You learn a lot of things on the job as a programmer. Years ago, at my first coop position, I was a little confused when my boss went to Visual C++, and tried to open the .EXE file as a project. What a dolt! I thought. That's not going to work.
Amazingly, it did. You don't need to create projects or solution files to use Visual C++ as a debugger. Just open up the EXE file and run it. If it has debugging information, you can also manually open up the source files and create break points and everything.
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STARTUP INK
The <canvas> tag is the current fangled way of displaying vector graphics in a web browser. Before, all graphics were images, Flash animations, or even thousands of one-pixel <div>s. Finally, Internet browsers have caught up to the 1970s and will be able to draw lines and curves programmatically, and you don't have to pay $699 USD for the priviledge.
At the time of this writing, Internet Explorer at version 8.0 still lacks the <canvas> tag. But you can easily add the capability by including a short javascript file in your page. At first glance, that's astounding. How do you implement an entire vector graphics API in a few lines of Javascript?
Actually, IE has had the ability to do vector graphics for years. For IE 5.0, Microsoft was aware at how useful it would be, and also keenly aware of how long standardization takes, so they went ahead and implemented something called VML (Vector Markup Language), after it had been submitted to the standards process. SVG is simply VML (combined with some competing submissions) after it went through the process of being standardized.
For example, this code will draw an ellipse in VML.
<style>v\: * { behavior:url(#default#VML); display:inline-block }</style>
<xml:namespace ns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:vml" prefix="v" />
<v:oval style="width:100pt;height:50pt" fillcolor="red">
</v:oval>
In 2005, Emil A Eklund created a simple translation layer in Javascript that emulates canvas.
IE doesn’t support SVG natively either, it does support something called VML though, and it’s been around since the 5.0 days, if I remember correctly. VML does pretty much the same thing as SVG (as far as basic drawing is concerned).So there is it. The ExplorerCanvas script isn't magic. It inserts VML tags into your web page when you call its various drawing routines.Using VML, in combination with behaviors, it should therefor be possible to emulate a subset of SVG or Canvas in IE. That’s the idea I got a few days ago when working on a basic drawing abstraction, and according to Google a few others have thought along those lines as well. Couldn’t find any actual implementation though so I decided to make my own, how hard could it be?
If such implementation could be created it would open up the world of client side drawing to web site developers and allow all kind of neat widgets to be developed.
"expertsexchange.com" is a domain name that can be read in multiple, unintended ways. Howshouldatexttospeechsystemresolvethisambiguity?
Recently, I was contracted to run a list of domain names through the custom-built pronunciation engine that powers my rhyming web site. On the first attempt, I found that the results were embarrassingly bad. A quick inspection revealed the problem: most domain names are severalwordsstucktogether.
When a pronunciation by analogy system encounters an unknown word, it searches its knowledge base for words that look similar, and tries to stitch together their pronunciations. In this case, it was doing just what it was supposed to do. For example, lots of words end with an 'e', and usually that 'e' is silent when at the end of a word. But stick another word on, and the system would try to pronounce the 'e', just like a six-year-old learning to read by sounding out each letter. Most people, on the other hand, would recognize the two words and say them each individually.
Try these domains in the AT&T text to speech system, which many consider to be the best in the world, at http://www.research.att.com/~ttsweb/tts/demo.php.
Time for a bit of dynamic programming. After finding an appropriate scoring function, we can break up text the same way a human reader would. We also use some simple heuristics to say numbers properly.
Although I don't have a speech synthesizer, you can check the raw pronunciation output using this form. The phonemes correspond to the ones in the CMU pronouncing dictionary.
Back in 2007, I created a rhyming engine based on the public domain Moby pronouncing dictionary. It simply reads the dictionary and looks for rhyming words by comparing the suffix of the words' pronunciations. Since that time, I have made some improvements.
Using a combination of techniques from artificial intelligence, math, and linguistics, the rhyming engine can now figure out how to say any word that you enter. That means if you enter a word that is not in the dictionary, it will still be able to find some rhymes.
Rather than looking for technically perfect rhymes, it suggests words that would sound good together in song or poetry. For example, we sometimes ignore consonants, as suggested by this 1985 paper. That way, fervently will rhyme with urgently despite the v/g mismatch.
There is a legal advantage to this technique as well. Many of the standard word lists used by natural language processing researchers include words from an old edition of the Oxford dictionary, and so cannot be used for "commercial purposes". That's why both Rhymezone and Write Express have a relatively limited dictionary size. My rhyming engine can sidestep this issue, since it only needs to be seeded with a small number of words from unrestricted sources, and it can then import words in bulk, and guess the pronunciations without using any restricted content.
I couldn't resist doing some premature optimization. It uses one of my favourite data structures -- the trie. The program starts, reads the entire 260,000 word database, and completes in 60 ms on my netbook web server. It takes about 8 MB of memory. I guess that equates to about 0.48 mega-byteseconds per request.
