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Here’s a great LEGO based Turing machine, Denis writes -

I chose to implement in Lego a slightly different version of the original Turing machine. Instead of having a bi directional tape, it uses a stack. When the symbol beneath the stack is read (and removed), the machine changes “states” and can add zero, one or two symbols on top of the stack.

This variation is maybe very different yet it is possible to show that this simple machine has the same capabilities than a Turing machine. Among other things, it can emulate a Turing machine placed on the stack.

I programmed a small interface (through an Access database so Microsoft Access must be installed on your computer) to enter an test simple Automaton With Append (AWA or AAA in French). Follow this link to download the demo: AAA.zip.

One reason to build the automaton with append instead of the original Turing machine was that I avoided building a bi directional (near) infinite tape.

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Today at Graphing Social Patterns, executives from hi5, AOL, MySpace and imeem provided updates on their OpenSocial platform usage. Patrick Chanezon from Google opened by explaining that Chinese service OpenPNE out of China and StudiVZ out of Germany are the two newest OpenSocial providers. He also shared some updated stats:

– 19 days in production
– 275 million users
– 66 million installs
– 2,000 applications built on OpenSocial
– 20,000 developers
– 10 million daily app users

AOL

The AOL OpenSocial discussion was brief as the panel was almost out of time but the discussion focused on the third-party and advertising aspects.

imeem

imeem focused on music and showed off some basic OpenSocial goodies you could build on imeem. Apparently you can access the entire music library on imeem using OpenSocial.

MySpace

MySpace came out of the gate boasting how large they are and noted they are twice as large as the nearest competitor (without naming Facebook). The pitch was simple, "want to reach the largest OpenSocial community? Build on MySpace." Staggering stat: 12% of all Internet minutes are spent on MySpace! The MySpace guy wouldn’t answer my question about the costs associated with being a "featured app" - said something about being a developer and not a business guy. I don’t buy it for a minute mister!

hi5

For some reason, the hi5 guy decided to open by putting on a gray shirt - he said that all business people wear blue shirts and khaki pants (luckily he didn’t take his pants off!) - the stunt didn’t seem to get much of a reaction from the audience. It felt like hi5 was the little engine that could from his presentation. They do have very strong adoption of the OpenSocial apps by their community.

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A post on how to potentially bring up an OSGi environment, deploy bundles and access an exposed service from a standalone non-OSGi client

TwitterLocal is a great tool for anyone that has ever wondered if anyone close to them, geographically that is, uses Twitter just like they do. This site allows you to input a location, whether it’s a city or a state, and check the surrounding area (up to 20 miles) to see who else is […]

ORM (object-relational mapping) tools have made database access much easier for many applications. However, ORM is not always the best tool for the job. I recently came across some lightweight alternatives to ORM that provide fluent interfaces around JDBC and SQL.

I finally understand why Spore has been delayed for so long. Originally expected for a 2007 release, the simulated evolution game from Electronic Arts (ERTS) studio Maxis was suddenly withheld, much to EA’s chagrin. Maxis head Will Wright explained the delay, saying that the company wanted to make the follow-up to its wildly successful […]

Even if San Francisco’s high-profile, city-wide Wi-Fi network with EarthLink and Google was a fundamental flop, residents of the city that need it the most could still get some free wireless broadband. Meraki Networks, a San Francisco-based startup that makes mesh networking gear is building an ad-hoc San Francisco Wi-Fi network called “Free the Net.” […]

Choice of configuration settings storage is an important topic when it comes to enterprise BizTalk application planning. One of the many options is to use regular .Net configuration files. Some prefer this way over the Enterprise SSO database option for reasons of simplicity and familiarity. I wanted to show how it can be done with Microsoft Enterprise Library configuration application block.

In this case Enterprise Library configuration section is placed in the BTNTSvc.exe.config file while application settings are stored in a separate configuration file. The problem here is how do we make EntLib to load required settings file at runtime.  Its done by simple helper class CustomSettings that looks up registry entry for the location and name of the application configuration file and creates FileConfigurationSource with it. The registry entry can be created  by MSI installation package.

The initialization method of this static helper class looks like this (thread synchronization code omited for brevity):

          RegistryKey regKey = null;

          try
          {
             regKey = Registry.LocalMachine.OpenSubKey(@”Software\MyCompany\MyApplication”);
             configurationFile = Path.Combine(
             (string)regKey.GetValue(“ConfigDir”),
             (string)regKey.GetValue(“ConfigFile”));

              ExeConfigurationFileMap fileMap = new ExeConfigurationFileMap();
              fileMap.ExeConfigFilename = configurationFile;
              configuration = ConfigurationManager.OpenMappedExeConfiguration(fileMap, ConfigurationUserLevel.None);
              configurationSource = new FileConfigurationSource(configurationFile);

              //- store configPath in the settings
              configuration.AppSettings.Settings.Add(
              new KeyValueConfigurationElement(“configDir”, (string)regKey.GetValue(“ConfigDir”)));
           }
           catch (Exception ex)
           {
              Debug.WriteLine(“Exception while initializing Settings:” + ex.ToString());
              throw ex;
           }
           finally
           {
              if (regKey != null) regKey.Close();
           }

 Then it has method to access properties by name:

        public static string GetValue(string name)
        {
            KeyValueConfigurationElement entry = Configuration.AppSettings.Settings[name];

            if (entry == null)
                throw new ConfigurationErrorsException(“Key ‘” + name + “‘ is not found in the configuration file.”);

            return Configuration.AppSettings.Settings[name].Value;
        }

 Which is used as in:

string propertyValue = CustomSettings.GetValue(“propertyName”);

If you keep getting nagged for log ons when using sharepoint this will solve the problem almost 100% of the time. The trick is to use the Windows managed Stored username and password feature. To access this,

1. Simply go into Control Panel
2. Click User Accounts
3. Go into Managed Passwords and click Add
4. Type the URL of the server (without HTTP), for example portal.us.com
5. Enter your credentials and click Ok

Now anytime Windows attempts to access ANYTHING on this server it will use the use those credentials and your prompting issue should go away.

The downside to this is if you change your password, you need to remember to come change it here.

Lots of links again tonight: ToolTip Control by Martin Mihaylov, Scott Morrison(3) on DataGrid, VSM by Ian Griffiths, Lee On Tech, and Tim Heuer, SL2B2 by Karen Corby, Cross Domain Services by Tim Heuer, Yavor Georgiev on Web Services, and GetTemplateChild Issues by Lee.