Normally I program in Java, but recently I needed to write a quick program, and I turned to my favorite language for such tasks, Python. I hadn’t used Python for a while, so I’d forgotten how much I like the language — terse, clean syntax, and an elegant design. But I’m still looking for a …
Category Archives: Software and the Internet
Borland switches JBuilder to Eclipse
In a move a lot less talked about than Mac to Intel, Borland announced that a future version of JBuilder will be based on Eclipse. This is good news both for Borland and Eclipse — Borland can focus its energies on building on JBuilder top of an IDE ecosystem, instead of trying to compete against …
Speaking of Macs…
The two features I find most interesting about Mac OS X 10.4 (“Tiger”) are not the ones getting the biggest hoopla, Spotlight and Dashboard. I’m more intrigued by improvements aimed at programmers. Core Data helps the developer manage the data within an application. Core Data, along with Cocoa Bindings, promises to make it much easier …
Big week in information technology
It’s been a more eventful week in IT land than I expected. First, Microsoft announced yesterday that the next versions of Office for Windows and Mac OS X will use ZIP-compressed XML file formats as the default. Woohoo! No more brittle binary files. And they’re being smart enough to change the extensions so you can …
More about Microsoft’s ClearType Font Collection
Apparently I misunderstood Microsoft’s intent over its new ClearType Font Collection. John Hudson, the designer of one of the typefaces in the collection, says that these new fonts are supposed to be a bonus specifically for Longhorn users.
New fonts, and new controversy, from Microsoft
This won’t be news to font fanatics, but anyway… Microsoft will be distributing six new fonts, called the ClearType Font Collection, that are optimized for on-screen reading. They will start shipping with various Microsoft products next year. But these fonts won’t be freely downloadable (unlike Microsoft’s Core Fonts for the Web, for a while). This …
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KCBS is now webcast
This is more substantive than my previous KCBS posts (about the new jingle, etc.). KCBS started simultaneously streaming audio over the web today, along with 10 other Infinity radio stations. WCBS 880 started in December. I was pleasantly surprised, since Infinity (which is part of Viacom, the owner of CBS) has banned webcasts since late …
Symbolic links and hard links in Windows
I just found out that Windows 2000 and XP have hard links and symbolic links, just like Unix. But Windows doesn’t expose those features in the user interface. Dang it, I could have been using links for the past 5 years! Thankfully, some enterprising programmers have created utilities for creating and removing symbolic links (called …