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The Collected Works of Alan Turing are published by Elsevier, an Amsterdam-based publishing house. The four volumes reproduce Turing’s 30-odd papers and articles, as well as other material, mostly in facsimile with valuable introductory essays. The only drawback is the price: the individual volumes range from $165 to $190. An excellent low-cost alternative is the The Essential Turing (Oxford University Press, 2004), edited by B. Jack Copeland, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand and Director of the Turing Archive for the History of Computing, www.AlanTuring.net . The Essential Turing includes all of Turing's major papers on mathematical logic (including “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem” that is the subject of my recent book ) and artificial intelligence, along with essays written by Jack Copeland and others. In particular, I found the essay “Corrections to Turing’s Universal Computing Machine” by Donald W. Davies Read More...
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You can actually buy one from Amazon.com: www.amazon.com/I-Love-Charles-Petzold-T-Shirt/dp/B0010JAN3E I strongly suspect it's a "print on demand" item: The photo doesn't look very realistic, and the company seems to have quite a few very similar products, some with names I've heard of, and many with names equally obscure to most people as my own. Read More...
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I hope Raymond Chen's Guide to the 2007/2008 season of the Seattle Symphony doesn't dissuade anybody from attending the performance of Gustav Mahler's 6th Symphony because he classified the work as "polarizing" (meaning that "Some people will love it; others will hate it"). To me, the closing concert of Seattle's 2007/2008 season is a no-brainer: First up is Wagner's multi-orgasmic Liebestod and then (presumably after the intermission) 80 minutes of pure relentless Mahler. Mahler's 6th Symphony isn't quite as life-altering as the 2nd or 3rd can be, but it packs a wallop regardless. Deirdre and I saw a performance conducted by Lorin Maazel with the New York Philharmonic two summers ago, and we were talking about it for weeks. (It still comes up in conversation occasionally!) There are few fixed rules in life, but one of them is this: Never pass up the opportunity to attend a performance of a Mahler Symphony. The Mahler 6th is dominated by march rhythms, and the one that opens the symphony Read More...
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After a prudent 7-year engagement, Deirdre and I are getting married later this month! Here's an awkwardly posed photo of the happy couple: The actual event will take place Sunday, October 28 th in Deirdre's home town of Utica, New York, in a small ceremony to be attended mostly by immediate family. We'll be back at our desks working by Tuesday. We're thinking about taking a belated honeymoon in January to London, Cambridge, Manchester, and Bletchley Park, but a weak dollar means I'll have to sell many more books to make the trip! Read More...
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A couple WPF programmers have puzzled about this subject recently so maybe next time somebody has the problem they'll find this blog entry. When setting Storyboard.TargetProperty to an attached property (such as Canvas.Left or Canvas.Top ), put the fully-qualified property name in parentheses: Storyboard.TargetProperty="(Canvas.Left)" Here's a functional example: <Canvas xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"> <Ellipse Name="ellipse" Width="100" Height="100" Fill="Red" Stroke="Blue" StrokeThickness="10" /> <Canvas.Triggers> <EventTrigger RoutedEvent="Canvas.Loaded"> <BeginStoryboard> Read More...
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Sometimes people email me with questions about foreign-language editions of my books: Will such-and-such a book be available in such-and-such a language? And inevitably the answer is: I have no idea. Any decision to translate and publish the book in another language is negotiated between my publisher and the foreign-language publisher, and generally I don't hear about it. Sometimes the translator will drop me a note, but most often not. My royalty statements split out non-English editions, but there's no further break-down, so it's impossible for me to tell where the sales are coming from. I've occasionally ordered translated copies of my books from Amazon.de (Germany), Amazon.fr (France), and Amazon.co.jp (Japan), where it's real fun to negotiate the pages, but sometimes a nice person at Microsoft Press gets ahold of a copy of one of my translated books and sends it to me, and that's how I got a copy of the new German edition of Applications = Code + Markup , which looks like this: It Read More...
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These two figures are known as square cuboids: But notice how differently they're colored. The one on the left has gradiated shades of blue with highest intensity in the upper-left-front vertex. In the one on the right, each of the three visible faces is colored uniformly. Both figures were defined in WPF 3D in the following XAML file: TwoSquareCuboids.xaml Both figures have the same light sources, which is a combination of AmbientLight and DirectionalLight . The figure on the left is defined with a mesh geometry with a Positions property that contains the 8 points for the four vertices of the cuboid: <MeshGeometry3D Positions="0 0 0, 1 0 0, 1 1 0, 0 1 0, 0 0 -4, 1 0 -4, 1 1 -4, 0 1 -4" Read More...
