Vos Virtual Network

Maybe you figured out that I love jazz. I enjoy many musical genres, and musical styles, but lately I’ve been really exploring jazz. In a recent article I described jazz as being full of  images, mirrors, and reflections.  Jazz is like a bridge — always going from someplace to another place. Jazz is always asking questions, bending notes, refactoring routines, revisiting and revising themes, and making analogies. Jazz energizes me with its innovative musical poetry of patterns, parallels and allegories.

Jazz Piano Art - found at Detroit River Days

Back in April, I started talking about creativity, innovation, improvisation … and how it relates to jazz and the blues… meditating on the mysteries of musical creativity  … compared to creativity , innovation, and risk taking in other domains (like art, architecture, design, entrepreneurship, computer programming, product design, web design, etc.) … pondering the amazing results that often happen when a skilled musician begins  to improvise with a good idea and the right attitude.

Surprising success and fantastic results can happen in your life (or your business) when you understand how it all works.  Innovation - It’s not a new idea, and I’m not the only one talking about this. I’m just improvising on a great theme.

Nick Sieger (no relation to the Detroit rocker Bob Seger) wrote a great article in July called Jazzers and Programmers. I found Nick’s article while researching some things about Ruby on Rails, and JRuby.  NIck describes the history and styles of jazz and compares it to the history and styles of programming. He talks about jazz fundamentals, and compares the rhythm section (piano, bass, and drums)  to programming libraries, frameworks, and patterns. He compares Bass-Drums-Piano to Model-View-Controller. It’s really great stuff — and even includes a musical score from one of the jazz standards, Blue Monk.

Nick spiced up the article with nifty quotes from famous jazz musicians like: “It’s taken me my whole life to know what not to play” - Dizzy Gillespie … “Anyone can make the simple complicated. Creativity is making the complicated simple” - Charles Mingus  …  I won’t steal anymore of Nick’s thunder. Go read the whole article.

Are you catching my drift? We’re not done with this jam session yet. I’m just taking a breather in between songs.

Tags: creative thinking, I love jazz, improv, improvisation, innovation, jazz, jazz musician, jazz standard, JRuby, Model View Controller, music, MVC, ruby on rails, scripting

PHP, JavaScript, Ruby, Perl, Python, and Tcl Today: The State of the Scripting Universe

Three years ago, Lynn Greiner at CIO Magazine, interviewed the big cheeses responsible for the popular scripting languages PHP, Perl, Tcl, Python, Ruby and JavaScript to find out where the languages were headed. In this follow-up discussion, she asks the dynamic language luminaries what has changed since then.

… and discussion of the article continues at Slashdot.

Tags: javascript, perl, php, Python, Ruby, scripting, Tcl

This is a test of PHP Script Syntax Highlighting with the GeSHi code colorizing and syntax parsing library, along with the WP-Syntax plugin.

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//
// Include the GeSHi library
//
include_once 'geshi.php';
//
// Define some source to highlight, a language to use
// and the path to the language files
//
$source = '$foo = 45;
for ( $i = 1; $i < $foo; $i++ ){
echo "$foon";  --$foo;
}';
 
$language = 'php';
 
// Create a GeSHi object
 
$geshi = new GeSHi($source, $language);
 
// And echo the result!//
echo $geshi->parse_code();

Tags: code colorizing, code documenting, code examples, colorizing, computer languages, parsing, php, script examples, scripting, syntax, syntax highlighting

Here are 19 Rails Tricks Most Ruby Coders Did Not Know — until the article was published… I liked the pointer about using BackgroundRB to run long running tasks (in the background).

Tags: coding, hints, How To, programming, rails, Ruby, ruby on rails, scripting, tips, tricks

An unofficial Python Tutorial is at growing in the InfoGami wiki system. It has a nice layout and the code examples are easy to read. See for instance the section on Python Modules, or the Brief Tour of the Standard Python Library. I just really appreciate it when the page layout is so clean and easy to read, code examples sprinkled like spice — which makes this technical documentation for Python easy to study.

Tags: code examples, documentation, How To, programming, Python, scripting, tutorial