RIP: Mansour Safai

Mansour Safai, an important player in the software development tools industry, has died. He was still young and my thoughts are with his family and children.

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Novell a good fit for ex-Borland Delphi Group

Of all the scenarios being mooted on the purchase of Borland's line of compilers and IDEs, the one that I like the most is Novell.

Novell's Mono project includes an implementation of the .NET CLI that runs on Windows, Linux, OS X, and a number of UNIXes. The Delphi group …

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No-Longer-Borland Folk Seem Confident

Every indication is that the people involved in Borland's compilers and IDE are confident that they will carry the products forward.

I talked to a couple people and I still haven't heard of a specific suitor, but there's also a real tone of confidence.

There's already a "Delphi Corporation", but …

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Borland Casting Off IDE, Compilers

Today, Borland announced that they are seeking a buyer for their line of IDEs and compilers and will concentrate on their Application Lifecycle Management tools. They also announced that they're buying Segue, which on a normal day would be big news, but, my god, the end of Turbo?

This really …

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Tablet-based handhelds around the corner?

::: {.Section1} TG Daily is reporting that [“Ultra Mobile Lifestyle PCs” will be launched in the 1^st^ Quarter]{style="font-size: 10.0pt;font-family:Arial"} (not much time to make that!). I think there’s huge potential for this form factor if the price point can really be brought down to …

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Outlook's Fatal Flaw as an RSS Aggregator: Desktop Search

I use NewsGator as my aggregator, but I think I'll have to change. The problem is that when RSS posts flow into your system as email items, desktop search for real email becomes much less useful.

For instance, searching your real email archive for words like "schedule" or "deadline" would …

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Programming OneNote 12

I've confirmed that, as one of them thar jour-nye-lists, I can actually write about my experiences with the Office 12 Beta (I'm allowed to talk about client-side stuff only). I have much to say about the new task-based interface, but for my first post I have to talk about OneNote …

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Low on brains

When I'm struggling with a hard problem, I often find myself subvocalizing the logic. It's surprising how often thinking "And therefore.." results in shaking free an elusive conclusion.

But not always. Today, as I tried to figure out some Win32 IPC problem, I found myself thinking the following thought: "And …

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"Ultramobile Lifestyle PCs" Coming Soon

Rob Bushway, blogging from Microsoft's Mobile Partner Briefing says that Ultramobile Lifestyle PCs" with a \$500 MSRP, pen-based, all-day batteries, and a full OS (not CE) are coming real soon now.

Wouldn't that be nice?

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Jolt Awards and Some Worthy Non-Finalists

As always, the last weeks of January are present-time for those of us who are judges in the Jolt Awards, which I launched 16 years ago (how old I am. How very old.)

This year, two books that I thought were exceptional didn't make the final ballot: Vincent Maraia's The …

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