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It's free! It's on-line! It's 267 pages! It's .NET Book Zero: What the C or C++ Programmer Needs to Know about C# and the .NET Framework and you can download it here . .NET Book Zero actually originated as Chapter Zero in Applications = Code + Markup , but I realized it would be a little long, so I spun it off into its own book, and then it got really long, and took me way too much time to get done. (And what's more — I don't think it's quite finished yet. It's missing chapters on DLLs, collections, reflection, and XML, which I'd like to add sometime in the future. But it has plenty of other information, and probably lots of typos as well because it hasn't been properly edited. But did I mention that it's free?) If you've been coding in C# and .NET awhile, you don't need this book. But if you've just recently realized that you need to learn this stuff (or maybe you know somebody like that?), then this book may be ideal. And then, after reading .NET Book Zero , maybe you might want Read More...
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Since at least 2003 we've been stuck in a quagmire of missteps, indecision, beta releases, and release candidates. Some of us feared it would never end. But the .NET Framework 3.0 is now officially released, and that's cause for much rejoicing. Let the balloons drop and the dancing begin! It's a new age. (Here's my XAML contribution to the festivities.) Of course, finding the proper downloads means dealing with the ever-shifting and hopelessly confusing MSDN web site. A significant page that seems focused on .NET is this one: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/netframework/aa569263.aspx The top link on that page brings you to what seems to be the main portal for all things Vista and .NET 3.0: http://msdn.microsoft.com/windowsvista/downloads/products/getthebeta From there you can go to the page to download and/or install the .NET Framework Redistributable Package (also known as the Runtime Components): http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=10CC340B-F857-4A14-83F5-25634C3BF043 Read More...
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The first chapter of my new book Applications = Code + Markup: A Guide to the Microsoft Windows Presentation Foundation assumes that the reader already knows her way around C# and the .NET Framework. For those readers who aren't quite there yet, I'm preparing a free on-line short book entitled .NET Book Zero: What the C and C++ Programmer Needs to Know about C# and the .NET Framework . I've received several emails from programmers understandably hungry for .NET Book Zero and I want to assure everyone that I'm working my fanny off trying to get it out there. My target date is October, which of course means the end of October, although I sincerely hope it'll be earlier than, say, October 40th. I'll be making this book freely available under the concept of "the first taste is free." Once you get hooked on C# and .NET, I'll let you know about the bigger thrills you'll experience exploring my two Windows Forms book and my WPF book. Read More...
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I've been wondering for awhile how to define a XAML animation to make an object move in a spiral. I tried one approach, and couldn't quite get it, so I tried another approach similar to the winding-down pendulum example I did over the summer, and that worked. The technique involves defining a compound transform on an invisible element. ( FrameworkElement itself works just fine for this purpose). The visible element — the one being animated — then has bindings to select elements of the resultant compound matrix. For the spiral, the compound transform on FrameworkElement consists of a rotation and scaling. The rotation goes from 0 to 360 degress, repeated forever, while the scaling is much slower, and goes from 0 to 240, and then back again, repeated forever. Normally, such a compound transform would cause an object to both rotate and increase in size. However, The first two elements of the matrix are x and y coordinates for an object moving in a spiral. The visible element Read More...
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In this perfect world of perfect people, the author of programming books stands alone in creating works that are riddled with errors, blunders, misstatements of fact, and code that will make your monitor explode. What is the cause of this strange phenomenon? Is it the enormous quantities of methamphetamine that must be consumed in writing a thousand-page book? Is it the mind-numbing sexual favors that authors are obliged to perform in return for information from the Microsoft developers? Or is it the senility that cripples the mind of every programmer above the age of 27? Whatever the cause, errors in a book are embarassing and humiliating, and I feel that every reader should be allowed to come into my home and kick me in the butt at least once until I learn to be a perfect human being. In the interim, the Applications = Code + Markup: A Guide to the Microsoft Windows Presentation Foundation page now contains a link to an errata list. ("Errata" is the plural of "erratum" which is Latin Read More...
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Just so there's no confusion, here are a few facts about my recent book Applications = Code + Markup: Read More...
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When a book is in the planning stages, the publisher (with input from the author) decides how long the Read More...
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