I've never played Halo nor Halo 2. I've now played the first level ("Groundfall" or somesuch) of Halo 3. Gotta' tell you: my initial impression is that it's not as entrancing as Gears of War or Call of Duty. The cutscenes make absolutely no sense to a newbie, the level …

Excel 2007: The problem is that the 3rd column contains =a2*b2 ... (the first 500 numbers for 2\^32 pass, though...)

 13
 26
 49
 52
 81
 87
 93
 98
104
107
115
117
119
123
162
169
173
174
186

etc. etc.

Is there a pattern in there?

Helpful

casey chesnut has been \<a href="http://www.mperfect.net/blog/browse.aspx%3fbid%3d633261847266875000"" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">playing around with augmented reality for the UMPC. I think he's going strictly for a technology demo, but the physical tags he's constructed seem to be about the right size …

Intel's announced the availability of a prototype C++ compiler implementing Software Transactional Memory, one of the central topics of this brilliant \<a href="http://www.knowing.net/ct.ashx%3fid%3df405eb51-5e89-4e9d-864f-529914e78017%26url%3dhttp%253a%252f%252fwww.dotnetrocks.com%252f"" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">.NET Rocks show.

That's exciting, although …

I love this idea: a magnifying glass with a built-in expert system for identifying bugs. That's a nice combination of form and function. My thrill was clouded upon reading the that it only identifies "more than 50 real live bugs;" if you're going to do the hardware and firmware for …

I'm not one of those people for whom the task of composition is a somewhat mechanical extension of increasingly detailed outlines. Nonetheless, research consumes between 80-90% of the time I spend on a technical article (note I said time and not effort -- subjectively, writing text is two or three times …

Some d00d named Leppie has written a \<a href="http://xacc.wordpress.com/"" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Lisp for the DLR [via Jason Bock]

Alan Zeichick deserves a fortune in Amazon referral fees for \<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Cables-Go-35507-Connector-Cable/dp/B000JG3WBY"" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">this: iPod connector to RCA plugs. 

Probably the biggest difference between academic and commercial writing is this: academic writing is almost always concerned with algorithms and process, commercial writing is almost always driven by a specific set of technologies. In this case, I'm being paid by AMD to explain integration of CodeAnalyst and Eclipse CDT. So …