I'm not a big fan of Eclipse -- I'm an IntelliJ IDEA man, myself -- but Europa, this year's coordinated release of components for Eclipse, is now available.

The very good Threading Building Blocks library from Intel, released last year around this time as 1.0 and being updated soon, has been \<a href="http://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/releases/20070724fact.htm%3fiid%3dpr1_releasepri_20070724fact"" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">open-sourced by Intel.  This is a …

We're hiring developers and testers for the Parallel Computing team in Microsoft's Developer Division....[Contact] joedu at microsoft dot com if you are interested.

Interesting, my analysis from last November is unchanged other than time-shifting and yet, emotionally, the availability of TiVo makes a huge impact. On the other hand, I am not sure that they would allow me to change my current TiVo lifetime subscription over to the TiVoHD, so I'd be facing …

John Lam details the first public availability of IronRuby. Couple reasons why I'm interested in this:

• It's Ruby
• It's the CLR
• It's a second data point for how to code for the DLR

I don't think I'm going to be able to resist the temptation to write a compiler for …

Joe Gregorio reports the \<a href="http://bitworking.org/news/219/Binary-XML"" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">First Public Working Draft of Efficient XML Interchange (EXI) Format 1.0.  Even that name stinks of bureaucratic ineptitude.

This is my early contender for Worst Idea I've Heard This Year. Or maybe …

I'll be interviewing Jonathan Schaeffer next week about his amazing checkers solution. Right now, he's busy at a big \<a href="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19875057/"" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">man-machine poker showdown. Suggested questions welcome...

\<a href="http://blogs.msdn.com/mapo/archive/2007/07/17/windows-powershell-free-ebook-at-microsoft.aspx"" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Free 40-page eBook on PowerShell (via Steve Pietrek)

Wesner Moise's NStatic static-analysis tool for .NET appears to be approaching its initial beta. Moise has made a number of exciting claims for this technology since he began discussing it about 18 months ago. If I understand correctly, NStatic involves considerably "deeper" analysis than most quality-assurance tools; it almost seems …

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 …