Balafon

I have released a new version (1.0.2) of the Neurocognitive Linguistics Laboratory software.

The program is available for download for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

This update contains mostly user interface improvements, including:

• Added some sample files to the distribution.
• Cut and paste: you can now cut, copy and paste network items.
• You can now zoom in and out of the network view.
• Printing support: you can print network diagrams or export them to a variety of graphics formats.
• Implemented node threshold learning similar to that in Colin Harrison’s dissertation.
• Added a network item type for text labels.
• Added some nice icons from the Silk icon set.
• You can now edit common properties when more than one item is selected.

Please see the changelog for further details.

Neurocognitive Linguistics Lab (“NeuroLab” for short) is a program that allows you to experiment with the relational networks of Sydney Lamb‘s neurocognitive linguistics model using a convenient GUI, and record the results of your experiments in tabular form.

The Neurocognitive Linguistics Lab is Copyright (C) 2010 Gordon Tisher, and available under the terms of the BSD License.

In case anyone needs to send Outlook meeting invitations from C# (or VB.NET, etc.), I have found the following resources useful:

• http://chuckdotnet.blogspot.com/2007/10/send-outlook-meeting-requests-with.html
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/461889/sending-outlook-meeting-requests-without-outlook
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2654743/cancel-outlook-meeting-requests-via-mailmessage-in-c

It turned out that adapting none of the code in these links worked correctly (the goal is to have Outlook add the “Attend”, etc. buttons) the only way that worked for me was to send a request, and then cut-n-paste the resulting ICAL file, filling the relevant fields with my data.

It seems Outlook is incredibly finicky in what it accepts, and incredibly liberal in what it generates.

The first self-replicating pattern has been developed in Conway’s Game of Life.

Developing in Visual C++, I came across the dreaded “Application failed to initialize properly” error. This is usually caused by a missing DLL, but in this case all the DLLs were there.

I finally realized that a static variable in one of the DLLs was throwing an exception in its constructor, causing the load to fail.

I ran into the strangest problem today. After upgrading to IE8, my Visual Studio 2005 (this is for work on a legacy system) debugger would detach all by itself soon I hit F5 to debug an ASP.NET page via IIS.

Turns out this is due to IE8′s use of separate processes for tabs. To disable this behavior, set a DWORD value of 0 in the key HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main\TabProcGrowth.

Of course this negates the benefit of running tabs in separate processes, but the debugger will not automatically detach.

Update: make sure you set the registry value in the 32-bit hive.