Popfly is the name (and URL) of Microsoft's new non-professional developer community, a Windows Live site whose flashiest feature is a Silverlight-based "mashup editor" that facilitates pipes-and-filters development. Before reviewing the gratuitous 3-D spinning cubes, though, pay attention to the context:

• Visual Studio Express has had 14,000,000 downloads …

I'm dying because I've just had a long talk with two of Microsoft's heavy hitters on the Dynamic Languages Runtime (DLR) team and have much to discuss, yet I am in a frenzy preparing for a business trip and cannot yet take the time to do the discussion any kind …

Should array indices start at 0 or 1? My compromise of 0.5 was rejected without, I thought, proper consideration. (Stan Kelly-Bootle)

That quote, which I saw by way of Jeff Atwood's latest, reminds me of what may be my favorite Stan Kelly-Bootle story. Stan worked on the EDSAC which …

It caught my eye that "I'll Stand By You" by Carrie Underwood is the #2 single on iTunes. I clicked on the tune to hear the snippet (I won't buy copy-protected music ever again, but I do like browsing...). Not to be harsh to Carrie Underwood, who has a lovely …

There are lots of worthy causes out there to donate to, but it's always nice to have a personal connection. Scott Hanselman, whose blog and podcast are must-reading/hearing, is fighting diabetes.

I'll be matching donations to Team Hanselman up to ... see now, never having done this before, I don't …

My goal is to create a VM running Windows 3.11 (VMWare by preference, but Virtual PC if it's easier).

One can download EN_MSDOS60.EXE and EN_WIN311.EXE from MSDN, but these files seem to simply be compressions of the files in the relevant distributions. Most challengingly, EN_MSDOS60.EXE uncompresses …

This is a rather daunting (124 slide) PDF on Sun's "Fortress" programming language, designed in large part by \<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_L._Steele%2c_Jr."" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Guy Steele, which is designed for scientific / mathematical programming. It looks really good -- lots of good decisions …

Michael Seuss has a good blog piece on \<a href="http://www.thinkingparallel.com/2007/05/02/parallel-programming-fun-with-loop-carried-dependencies/"" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">parallelizing code that contains loop-carried dependenciess, which is to say, code such as the following, where the calculation in one pass is dependent on a previous pass' …

Jeff Atwood recommends that everyone read an Intuitive Explanation of Bayesian Reasoning in order to become an initiate in the Bayesian conspiracy. What he doesn't tell you is that Bayes' theorem is only the outermost ring of the Bayesian Conspiracy. Once you've been initiated and spent the necessary apprenticeship bringing …

According to this CNet article, Harry McCracken of PC World resigned when pressured by SVP Colin Crawford to tone down stories critical of advertisers. I have no idea of the inside scoop on this, and the CNet article is full of anonymous sources, but sadly, I can believe it.

I …