A Look at Two Rival Ideas About How to Compose
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The Manhattan Sinfonietta, a flexible new-music ensemble led by Jeffrey Milarsky , took over Merkin Concert Hall last weekend for two concerts that explored competing notions of contemporary musical language.
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Give us our refactoring moment People sometimes do a double take when I talk about analysis, design and agility in the same sentence. And if I mention UML and agility, they spin round several times and fall over. At the expense of inviting a flurry of email replies for posing a rhetorical question, I have to ask: why?â¦
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There is not always agreement between the piano and the voice in Schubertâs song cycle âDie SchÃ¶ne MÃ¼llerin.â
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On his blog, Nick Halstead shares a few tips he's worked up to help developers that might be having a hard time with coding issues - a few steps towards solving programming problems.   Early on in most people's programming careers problem solving is a large part of your day to day job. As you become more experienced you find that many programming patterns that you have used before can be reapplied. You then start working on larger and larger projects and the problems tend to be more about solving architectural problems rather than logic related ones.   Included in his list are things like "Talking it through", "Brainstorming", "Breaking it down" and "Research". This last one can be one of the most important and can save tons of time in the long run. With tools like Google and other sites, there's no reason to check before you start a project to see if there's someone out there that might have already done it (and it might be more well developed).
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A little while back Matthew Turland posted about something that some developers moving over to PHP from more strict languages have an issue with - variable typing - and how its evolved in languages over time.   Without a little background in programming languages or computer science in general, it's entirely possible that typing systems are not something that have crossed your mind. I thought I'd take a blog entry to share some of my thoughts on how itÃ¢ÂÂs affecting the creation and evolution of languages.   He walks through history a bit, mentioning C, Java, Python and PHP and how they differ in their default type handling. He especially focuses on the "blurred line" between strong and weak typing and how some if offers special features to the language that uses the method.
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In his latest post, Padraic Brady takes a look at PEAR in a verb form - both in how you can use it and what sorts of things it has in store.   over the last few months after finally getting over my ignorance of PEAR beyond it being a hodge podge of packages of dubious quality I've been questioning whether pearifying my future and past code is worthwhile. The answer is a resounding YES.   Unfortunately, there are some barriers for most people to get into the PEAR world (including the lack of the "coolest packages") with some of the perceived barriers including:   PEAR will require large scale changes to my shiny new cool code PEAR only allows proposals for complete functional code PEAR is elitist PEAR is fossilised   He also talks about PEAR packages and dispels one of the most popular myths about the package repository - "you can't use PEAR on a shared host".
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In this post on the Zend Developer Zone, Cal Evans takes a look at an article published in a recent php|architect issue from Chris Hartjes about how several recent advancements in the PHP community have helped developers think more in "the Rails way" of development.   Chris does a good job of laying out his points. As with any article of this nature, you are going to agree with some of them and you'll disagree with some of them. However, to get to that point you'll have to consider all of them. That's really the point of the article; making developer sit back and think for a minute. It's well worth the read.   Cal also mentions some of the topics presented in the article including more conceptual ideas like "Convention Over Configuration" and "Rapid Should Mean Rapid".
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The AccessMusic project provides a set of tools for creating accessible music which are freely available to download. These tools allow you to convert music scores from traditional western music notation to formats for the Blind and visually impaired.   As part of the i-Maestro project the accessible music production code was extended to provide accessible "viewers" that could be coupled onto any existing music notation editor. The code for these interfaces is provided in the hope that it can be of use in other projects. For I-Maestro the interfaces were coupled to a Symbolic Music Representation editor developed by the University of Florence. However they were designed with reusability in mind to allow easy coupling onto any editor.  See http://accessmusic.sourceforge.net/interfaces.php for further details.  Source code will be uploaded to subversion over the next couple of days.
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We all love cohesion and hate coupling, don't we? The standard advice on cohesion and coupling is that a design should strive to maximise cohesion and minimise coupling. This is a fine mantra, but, as is so often the case, without a good understanding of what is really intended, it becomes either misguidance or perceived as academic and irrelevant.â¦
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This book attempts to demolish the notion that ''new is better.&quot; For the most part, it succeeds. Sergio Zyman and coauthor Armin A. Brott build a solid foundation for their argument that innovation can be disastrous for the bottom line. Innovation is like a sugar high, they say -- a quick fix that just doesn't work.
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Chris Hartjes has posted an update on the Zend_Service_Audioscrobbler package for the Zend Framework, including writing the unit tests to ensure it's complete functionality.   In my spare time I've been banging away at writing the required unit tests for the Zend_Service_Audioscrobbler component that Derek and I had started. I finished all the unit tests for the user based functions, which is a nice milestone. Then I decided to go back and actually read the comments made from the proposal. Oops. I discovered there were a bunch of changes that the folks at Zend said needed to be made in order to accept them. I agree with most of them.   He also lists some of these comments/changes/suggestions for the package that were given to help it fit in better with the rest of the framework.
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Its formula for success: Writing about complicated scientific subjects in a way that makes them accessible to the average, educated reader.
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The International PHP Magazine is back this week with the results from their latest user poll that asked the question "Which Stage Comes First in the Development of the Basic CMS?"   Of course, of the options they gave, "Planning your CMS" came in with an overwhelming lead of 60.5 percent of the votes. Lagging far behind that was "Further Development" and "Database creation". It is good to see that a large majority of the people out there think that taking the time out to plan out the application first is the best way to go. Throwing something together, especially something that can get as complex as a CMS, is a very bad idea.   Be sure and get your votes in on this week's poll that asks which of the given options including "Web and command-line interface" and "Generates a todo list from @todo tags in source") wouldn't be a good option to be added to the phpDocumentor functionality.
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Felix Geisendorfer shares, in this new post to the ThinkingPHP blog, some of his experiences with writing his code using test driven development.   So far I've had tons of fun trying to create php code using test driven development. It caused my code to become a lot more structured/consistent because writing the tests shows you interfaces problems right away. This is because the process of writing the test forces you to think a lot more about *how* you want to use some class / piece of code vs. your traditional "how can I get task x done"-thinking.   He also points out another benefit - it makes refactoring the code even easier (so there's more of a likelyhood that you'll use it again and again). He talks specifics about a library that he's been working on and the processes he's gone through to make things work with the testing versus his normal development cycle.
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John Markoff in the New York Times reports that a computer science professor and two of his students have discovered a &quot;composition flaw&quot; in Google&#39;s desktop search application.
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In this final section I'll present some MIDI-specific troubleshooting tips, along with a brief description of the setup here at StudioDave, a few closing remarks, and of course some links to the Linux music-maker du jour.  read more
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Mike Baker examines the factors that combine to make a good teacher.