In comments to my previous post, Wesner Moise says:

• given today's components, "why build vi?";
• the difficulty arising from software state "is a solved problem in functional programming"; and
• suggests that the advances in graphics and networking that I'd acknowledged amount to a silver bullet.

I'm afraid he's missing the …

I'm going out on a limb, I know, but I'm going to say that I don't think NASA will be ready to begin construction base on the moon in the year 2020 and, darn it, I know I shouldn't speculate wildly like this, but I'm going to say that when …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

\<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 have …

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)

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 …

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 …