There are lots of worthy causes out there to donate to, but it's always nice to have a personal connection. Scott Hanselman, whose blog and podcast are must-reading/hearing, is fighting diabetes.

I'll be matching donations to Team Hanselman up to ... see now, never having done this before, I don't …

My goal is to create a VM running Windows 3.11 (VMWare by preference, but Virtual PC if it's easier).

One can download EN_MSDOS60.EXE and EN_WIN311.EXE from MSDN, but these files seem to simply be compressions of the files in the relevant distributions. Most challengingly, EN_MSDOS60.EXE uncompresses …

This is a rather daunting (124 slide) PDF on Sun's "Fortress" programming language, designed in large part by \<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_L._Steele%2c_Jr."" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Guy Steele, which is designed for scientific / mathematical programming. It looks really good -- lots of good decisions …

Michael Seuss has a good blog piece on \<a href="http://www.thinkingparallel.com/2007/05/02/parallel-programming-fun-with-loop-carried-dependencies/"" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">parallelizing code that contains loop-carried dependenciess, which is to say, code such as the following, where the calculation in one pass is dependent on a previous pass' …

Jeff Atwood recommends that everyone read an Intuitive Explanation of Bayesian Reasoning in order to become an initiate in the Bayesian conspiracy. What he doesn't tell you is that Bayes' theorem is only the outermost ring of the Bayesian Conspiracy. Once you've been initiated and spent the necessary apprenticeship bringing …

According to this CNet article, Harry McCracken of PC World resigned when pressured by SVP Colin Crawford to tone down stories critical of advertisers. I have no idea of the inside scoop on this, and the CNet article is full of anonymous sources, but sadly, I can believe it.

I …

Because I use primary_key_prefix_type = :table_name this did the trick for me. Basically, I just set up a hash mapping primary key column names ("InvoiceID" and the like) to the name of the appropriate controller ("invoice_admin"). When outputting a column, if the name of the column is contained in that hash …

Is there a product in the "cheaply deployable" range (say \~\$100) that you can point at a significant SQL Server database and it parses the foreign key relationships and presents a table viewer in which the values in the foreign-key column automatically hyperlink to the relevant table? And this tool …

The source code to the Microsoft.Scripting namespace is available at http://www.codeplex.com/IronPython/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=438

A review of the IronPython codebase in the release makes the early-stage processing look pretty close to the (well-designed) IronPython 1.0 release: there's a language-specific tokenizer, parser, AST …

The preliminary documentation for the DLR is included in the IronPython-2.0A1-Doc.zip download at http://www.codeplex.com/IronPython/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=438 :

We're leveraging the learning we did on IronPython to extract elements that could be common amongst languages (dynamic type system, hosting APIs, cached method dispatch …