Eiffel Software, makers of the Eiffel programming language, have made their IDE EiffelStudio available under a "dual license." Use it for commercial software, pay; use it for OSS, get it for free. Interesting idea and a good opportunity to see why Eiffel is a well-respected language.

Well-respected, but never very …

Is this true? I was under the impression that virtualization technology had gotten to the point where this kind of work was fine. If not, I'll try things out on real hardware.

Update: Trying out the n-queens problem (which I think is probably a pretty close match) with n = 14 …

::: {.Section1} What is with the press releases today?

:::

The short commercial at the beginning of Dr. Dobb's TV made me laugh.

::: {.Section1} This press release for a MIME filtering antispam product is attached as a Word document file, one of the primary vectors for viruses.

:::

My Hexodoku Programming Contest is live: the challenge is to generate 16 x 16 Sudoku grids. If multiple entries can consistently beat 1 second, the winner will be the program with best Big O behavior as the order of the grid scales (4\^4, 5\^4, 6\^4, etc.). The …

Hawaii doesn't have "Daylight Savings Time." In the winter, we're 2 hours behind the West Coast and I work from 7 AM to 3 PM in an attempt to make my location as little of an issue as possible. In the summer, we're 3 hours behind. So I have to …

Just got the April 25th edition of PC Mag via Zinio. They've done a redesign and boy, do I not like it. Much more consumerist, big photos, second-class text. Automotive coverage is now a big thing with them: not only do they have a column, but this issue is some …

::: {.Section1}

Some friends took us fishing yesterday and we hooked up 32 pounds of Acanthocybium solandri aka wahoo aka ono. "Ono" is the Hawaiian word for "delicious." It's one of my favorite fishes, but I think I'm going to get tired of it in the coming weeks!

P.S. Troll …

Microsoft is looking for a developer whose "first task will be to drive the exploration of other dynamic languages such as Ruby and JavaScript on the CLR". Dang. If only they allowed people to work remotely...