Wow! Jonathan Schaeffer of the University of Alberta has solved the game of checkers. Games like tic-tac-toe, checkers, chess, and go are all known to have optimal strategies (I don't recall  of the exact game-theory restriction that describes such games: "perfect information, sequential"?). That's why tic-tac-toe is boring -- it's always …

A few weeks ago I got an email asking if I was interested in selling one of my idle domain names -- inkpositive.com. "Sure," I said, and named a price that covered the hour of time it would take me to transfer the domain. The subsequent process (contract, escrow.com …

Looking for enough cores to start seeing complex behavior? Check out this Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 Acer Aspire from CompUSA for \\(750 (sheesh, the *chip* goes for about \\)580!).

Or, if you're rolling in the dough, CNet quite \<a href="http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/ptech/07/17 …

I love this prototype / early version by Mitch Barnett of a web-based IDE for distributed programming using IronPython. It reminds me of my last dot-comet system: a Web-based assessment framework (I'd say "testing framework" but you'd think NUnit when you should be thinking certification). You were presented the pre-conditions, post-conditions …

You know I love my homeys at \<a href="http://www.sdtimes.com/"" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">SD Times, but ought not the headline read: "Study states obvious, costs money"?  

O'Reilly has made the back issues (from 1983 to 2006) of Esther Dyson's "Release 1.0" newsletter available as freely-downloadable PDFs: O'Reilly Radar > Release 1.0

The newsletter was very forward-thinking; I just grabbed the June 1989 issue (the month I was hired at Computer Language) and found a discussion …

The Ruby language contains the built-in module ObjectSpace, which provides programmatic access to the entire world of living objects. For instance, in Ruby you can write:

ObjectSpace::each_object(Class) do |c|
 p c if c < Test::Unit::TestCase
 end

which will iterate over every instance of Class in the …

Forbes has a few-hundred word article on the decline in tech-sector print media. (via \<a href="http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/blog/blogView%3fshowComments%3dtrue%26entry%3d3362119884"" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">James Robertson) Nothing specific to the software development industry, but still, another data point...

This tool from Microsoft Research:

lets users quickly convert existing maps into an online format that's as fast and easy to use as Virtual Earth. PDF and raster maps can be converted in minutes just by clicking on corresponding landmarks on the user's map and the global maps in Virtual …

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I figure I'll be the #1 programming blog by the end of the month.