May 25, 2008

"Dynamic Languages Strike Back" talk by Steve Yegge

Very cool talk by Steve Yegge, available in video or transcribed form. I particularly enjoyed tooling part: Moving right back along to our simple dynamic languages, the lesson is: it's not actually harder to build these tools [for dynamic languages]. It's different. And nobody's done the work yet, although ...

April 11, 2007

Amazon Context Links

Amazon has launched Context Links Beta program. The idea is that you insert a little Amazon script into your pages and when the page is open in a browser the script identifies words and phrases it thinks are relevant and makes them links to whatever Amazon products. I enabled the script ...

February 8, 2007

Microsoft-free Daily Grind

If you like the "Daily Grind" by Mike Gunderloy you might like its Microsoft-free version "Quick Links" at the "A fresh Cup" site ("Notes from a recovering Microsoft addict") too. Worth subscribing anyway. ...

December 6, 2006

The Coolest XML Project Contest

I completely forgot that I still have one Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite with MSDN Premium Subscription gift card to give away. And it expires 12/31! Oh boy, what do I do now??? So for the next 2 weeks I'll be holding the "The Coolest XML Project Contest". ...

November 24, 2006

XML Notepad 2006 goes 2007

Just couple of months after XML Notepad 2006 release Microsoft ships another version,  now called XML Notepad 2007. They even went and edited the article "XML Notepad 2006 Design" to be "XML Notepad 2007 Design". Cool. XML Notepad 2006 was released on the 1st September 2006, and 2 months later it had 175,000 ...

November 15, 2006

Exam Insurance: win-win offer in Microsoft certification

If you are up to Microsoft certification you might be interested in this new offer from Microsoft called Exam Insurance: Get two chances to pass your Microsoft Certification exam With Microsoft Exam Insurance, you can retake a Microsoft Certification exam if you need to. You'll have two chances to pass ...

November 10, 2006

Learning Ruby

Man is driven to create; I know I really love to create things. And while I’m not good at painting, drawing, or music, I can write software. I believe that the purpose of life is, at least in part, to be happy. Based on this belief, Ruby is designed ...

November 2, 2006

NASA found another landform face

 Remember this famous Mars face? So recently NASA found another one, here in the Earth, in Australia actually. They call it "Ghostly Face In South Australian Desert". I first though it's about upside-down face that reminds Dali paintings, but no. Can you see a ghost face here? That's really stupid ...

October 24, 2006

Free Brainbench Certification

Just in case somebody needs is: Brainbench is giving away some certification tests for free. Including: .NET Framework Fundamentals ASP.NET C# Java 2 Fundamentals Java 2 Platform Enterprise Edition (J2EE) 1.4 Java 5 Math Fundamentals Visual Basic.NET Fundamentals ...

June 12, 2006

MSDN Wiki

Hmmm, community-driven MSDN documentation... tempting. Microsoft has launched the MSDN Wiki Beta - sort of a wrapper around MSDN documentation site, which adds "Community Content section" to the bottom of each MSDN page. Anybody can contribute any content to that section. Here is my test contribution to the "XslCompiledTransform Class ...

January 17, 2006

How to give away 3 Visual Studio Team Suite/MSDN Premium Subscriptions: looking for ideas

As many other Microsoft MVPs I've been given 3 "Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite with MSDN Premium Subscriptions" redemption cards to share. So now I'm having hard time looking for smart ideas how to do so. One card I would give to Kevin Downs, the guy who runs NDoc if ...

January 8, 2006

Trying out natural keyboard

I've never tried working with natural keyboards. Somehow I thought they are kinda unnatural :) Now I want to give it a try, may be this new Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000: Seems like people love it. It's great to see the latest Microsoft keyboard with standard 2x3 home/end key ...

December 15, 2005

IE7 to adopt orange Firefox RSS feed icon

This is surprisingly cool news - Microsoft RSS Team decided to adopt this orange RSS feed icon used in Firefox to be used in IE7 too. The guys from Mozilla happily allowed the usage of the icon. Here is what Jane from Microsoft RSS team writes: I’m excited to announce ...

