice artilce about him and his noteworthy quote is tucked in at the end
Innovation, Mr. Backus said, was a constant process of trial and error.
"You need the willingness to fail all the time," he said. "You have to generate many ideas and then you have to work very hard only to discover that they don't work. And you keep doing that over and over until you find one that does work."
I have been playing with s9y's cml-rpc interface for a few days now. Here is a small article on how you can post to your s9y blog using the command line.
I have written a small article on how you can install MySQL5 alongside with MySQL4. MySQL5 has a bunch of new features and I am trying to spend some time in learining them. Read the article titled Trying out MySQL5 without clobbering your MySQL4 installation and let me know of your comments.
Yesterday Lig
and me put out the third edition of the PHPCommunity Gazette. It has some very
nice articles, do check it out. If you want to write an article for
it, drop us a mail,
but remember that we would not be able to pay you anything, except a
nice "thank you" note - it is a voluntary effort .
Some weeks back, I was talking with my manager about AI and how it
is such a bogus field. My manager replied that in a few years we will
see applications that use AI in our daily life. However, I was quite
skeptical - and I refused to agree to this. He then gave an overview
of neural net and how they can learn to solve the problems. Here I
pointed out that Bayesian filters can also be considered a form of AI,
as they can learn from their previous data and they can make
decisions, but Bayesian filtering is mathematics and not AI. At this
he replied that most of AI is mathematics and only some part of it is
hocus-pocus and hand waving.
This brings me what I have been thinking for a long time.Joel write
A very senior Microsoft developer who moved to Google
told me that Google works and thinks at a higher level of abstraction
than Microsoft. "Google uses Bayesian filtering the way Microsoft uses
the if statement," he said.
. I had always suspected
this and had also felt that this was the way to go. A few months
back, we had a presentation by a researcher (not a Yahoo! employee),
who was working on extraction and summarization of documents. He had
a formula that he was applying on the sentences of the documents to
find the weight of the whole sentence and then finally if the weight
of the sentence was above some limit, it showed up in the summary. I
was skeptical about this approach - my belief is that the Bayesian
approach can be used to classify documents. Luckily, there is a project that seems to
provide a framework on which things can be built further.
I was reading through the mails in the php-general mailing list and
came across this mail by Rasmus about AJAX
I find a lot of this AJAX stuff a bit of a hype. Lots of people have
been using similar things long before it became "AJAX". And it really
isn't as complicated as a lot of people make it out to be. Here is a
simple example from one of my apps. First the Javascript:
function createRequestObject() {
var ro;
var browser = navigator.appName;
if(browser == "Microsoft Internet Explorer"){
ro = new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP");
}else{
ro = new XMLHttpRequest();
}
return ro;
}
var http = createRequestObject();
function sndReq(action) {
http.open('get', 'rpc.php?action='+action);
http.onreadystatechange = handleResponse;
http.send(null);
}
function handleResponse() {
if(http.readyState == 4){
var response = http.responseText;
var update = new Array();
if(response.indexOf('|' != -1)) {
update = response.split('|');
document.getElementById(update[0]).innerHTML = update[1];
}
}
}
This creates a request object along with a send request and handle
response function. So to actually use it, you could include this js in
your page. Then to make one of these backend requests you would tie it
to something. Like an onclick event or a straight href like this:
<a href="javascript:sndReq('foo')">[foo]</a>
That means that when someone clicks on that link what actually happens
is that a backend request to rpc.php?action=foo will be sent.
In rpc.php you might have something like this:
switch($_REQUEST['action']) {
case 'foo':
/ do something /
echo "foo|foo done";
break;
...
}
Now, look at handleResponse. It parses the "foo|foo done" string and
splits it on the '|' and uses whatever is before the '|' as the dom
element id in your page and the part after as the new innerHTML of that
element. That means if you have a div tag like this in your page:
<div id="foo">
</div>
Once you click on that link, that will dynamically be changed to:
<div id="foo">
foo done
</div>
That's all there is to it. Everything else is just building on top of
this. Replacing my simple response "id|text" syntax with a richer XML
format and makine the request much more complicated as well. Before you
blindly install large "AJAX" libraries, have a go at rolling your own
functionality so you know exactly how it works and you only make it as
complicated as you need. Often you don't need much more than what I
have shown here.
Expanding this approach a bit to send multiple parameters in the
request, for example, would be really simple. Something like:
function sndReqArg(action,arg) {
http.open('get', 'rpc.php?action='+action+'&arg='+arg);
http.onreadystatechange = handleResponse;
http.send(null);
}
And your handleResponse can easily be expanded to do much more
interesting things than just replacing the contents of a div.
-Rasmus
.