GotMusic

                                                                 
                                                                      

PlayerScore

                                                                                   

Control Issues

I well remember at one point, in my varied life, taking an interest in Jungian psychology, some thirty years ago. This is considered something of an esoteric practice - Freud is the man, not Jung - and people are advised not to venture on their own. Jungian analysts, however, are highly regarded. It is something of an achievement to practice as a Jungian and the entrance criteria for training are very high.

The memory that is strong for me is watching a woman analyst on television, discuss eating disorders. Her take on anorexia-bulimia was very interesting: it is not an issue about food - although everybody eats - but about control, and this within the individual psyche. Someone breaking out of a diet to binge is reasserting control over his/her deportment. The process is violent and liberating, the denied one is staging a palace coup. This is also why people who fail at diets report feeling powerless. The dieter is powerless: this is the price paid for the individual's own freedom.

Bottom line, when sticking to a regimen is starting to get tough, there may be strategies to help out. To get out of the control bind, I have recently started using randomness. At 5 in the evening, when dinner planning becomes an issue, I make two mental meals and assign each to a coin throw option: heads I eat this, tails I eat that. I flip and that's what it's gonna be. I'm never entirely happy with the outcome because each meal is a mix of healthy and fun foods, but each mix is different. If I don't get banana pud tonight I might get it tomorrow. The diet is still on.

Lecteur

I'm totally enjoying a new feature on Safari. It isolates an article from a Web Page.
The reader function that triggers this behaviour is on the right-hand side of the
Web address.

ODP

 

http://www.java2s.com/Code/CSharp/CatalogCSharp.htm

Replacement

These numbers are a little old - dating from 2011 - but they do show a trend
that surprised me. People are keeping their phones longer. The assumption
in many discussions seem to be that a better offer lures customers to switch
to the new gadget, but overall it may be that a better quality phone will last longer.
Unless switching behaviour is governed by contract length. C'est à voir...

Trigger

Magician

Bears

As a hobbyist programmer and occasional developer, I am sometimes tempted to

reflect about the rapid progress within development itself ie on the evolution

of programming languages and practices. No doubt some hollow-cheeked university

professor of the future will detail things with great accuracy, but from the heat of the

action, and gleaning things from the Internet, some tantalizing indices of the story to be told do stand out.

Tech journalists make many observations in terms of market shares and device capabilities, but let’s take a look from another perspective. The following is from a Wall-Mart ad for a 220$C 7-inch Nexus with ‘only’ 16G of storage.

The ad nails the coffin: it doesn’t run Windows, doesn’t replace a real computer; it is an 

entertainment on-the-go device. I dare say they are right. Something that runs Candy

Crush Saga would have been a formidable computer in the year 2000, because we were enamored of the computer as such. Today, we are meant to be blasé and oriented

to the app that runs on it, which we consume. Quite a difference.

Team Cupertino - the makers of those wonderful Apple products - have been marketing 

the entertainment value of various devices for quite a while. And in fact, their tablets are 

computers in the full sense of the word. Here is a description of some of the wonders on

an Apple computer, carefully hidden on their minimalist Web site lest some deluded

youngster realize what an amazing educational device he had gotten for his birthday.

                                                                       

I have literally spent years on Grapher, building up a visual notion of mathematical

relationships. A keyboard on Garage Band allows one to tweek performance to a 

level only dreamt of by Glen Gould. Beyond awesome!!

Microsoft, for their part, are currently portrayed as the maiden aunt of the industry, with

sensible products. They do offer a low-cost tablet, and a full Windows computer at twice the 

price. But in point of fact, Auntie is the wrong scenario. Microsoft is the Papa Bear of the story, 

consolidating advances for the business community and now - given the

emergence of cloud computing - offering a planetary string of storage centers. What

begins as a breakthrough in development ends up, with MSoft as purveyers of software

as a service, as a form of fully articulated, certifiable expertise. To point: 

The Dotnet presentation of data binding is the best I have seen: clear, systematic,

dirt-simple when you actually understand what is going on. (Whereas going straight to

a library can bring a newbie to tears, there are so many twists and possibilities). But hey, 

that’s just me. I need to know what it is, not the inside dope and pitfall avoidance strategies 

which is what the professional’s library offers.

Yet data binding has a history, through work dome with server-hosted libraries on the one 

hand, and dev efforts on the part of the Java community to develop a stable approach for Beans. 

Somebody exlain it to me...

Rescue

S & W

Found this wondeful recipe for a seasonal drink on the Web. Substitute soda water for the
soft drink if you are diabetic. This is not a breakfast shake!

 

 

 

Welcome

GemClix(Yahoo Games)

Beats shoveling...

Inexorable!

Reset

Machine Player

One might well be tempted to use random numbers, in the context of a game,to help define the moves of the machine Player. Random is a call to the Randomnumber engine, while random is a call for a run-time number. By putting 4 in the parameters'parentheses, one is specifying a random integer between between 0 and 4, hence one of 5.

What happens next is dependent on drawing number 3.

I have used an enumeration to identify the tiles in the code. Once the button is clicked, one is free to search for a match between the tile number and the random number. If/where there is one, asubsequent colour change occurs.

Enumerations are particualr: it is the index within the enum - an int - which is of interest.