November 15, 2005

MSN sponsors TopCoder matches and hires topcoders

MSN joins Google, Yahoo and others supporting the TopCoder community - a major league for programming competitions. MSN is sponsoring 8 TopCoder matches and is giving away $40,000 in cash prizes to the TopCoder Community. MSN is also hiring best topcoders. That's cool. And TopCoder is a great place to ...

October 27, 2005

PDC 2005 videos online

Microsoft put hundreds of hours PDC 2005 videos online at http://microsoft.sitestream.com/PDC05. Here is a list of XML-related and others interesting presentations worthwhile watching IMHO. ...

October 23, 2005

"Share customer's pain" video

I've seen this video at the MVP Summit. Fun, but you know, sometimes I wish something like that was actually deployed. Hey, wait, I'm a developer too... Well, all actions have consequences after all. Oh, and don't forget "Bill Gates goes to college" too. What I can't find on the ...

October 10, 2005

Visual Haskell

I was always sure that's what Haskell desperately needs: Visual Haskell: Visual Haskell is a complete development environment for Haskell software, based on Microsoft's Visual Studio platform. Visual Haskell integrates with the Visual Studio editor to provide interactive features to aid Haskell development, and it enables the construction of projects ...

September 24, 2005

MVP Summit

I'll be at the Microsoft MVP Summit in Redmond next week. I'm Microsoft MVP for second year, but that's going to be my first MVP Summit. That should be fun. ...

August 14, 2005

topcoder.com

I discovered TopCoder.com this weekend and now I know how I'm gonna spend my spare time next decade... ...

July 5, 2005

Cool Web hosting news

Hey, I just noticed that Webhost4Life (web hosting company where I host my sites) greatly increased disk and database space available with their hosting plans - now for the same $10/mo one can get 2Gb of disk space, 2Gb of MS SQL and 2 Gb of MySQL. Hmm, 6 times ...

June 11, 2005

Microsoft Certificaion: Second Shot Offer has been extended through August 2005

Good news for those who missed the opportunity to retake a Microsoft Certificaion exam for free - the Second Shot Offer has been extended through August 2005. ...

May 29, 2005

Did you know? MIT's OpenCourseWare - MIT Courses online for free

Hey, self-learners, did you know that you can take MIT course online for free? MIT's OpenCourseWare made it possible. That's really cool resource for self education. [Via Wesner Moise] Enrolling in an online computer science program can help advance your knowledge. ...

May 1, 2005

Erik Meijer on Helping Programmers Program Better

Erik Meijer, one of designers of Haskell98 and C-omega languages will be presenting an interesting webcast at Tuesday, May 03, 2005 10:00 AM (GMT-08:00): MSDN Webcast: Language Design: Helping Programmers Program Better (Level 300) One of the greatest challenges programmers face is translating the concepts in their head into a ...

April 19, 2005

Microsoft fingerpring reader - Windows XP only?

After reading this, I bought this: just to realize the damn fingerprint reader only works with Windows XP and I've got XP only on my laptop. Oh, shit. Can you believe it? Microsoft fingerprint reader doesn't work with Microsoft Windows Server 2003 or Windows 2000. :( Oh well, still it's ...

Microsoft Knowledge Base - RSS is here

Finally Microsoft Knowledge Base provides RSS feeds. Quite expressive list. [Via Sergey Simakov] ...

April 11, 2005

C-Omega webcast at May 11

Interesting webcast: Learn about Cω (C-Omega), an experimental research language from Microsoft Research that extends Microsoft Visual C# with new constructs for relational and semi-structured data access as well as asynchronous concurrency. Cω is a strongly typed, data-oriented programming language that bridges the gap between semi-structured hierarchical data (XML), relational ...

March 12, 2005

MSDN upcoming webcasts RSS feed

For those like me who missed that - finally you can get informed about upcoming MSDN webcasts in the most natural way - via RSS feed! ...

March 10, 2005

Microsoft Certification Second Shot Offer - if you fail, try second time for free

Nice promotional offer from Microsoft for those interested in Microsoft IT Pro or Developer certification. Register for the offer by May 31, get the promotional code and then take your exam. You you fail, you can use the promotional code to retake the exam for free! ...

December 8, 2004

Jerusalem - satellite view

Cool new image from the NASA Earth Observatory - satellite view of the Jerualem city and area. ...