joe_cobol

Microsoft Opens Pro Photography Site

Yep, Microsoft opens their Professional Photography Home Page. It looks pretty interesting, especially the RAW format tools.

The War Against Silence

Glen MacDonald's desert island music selections are just so...right.

Missing Persons: Spring Session M
The definitive goofy New Wave trash-pop album. Squeaky and astonishing vocal acrobatics, transparent plastic clothes and kaleidoscope hair, and more musical technique than the rest of MTV's early playlist combined.

Maybe not the best taste in the world, but so close to mine it's eerie.

Acrylic Beta

Microsoft's Acrylic graphics app is in beta now. I guess I'll have to download it and report later. Here's the Microsoft blurb:

"Acrylic" is the codename for an innovative illustration, painting and graphics tool that provides exciting creative capabilities for designers working in print, web, video, and interactive media.

Constraint Programming Languages

Chris Sells has some comments on CPLs in "The Logic of Logic".

Constraint Logic Programs (CLPs) break down into constants, variables over ranges and relations of truth, which together make up the constraints in a logic system. In my son's case, the constants are the numbers, e.g. 3, 20, etc, the variables are the number of people of each type and the relations form the constraints, e.g. the sum of all people must be 20. The CLP "solver" (in Alex's parlance) provides the logic over a particular "domain" (real numbers in our case) and knows how to do all the iteration and forward and backward chaining to solve the people_at_the_meal problem. A different solver would be able to solve my grandmother's and the NBA's scheduling problem.