Wesner Moise Claims IDEs Disprove "No Silver Bullets": I Say "Are You Kidding?"

Wesner Moise quickly reviews Brook's "No Silver Bullets" assertion and claims "[t]hat assertion turns out to be pure nonsense, amply disproven by numerous advances in IDEs, languages, frameworks, componentization over the past few decades."

I couldn't disagree more. While the cumulative effects have given us more than an order …

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Office to Skip Version 13: Regardless, Bogeymen Vow Trouble

Apparently, the next version of Office is going to be 14, embracing the triskedecaphobic convention of buildings in skipping the sp-o-o-o-k-y ramifications of, you know, counting.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but when you get to the point where, despite your worldwide hegemony on office documents …

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LineRider: I Want to Clone this on XNA

Things are beginning to look up for me being able to do some XNA-based projects in the new year. I need a couple realizable games to tackle. I have one designed that I'll never be able to get approved (it's called "Fanaticize me!" I think I'd get in trouble even …

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Backseat Playground: GPS-Enabled Automated Storytelling / Game

Backseat Playground is a research project that developed a GPS-based game for kids. It seems more like a (great) storytelling system more than a game. Basically, it uses the GPS and location-awareness to introduce game elements, e.g., when it sees that you're driving over a bridge, it presents you …

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Lives of the Ancient Geeks

\<a href="http://www.knowing.net/images/ComputersoftheAncientGeeks_74BC/image05.png"" atomicselection="true">Scientists have reverse engineered the Antikythera Mechanism, a sophisticated analog computer that was known to have calculated lunar phases and a luni-solar calendar. Newly reported is that it additionally calculated lunar and solar eclipses! Additionally, it may …

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Envy Code R Font Preview Entices

Damien Guard has done some work on a great looking monospaced font. He hasn't finished it yet, so be sure to post about it so that he gets a whole bunch of technorattention for the project and is shamed into finishing it. (via Brad Wilson)

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I'm emotionally reversed

Julie Lerman parsed from an email of mine that I :

  • am "kinda nervous" about Tina's first mammogram since her mastectomy,
  • was "scared" by the 12' tiger shark I saw while diving the other day, and
  • am "terrified" of installing a new hard drive

Apparently, I've got an inverter on my …

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New F# Compiler Released; Thoughts on "Practical OCaml" by Joshua Smith

Microsoft has posted version 1.1.13.8 (whatever the heck that means) of their F# compiler, which gives me an excuse to discuss the book Practical OCaml by Joshua Smith.

Practical OCaml is a new release from APress. My favorite technical book of last year was Practical Common Lisp …

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Measuring the speed of a meme

This post is attempting to measure the speed with which a blog post can propagate across the blogosphere. Feel free to link to it.

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Modified Snapshot Pattern

Here's a good pattern to use when you have a domain object that combines non-varying and time-varying data. Perrin's modified the original pattern to use generics: a good choice. (Why is it a good choice? Because objects that combine these two types of data are usually conceived of in a …

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