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Irregular expressions regularly
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Is RegExLib full of "it"?
Today I read a comment on Jeffrey Schoolcraft's regex blog from Randal L. Schwartz which I felt that I needed to respond to. As I started writing the comment I realized that this is probably news that needs to be publicly visible, so I'm posting it to my blog and cross referencing the original comment. First, here is Randal's comment:
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Smart UI agents and inductive UI
Continuing on from my blog entries last week about automated UI agents, I've started building a small prototype which will hopefully lead to an actual implementation. In my prototype I have several agents accessing shared context through which they have some access to shared resources - such as logging tool and reporting agents. As I mentioned, the output from my prototype will be an implementation, but I'm also preparing to cover it with a whitepaper on some of the lower level details.
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We live, as we dream alone
Every now and then you will see blog entries which read along the lines of:
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Using generics to build generic data logic layers
Consider exposing raw Generic collections from your data logic layers, such as:
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Using the SiteMapDataSource to display lists of links
Danny Chen just blogged about the SiteMap and showed some interesting ways to make use of custom attributes:
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Autonomous Interface Agents
Web applications that are context aware will be able to make greater use of autonomous agents to directly manipulate graphical objects and affect the users display. The MIT paper titled "Autonomous Interface Agents" says of autonomous agents:
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Getting ASP.NET Membership running against your own database
If you want to install the ASP.NET V2 tables and procedures for things such as Membership, Personalization, etc you need to run the aspnet_regsql.exe tool against your database. The tool can be found in the %windir%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\{FRAMEWORKVERSION} folder.
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Out of context - how to know whether Tweety can fly
In the excellent whitepaper titled "Out of context: Computer systems that adapt to, and learn from, context", there's a section nearing the end titled: "The view of context from other fields" - containing the following subsections:
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Coaching end-users
Today I had a conversation with a friend who is a musician. We were discussing some of the similarities between music and software and even extending many of them to any creative pursuit where the output is consumed by others. One of the things that we noted was that, as with software, end-users of music do not always share the feelings and experiences envisaged by the architects of the product. I'm not sure how a musician can give corrective advice to an end-user about such a discrepancy at "runtime" but, in software we are fortunate that we can use context and UI elements to teach a user about the intended usage of a system.
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Grokking Information technology
My days of using handcrafted Access database applications to automate inventory reconcilliation seems to be nothing but a distant blur. Too soon it seems that I was whisked away from my accounting world of Office applications and surrounded by millions of rows worth of raw data. There's something about real, raw data that seems to make my nerve edges jingle in a merry way.