Thursday, October 19, 2006

Tool Builders "Programmers should be tool builders. If you're not building tools to make your life easier, you're wasting time. " -- Phil Windley 3:44:18 PM    comment []

PySIG: 26-Oct-2006 SciTE, meld, subversion, lambda expressions Bill Sconce announces: The monthly meeting of PySIG, the New Hampshire Python Special Interest Group, happens on the fourth Thursday of the month, starting at 7:00 PM. Beginners' session starts at 6:30 PM. Bring a Python question! At this meeting we'll begin the often-requested "Python development series", with the specific topics of source-code differencing (using meld - an excellent development tool in its own right, written in Python!), how to integrate tools such as meld into the SciTE editor. In other words, one way to start complementing and moving beyond the interactive Python window. Time permitting, we'll demonstrate similar integration of revision control: Subversion checkins and Subversion diffs. Presented by Bill Sconce (recovering Eclipse user). Kent's Korner (Module of the Month) will be lambda expressions, hosted this month by Mr. Python, Lloyd Kvam of Venix Corp. The full announcement can be found here 2:24:25 PM    comment []

Isenberg reviews Moyers on The Net@Risk David Isenberg does a great job of reviewing the Bill Moyer's show, "The Net@Risk". The show brought out a lot of the problems with mass-ownership of media, the "duopoly" of cable and telephony vendors slowing the US's broadband capabilities (we've slipped below tenth in the world) and how an unbalanced Congress is handing Big Media whatever it wants in 1984-Speak "Net Neutrality" justifications. Congress and Big Media are hurting the US' ability to compete and are harming the Society they are supposed to protect. (Thanks to JOHO for the link.) 12:29:35 PM    comment []

Microsoft to expand WGA to corporations Over at Microsoft Watch, Jason Brooks opines on the efforts Microsoft has spent to bring "Windows Genuine Advantage" to its corporate customers: "What's worse, it appears that Microsoft has been expending significant development resources to make these expanded controls a reality. It seems to me that there's been a rather important and rather delayed product in the works that could've benefited from the developer hours that Microsoft had to devote to building the self-hosted activation server and associated tools required to bring WPA to Microsoft's biggest customers." There's an interesting challenge here: Microsoft may squeeze a few more licenses out of its corporate customers at the cost of alienating a few of them into switching to less difficult solutions. 9:14:43 AM    comment []

Vista RTM up in the air Over at All about Microsoft, Mary Jo Foley reports Allchin: Vista won’t RTM next week. "Vista is not on track to be released to manufacturing on October 25, after all, according to Jim Allchin, co-president of Microsoft's platforms and services division." Whadyaknow. The CD-printing facilities that have to generate the bajillions of CDs and DVDs must cost a lot to leave idle. 9:07:17 AM    comment []

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