Mitch Walker provides an excellent screencast showing the use of components within XNA GSE. However, looking at it I kept thinking "Shouldn't this be a domain-specific language"? I have to be careful here because, obviously, drag-and-drop designers have proven to be successful. But using the design surface as nothing but …

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from Kathy Sierra via John Lam

Ah hah! Joel Spolsky posts a technique that allows Vista to instal on VMWare: edit the .vmx file (a plaintext file) and add the lines svga.maxWidth="640" and svga.maxHeight="480". This allows you to see the Vista install (with crappy posterized colors). After Vista boots, install VMWare Tools …

Infants exposed to a Mandarin-speaking adult for less than 5 hours (25-minute sessions over 4 weeks) were "able to distinguish phonetic elements of that language." Very impressive. But infants exposed to a similar amount of speech delivered over DVD could not. Fascinating. General-audience article here (via The Old New Thing …

Microsoft rapidly pushed out, via Windows LiveUpdate, a patch to invalidate the FairUse4WM application, which strips the Digital Rights Management (anti-copying) mechanism of Windows Media Player. Most comments on this have spoken of the apparently greater zeal applied to DRM than to security, but the incident is far more infuriating …

The release of IronPython is, in and of itself, A Good Thing. But maybe the best thing is that it's a shared-source release with a very reasonable license. Not because I'm a utopian about the quality of open source, but because I really quite like the code structure. Apropos my …

Amazon has released "Unbox," their video purchase / download service. TV shows are \\(1.99 each and you get \\)1.99 rebate on your first purchase. They've got all 3 seasons of Star Trek and I'm greatly tempted to have colorful glowing brains wagering quatloos (until Kirk teaches 'em what real …

The September 1st issue of SD Times contains two opinions on Ruby, "It Isn't All A Gem," by Andrew Binstock and my "Crossing the Chasm." Allen Holub's column "Just Say No to XML" is also provocative. As usual, surface disagreements belie underlying agreements: there is nothing that either Andrew or …

A commenter on a recent post asked a question I get quite a bit, namely, "What's the market in Hawai'i for high-tech professionals?" The short answer is that in Honolulu it's great and that every place else in the state it's poor. Honolulu's a million-person city and has banks and …

BookMooch is a good idea -- give a book, get a point, get a book, take a point -- but the logistics proved too off-putting for me. Not that they were egregious, but given my life, the last thing I need is another errand on my "to do" list.