With SIGGRAPH Looming, MSR Releases Interesting Papers

If it's Summer, it must be SIGGRAPH! All sorts of interesting things over at Microsoft Digital Image Suite 2006? ... anyway, other stuff they've shown, like automatic erasure of distracting objects, best shot selection, automatic compositing is all very impressive. Something to keep our hex-core processors humming in the year 2016 …

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Monopoly as an Interview Question for Software Developers

Reginal Braithwaite's favorite interview question of programmers is: Sketch out a software design for a game of Monopoly (via Coding Horror). I dunno'. I like it in terms of being open-ended and non-trivial, but it's a real quagmire. I mean, my first reaction was to drop back to OO 101 …

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Active Record as a Rule Engine

Snap! Ayende Rahein has shown how Active Record can be used to implement a rules engine. I'd had some thoughts about backward-chaining and LINQ lately as part of a forthcoming post, it's nice to see some groundwork laid.

BTW, this is via Sam Gentile, whose \<a href="http://www.knowing …

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Tina's cancer-free

I've mentioned my wife's breast cancer on this blog a few times and now, officially, it's my wife's ex-breast cancer. We're back home after recuperating from her 3rd surgery (if you need to recuperate from a surgery and are looking for a place with a fun view, I highly …

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Apologies to the "Made in Express" Finalists

In an earlier post, I was thoughtlessly harsh about the finalists in Microsoft's "Made in Express" contest. It's come to my attention that at least several of the contestants felt insulted by the post. To them I apologize: I wish them nothing but the best and envy them their enthusiasm …

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The Haar Transform

::: {style="direction:ltr;margin-top:0in;margin-left:0in;width:6.8736in"} ::: {style="direction:ltr;margin-top:0in;margin-left:0in;width:3.2243in"} The Haar Transform :::

::: {style="direction:ltr;margin-top:.0493in;margin-left:0in;width:1.5854in"} Saturday, June 24, 2006

9:52 AM :::

::: {style="direction:ltr;margin-top:.477in;margin-left:0in;width:6.6902in …

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TOAD for MySql: Free Must-Have Tool

How did I miss this? The tool TOAD by Quest Software is utterly essential to developers using Oracle (and, I would guess, DB2). It's not quite utterly necessary for SQL Server developers who have access to one of the higher-end Visual Studio SKUs. But... ah hah! ... it is available for …

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This is a review, tagged with hReview microformat

::: {.hreview} [0.2]{.version style="DISPLAY: none"}

Reviewing the hReview microformat

Jun 23, 2006 by [Larry O'Brien]{.reviewer .fn} hReview

???&#x2606&#x2606 Reviews are one of the most valuable pieces of information one could hope for, guiding purchases as they do, and one of the types of information where the …

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WS-* vs. REST: Jigsaw vs. Tangram puzzle

Harry Pierson quotes Nick Gall on the value of using a small set common modular operations (i.e. the REST / WS-Transfer approach):

Modularity can be open or closed. Closed modularity is like a jigsaw puzzle. There are lots of individual pieces, but they can only be put together one way …

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Novell cans CEO, CFO

Novell today terminated CEO Jack Messman and CFO Joseph Tibbetts. Messman is replaced immediately by Ronald Hovsepian, Dana Russell is interim CFO.

Novell has long been the hardest-to-parse of the major OS vendors. To say they "owned" the network market in the early 90s is to understate things. Their fumbles …

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