Archive for the ‘General’ Category

Software patents here again: Amazon paying Microsoft for use of Linux

As published yesterday, Amazon has agreed to pay Microsoft for the right to use the technology that their Linux servers (and Kindle) allegedly contain. You might go “What?”, but sometimes the real world just surpasses parody plays in terms of absurdity.
Of course, we still have little information on whether Microsoft’s patent claims against Linux are [...]

February 24, 2010  Tags: , ,   Posted in: General  No Comments

VSPaste is great – but vile

VSPaste is a Live Writer plugin I have been using to help in pasting code segments from Visual Studio to my blog. It’s been working great – until I noticed it’s polluting my blog with hidden links to itself.
VSPaste allows me to copy code in Visual Studio and just hit the paste button. And hey [...]

January 16, 2010   Posted in: General  No Comments

OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Office: A serious threat for the empire?

The blog world is abuzz on a Microsoft job posting. The US subsidiary looking for a “Linux and Open Office Compete Lead” – and a team of 13 people – seems to signal a meaty victory for the OS crowd, as it implies Microsoft is taking OpenOffice seriously. Or does it?
As I pointed out in [...]

January 5, 2010  Tags: ,   Posted in: General  No Comments

ReaderWriterLockSlim performance

A while ago I blogged about the performance of various thread synchronization primitives. Due to the insufficient accuracy of my memory cells, I forgot ReaderWriterLockSlim out of the comparison. Let that be fixed here and now.
The comparison method is still the same, and I have amended the previous post with the results of the Slim [...]

December 29, 2009   Posted in: General  One Comment

Move and Flu – the twin reasons for silence

[No technical content in this post]
After the SPC 2009 week, time just seems to have zipped by, with zero blog entries (and I certainly wish blog entries were the only thing “zero” is the appropriate achievement descriptor for). Why is that?
Two main reasons:
First, we moved. Not a big deal per se, but moving from [...]

November 5, 2009   Posted in: General  No Comments

More on future UIs

A while ago I wrote on Microsoft Courier and the UI design implications such a form factor would have. A bit farther in the future, it’s getting even more hardcore.
Long Zheng has a nice post on Microsoft’s most recent future office video (if an 8-minute video is too long, check out the images). What we’re [...]

September 28, 2009  Tags: ,   Posted in: General  One Comment

What does Microsoft Courier mean for UI developers?

So now the rumors of the Microsoft’s next stab at the tablet market seem to be getting more meat around them. And while Courier may never even see the light, it’s a good time to stop and think about the potential developer impact.
If all of the above was unfamiliar to you, check out Gizmodo’s [...]

September 23, 2009  Tags: , ,   Posted in: General  One Comment

A hobby project: Local weather onto Twitter and the Web

A year ago I suddenly grew an interest in following the weather. Being a bit too quality-focused, there was little alternative to buying a Davis Vantage Pro 2 weather station with a cool console inside and mounting it onto the roof of our house. But what kind of dev-minded person would I be, had [...]

August 22, 2009  Tags:   Posted in: General  No Comments

A chart that justifies all the RIA hype (again)

There are web enthusiasts that consider Flash, Silverlight and friends nothing but an accessibility problem. I think there is plenty of potential in RIA technologies that we still haven’t experienced. Data visualization is definitely one of the top fields, and NY Times just posted a Flash chart that reminds me why.
Check out the interactive chart [...]

August 12, 2009  Tags: , ,   Posted in: General  2 Comments

The Windows 7 chkdsk crash – and how would Linux have fared?

Stories of the Windows 7 showstopper bug with a chkdsk crash have been circulating. Newly appointed Windows President Steven Sinofsky was pretty conversational on the issue, and has now posted their notes on how crash reports get handled. Had it not been Microsoft, how would other vendors have managed?
Unfortunately, Steven’s latest blog post is very [...]

August 10, 2009  Tags: ,   Posted in: General  17 Comments