News Items

News for Wednesday, March 22 2006

Hovering cars appear on Google Earth. The truth is out there!

Code Master Challenge. Write a Windows Vista app, win $50,000USD. What could be more simple?

According to producer, Rick McCallum, the series will be set between episodes three and four and should begin production in 2008.

He missed the record by about 2,000 digits, and is only about 12th on the world-wide list of reciters.

Developers have an opportunity for revenue from developing mini-applications, called Gadgets, for Windows Vista according to Microsoft VP Joe Belfiore.

Learn more about the upcoming Office file formats (soon to be ECMA Standard)

Sun Developer Expert Assistance program will provide e-mail based answers ($99USD per request) and Sun Community Champions Program will highlight community developers for their work promoting Sun tools and services.

You'll now have to wait a few more sleeps before you get your hands on the shipping version of Windows Vista as it's now set for release in January 2007.

News for Tuesday, March 21 2006

The motor that rotates Mars rover Spirit's front right wheel seems to have stopped working according to NASA officials. Only 779 days into its 90 day mission.

Bridging the gap between application developers and Web designers has always been a problem for companies building high-impact Web sites. Now Microsoft Corp. thinks it has the answer through its use of an XML-based language called Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML).

Samsung has begun selling their new flash-based hard drive. Silent and fast, but only 32GB. (Pricing not mentioned)

Now everyone's favourite search engine has a finance page. Beta, of course.

Is is part of the longest ever translation exercise for The Code Project, or just curiousity by the code-frog?

Still love Netware? Don't worry, Novell does too -- at least until 2015.

Reviews of cool stuff by geeks like us.

The EclipseCon 2006 conference in Santa Clara, Calif., this week will highlight Eclipse projects in ALM (application lifecycle management), as well as endeavors in rich-client technology, PHP (PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor), and VoIP.

Want to know how to build a game? Microsoft has released the source code for MechCommander 2 to show you how XNA Build will help. (Caution: download is over 1GB)

The news of COBOL's death is exaggerated.

News for Monday, March 20 2006

Bangalore, India, is a booming, sprawling metropolis. You can find almost anything here. You can even find a piece of Cincinnati if you know where to look.

The March Community Technology Preview of XNA (Microsoft's upcoming gaming API) is now available.

Is C++/CLI gaining momentum, or do more people leave C++ for unmanaged development? Discuss.