Sorry about such a string of offtopics but now that I've posted something SD-related, I just have to tell you about literally bumping into Beth and Duane "Dog" Chapman at the airport. Tina and I were over in Honolulu a few days ago, all bleary-eyed and coffee-deprived from an early …

Andrew Binstock has a good post on "Writing your own language -- How to choose a VM." In the post, he says that "Most of these VMs encourage your compiler to output not bytecodes but source code using their native language." But at the level of code generation, you're talking low-level …

When discussing how awesome Children of Men was, Tina pointed out that it had some flaws, like a scene where someone is utterly defeated, the bad guy cocks the gun, all hope is lost, and rat-a-tat-tat come the bullets from off-screen. I said "Oh, you mean the deus ex machine …

According to an article in Seed Magazine (article not online), "early civilizations in Egypt, Peru, Mesopotamia, among other regions, arose not, as traditionally thought, because of the era's relatively benign climate, but instead to cope with an especially harsh one." I don't know about the data, but it's an appealing …

I thought I was the only one in the world who can't stand the Ribbon. I find it much harder to find functions than I did using menus. Alan Zeichick agrees, but for more noble reasons.

Ugly Betty has the exact same plot (including must-be-from-the-same-source-material stuff about how the perfectly routine magazine process called "Run of Book" has special fashion-industry quirks and at least one identical "Are you the 'Before'?" joke), is funnier, and (with the exception of Meryl Streep, who's fantastic) is better cast. (They …

http://www.google.com/search?q=vista+architecture

It seems to be the common wisdom that programmers, as well as the general public, are hesitant about embracing Vista. With results like the above, it's no wonder: at the moment it takes until page 5 to see a relevant text article …

Hoowee! Even with a bad cold, New Year's in Hawaii is a special thing: with July 4th, it is one of 2 days per year that fireworks are legal. I imagine that it's the Asian influence on the society, but for whatever reason, New Year's is much louder than the …

According to InformationWeek, Umakant Sharma, seeded 2nd in a tournament in New Delhi, was caught with a Bluetooth headset stitched into a cap that he wore "pulled down over his ears" during competition. According to the All India Chess Federation, accomplices fed him moves from a chess program. He's been …

Well, more or less...

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There's really no way to program XNA, even in 2D modes, without learning HLSL.