I'll be interviewing Jonathan Schaeffer next week about his amazing checkers solution. Right now, he's busy at a big \<a href="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19875057/"" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">man-machine poker showdown. Suggested questions welcome...

\<a href="http://blogs.msdn.com/mapo/archive/2007/07/17/windows-powershell-free-ebook-at-microsoft.aspx"" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Free 40-page eBook on PowerShell (via Steve Pietrek)

Wesner Moise's NStatic static-analysis tool for .NET appears to be approaching its initial beta. Moise has made a number of exciting claims for this technology since he began discussing it about 18 months ago. If I understand correctly, NStatic involves considerably "deeper" analysis than most quality-assurance tools; it almost seems …

Wow! Jonathan Schaeffer of the University of Alberta has solved the game of checkers. Games like tic-tac-toe, checkers, chess, and go are all known to have optimal strategies (I don't recall  of the exact game-theory restriction that describes such games: "perfect information, sequential"?). That's why tic-tac-toe is boring -- it's always …

A few weeks ago I got an email asking if I was interested in selling one of my idle domain names -- inkpositive.com. "Sure," I said, and named a price that covered the hour of time it would take me to transfer the domain. The subsequent process (contract, escrow.com …

Looking for enough cores to start seeing complex behavior? Check out this Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 Acer Aspire from CompUSA for \\(750 (sheesh, the *chip* goes for about \\)580!).

Or, if you're rolling in the dough, CNet quite \<a href="http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/ptech/07/17 …

I love this prototype / early version by Mitch Barnett of a web-based IDE for distributed programming using IronPython. It reminds me of my last dot-comet system: a Web-based assessment framework (I'd say "testing framework" but you'd think NUnit when you should be thinking certification). You were presented the pre-conditions, post-conditions …

You know I love my homeys at \<a href="http://www.sdtimes.com/"" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">SD Times, but ought not the headline read: "Study states obvious, costs money"?  

O'Reilly has made the back issues (from 1983 to 2006) of Esther Dyson's "Release 1.0" newsletter available as freely-downloadable PDFs: O'Reilly Radar > Release 1.0

The newsletter was very forward-thinking; I just grabbed the June 1989 issue (the month I was hired at Computer Language) and found a discussion …

The Ruby language contains the built-in module ObjectSpace, which provides programmatic access to the entire world of living objects. For instance, in Ruby you can write:

ObjectSpace::each_object(Class) do |c|
 p c if c < Test::Unit::TestCase
 end

which will iterate over every instance of Class in the …