Ingredients for Web 2.0
I thought this would be lukewarm, but the delivery was great 
Archive for June, 2006
Burning CDs or DVDs on XP
If you ever need to burn an ISO under Windows XP, the solution is not obvious. Just find the “Windows Resource Kits” somewhere out on the internets. It will install in your ‘Program Files\Windows Resource Kits\Tools’ directory a bunch of handy executables. The two you will use are cdburn.exe and dvdburn.exe. Just run them without commands and their help will tell you what to do. They are both a grand total of 32k in size.
Simon Tatham, Tom Duff - You Rock
Simon Tatham - author of this piece on Coroutines in C (more a fun thing to see that you can do in C), also one of the authors of Nasm, is the author of the most awesome console program ever… PuTTY!
Tom Duff - the original author of the original trick. Pure genius.
Good things come in at under 100k
.kkrieger - a sub 100k game demo with incredible textures, lighting, and shadows by .theprodukkt
AND
tcc - Tiny C Compiler - small and fast … which can also compile linux on boot in 15 seconds with tccboot
so good!
A greasemonkey script for Schwab
I made a greasemonkey script for schwab.com. I made a page for it over here on my blog. Basically, it just expands a view that is always shrunk when I login. Annoying.
Microsoft GDI+ circa 1999
Here is a link to a paper written by Microsoft on their next generation graphics system GDI+. I also talks a bit about 3D user interfaces. . I tried the email address at the bottom of the paper, but it just bounces now.
What did they get wrong? They thought Shared Memory Architectures for graphics would be where it is at (I think they saw SGI doing this). This just didn’t happen. The GPU systems diverged further and advanced independently and significantly.
Microsoft Vista
Ok, Microsoft is one of those companies with some scary negative tendencies. Marketing and management is trying to put on the face of “we are nice people, we care”… with the highly visible slip ups to the contrary (they still think they can play the game the same old way). Then you have the many MS engineers and product managers. Those people are all over the map. A lot of them are very good and I’m sure they have their frustrations. Then you add those two groups together and its kind of like watching the movie WarGames when they are trying to break into the WOPR the last time. Where you have management constantly saying “Stand down the missles!!!” as “Make huge margins!!! Just good enough, and no more!!!” while other people just have to roll their eyes until they understand what the situation really is.
These people are creating the next desktop OS that will probably last for the next 5 years. Microsoft Vista. Yet, even with all of the crazy things happening, it will be better for me. They will keep the same keyboard shortcuts, APIs, and drivers. They will add a bunch of new stuff that eventually will be forgotten. At the same time, they will dramatically improve the graphics systems. That’s really all I care about, better graphics. Vista will have that and the best driver support on the planet for the cards that will render those pixels.
If they had it next month, I would install it.
