Alan Zeichick relates what happened when the first .docx file was sent to BZ Media, a company that runs primarily on Macs. Microsoft says that everything's just swell:

We are running on target and expect to release a free public beta version of the file format converters in Spring 2007 …

My house is built on a bit of a ridge between two gullies (well, two collapsed lava tubes -- I do live on the side of an active volcano, after all). Grand plans include decks and terraces, but I can't envision them without a plan. Of course, I could hire surveyors …

It's been a good couple weeks for Ruby IDEs. First, Ruby In Steel was released. Pretty much simultaneously, ActiveState releasedKomodo 4 with support for Ruby.

Komodo is a significantly "weightier" IDE and Ruby is just one of the many languages it supports. It is, I suppose, more akin to …

Gunnar Peterson, responding to my posts on REST, says we cannot punt on message-level security. He cites 3 security breaches as evidence that the "the 1995 security model" of "firewall, SSL, and a prayer" won't cut it. However, I don't believe that any of these breaches would have been thwarted …

Sam Gentile says:

[W]hen people bitch about WS-*, I don't get how its not obvious that "the main characteristics of Web services is communication over unreliable communication channels such as the Internet employing unreliable data transfer protocols such as HTTP, SMTP and FTP" and many of us need things …

Jim Gray, who did fundamental work on transaction processing and won theTuring Award, is missing off California's Farallon Islands. The good news is that weather has been good and he was sailing in a 40' yacht, which ought to provide ample shelter for a few days. The bad news is …

I lag behind in this brave new era.

I've been running Vista in VMWare virtual machines and having an acceptable, but not good, experience. No glass, no NUMA (one of the few interesting APIs targetting concurrency), performance less than stellar.

However, with the time at hand to install Vista to …

In order to provide Intellisense for Ruby, a language that does not have explicit typing, Ruby In Steel turns to type inference. The built-in inferencing can be aided by adding type assertions to a function, for instance:

#:return: => nil
 #:arg: c => String
 def Bar(c)
 @field = c
    puts @field
 end …

Here's the Ruby In Steel editing / debugging experience. Intellisense works dynamically -- as soon as you define a function, it becomes available to Intellisense. The debugging experience seems to be the standard VS one (that is, pretty darned good).

REPL functionality is provided by IRB in a console window: not ideal …

+-------------------------------------------------------------------------------+------------------------------------------------------------+ | | I am:\ | | | | | | > Gregory Benford | | | | | | A master literary stylist who is also a working scientist. | +-------------------------------------------------------------------------------+------------------------------------------------------------+

Which science fiction writer are you?