King Kong: Good Movie, But the FX Aren't The Best

I liked King Kong quite a bit, and I'll say that the special effects of Kong's face are the best I've ever seen. But in most of the action scenes, I thought the effects were a notch below Lord of the Rings. The dinosaur chase scene I thought was really …

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Getting Sacked The Week Before Christmas

CMP, a major trade publisher, laid off a bunch of people in their software development publishing group on Friday, including blindsiding a five-month pregnant editor who'd worked there for more than a decade. Ah, corporate America!

I suspect that at least two well-known but ad-challenged magazines are going to shut …

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Logic programming with Iterators

::: {.Section1} [Wesner Moise has a fantastic blog post on how iterators and Expressions can be used to implement backtracking:]

It turns out that it is possible to implement logic programming in C\# natively through the use of iterators.  
grandparent(x, z) :– parent(x, y), parent(y, z).
 parent(jebbush, gpbush …
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The Dismal Failure of XSLT

XSLT is used to transform one XML document into another. The canonical example is the transformation of a data-oriented XML document into a XHTML document formatted for reading in a browser. However, the evolution of dynamic Web sites has clearly favored procedural programming to get the data (ASP, PHP, etc …

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Too Twisted: Text Entry via Tilting Toshiba!

Seb Wills has hooked the accelerometers in the Toshiba M200 to control the Dasher text-input system (in which letters gradually slide from right-to-left and your vertical motion selects them). Fantastic!

One of the most interesting things about the Tablet PC is all the ways we search for alternate input techniques …

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IronPython in Visual Studio CTP available

Microsoft has just released a CTP with the first version of IronPython / Visual Studio integration: http://affiliate.vsipmembers.com/downloads/41/UserFileDownload.ashx

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MSBuild tasks for Subversion access

The msbuildtasks project at http://msbuildtasks.tigris.org/ has written tasks for MSBuild that include Subversion commit, update, checkout, etc. Also, they have an FTPUpload that double definitely come in handy. Fantastic!

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MSBuild: Determine Available Tasks and Outputs

It can be hard, when using MSBuild, to know what Tasks (aka Targets aka functions) are available, especially when using the built-in .targets files associated with the compilers. So, I wrote a custom Task that iterates over all the other Tasks that are currently loaded and outputs their [Output] properties …

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Saddam "refuses to appear"? WTF?

Okay, totally off-topic, but how can a prisoner refuse to appear at his own trial? And then he gets a two-week delay of the trial? This does not bode well for establishing the supremacy of the rule of law. Talk about "contempt of court."

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Sunsets growing later...

Since the Earth orbits the sun elliptically and therefore a) accelerates and b) has to turn about a degree more than a full circle to bring the sun into the same position, sunrise and sunset are not symmetrical around local noon. Here in Hawaii, the sun set today at 5 …

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