John Lam details the first public availability of IronRuby. Couple reasons why I'm interested in this:

• It's Ruby
• It's the CLR
• It's a second data point for how to code for the DLR

I don't think I'm going to be able to resist the temptation to write a compiler for …

Joe Gregorio reports the \<a href="http://bitworking.org/news/219/Binary-XML"" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">First Public Working Draft of Efficient XML Interchange (EXI) Format 1.0.  Even that name stinks of bureaucratic ineptitude.

This is my early contender for Worst Idea I've Heard This Year. Or maybe …

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"?