Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

Rotor, the shared source implementation of .the NET CLR (along with chunks of the SDK and the C# language) now has an official build for Mac OS X. Command line only for the moment, but I'm sure greater minds than mine are working on the Cocoa bindings.

From the MSDN site it appears that requirements won't be too rigorous - on Mac OS X you will need:

• Mac OS X version 10.2.
• Apple Developer Tools.
• The BSD subsystem installed.
• 256 MB memory, 512 MB (recommended).
• One gigabyte of free disk space.

This could be fun.

I just spent most of the day with a background task downloading (over a DSL link!) the trailer to the Korean animated movie Wonderful Days. Wonderful looking SF imagery, a beautiful mixing of CG and cel animation.

Pity we'll probably never see it outside of import DVDs. If any one from Miramax or Buena Vista reads this, they really ought to check the film out.

Beautiful work.

One of the most common pieces of business software, it's everywhere you go, and badly done, it can be intensely annoying (or mind-numbingly tedious) - and it was Colin Powell's main tool at the UN.

Check out this Guardian piece for a concise history of Powerpoint (without the slides, bullet points and pointless transitions). I have to admit to being surprised to find out that Whitfield Diffie was one of the original authors.

While trying to track down a bioraphy of someone at Microsoft I interviewed recently for ADA to make sure I had his job title correct, I found something that made me laugh (which isn't easy when I'm writing up interviews, as I really don't enjoy it!)...

In business consulting we often talk about CXOs, as a general catch-all name for all C-level management. It comes as an amusing surprise to see that Microsoft really does have a CXO: its Chief Xbox Officer.

(Of course the bio I was looking for wasn't on that bit of the site, but, hey, silver linings and all that...)