Microsoft Research Asia has cloned the GNU Universal Software Radio Peripheral, details at the USENIX NSDI 09 talk.

The USRP guys mentioned it briefly on their own list.

As long as the hardware can be used from Linux, this is a good thing. If it ends up being the standard proprietary gig, I don't think it'll fly. For once, Microsoft has to compete with an incumbent that they cannot flat out purchase, so they have to throw money at the problem.

Should be interesting to see how this turns out. I have some plans in mind for the GNU USRP that mix nicely with my Cell blades.

Today I'm learning to use IronPython to automate MS Office, I've hpasted my latest experiment.


Now that I've figured out how to load the DLLs, it's just a matter of discovering the Microsoft API for automation. Too bad it's not terribly consistent across the various applications.


The one thing I have not figured out is how to get the type signature of a function while in the Python REPL.

I've also not figured out if it's possible to use IronPython 2 inside Visual Studio 2008. I found IronPython studio, but its homepage says it doesn't work with IP2.



Has anyone used IronPython and has more thoughts or advice?

What n00b used completely different syntax for the two SQL operations that map values onto columns?

Update is:

UPDATE T SET C1 = 1, C2 = 2;

Insert is:

INSERT INTO T (C1, C2) VALUES (1, 2);

Would it not have made more sense to use the same flavor of mapping so that parsing and generating SQL would be easier?

Dear LazyWeb, is there any good reason for this inconsistency?

I finally found a decent tool for doing generative unit testing on Windows.
But, it's covered by the Microsoft Research something license such that I can't use it for commercial purposes. So I can't use it at work.

At home I'd just use QuickCheck... Maybe I should think up some way to get QuickCheck to do this. I know someone on #haskell (ADEpt?) wrote a tool to get QuickCheck to save out the test inputs. That would be something at least.

Edit: Discovered that ADEpt did in fact describe how to save test data from QuickCheck. Thanks ADEpt!

The best command line shell for windows is: zsh on cygwin.

I admit, I'm on a rant roll at the moment about lack of functionality in windows.

titivillus, I don't see how you can do development on Windows without extreme pain :-)

The best version control system I've found for Visual Studio so far is ... subversion.
Team Foundation Server really is better than Visual Source Safe, but that's not saying much.

More and more the best parts of the Microsoft oriented development environment don't come from Microsoft.

I admit, emacs does not have intellisense, code completion or spiffy visual designers.
It does everything else better than Visual Studio.
I like the visual designers part of VS, except when they break horribly and I have to manually frob the generated code to get it to work again. Or when the designers just don't handle what I actually need and then they get in the way.

Today's example, I was asked to put the application build time into the title bar with C#. That took hours of google searching to figure out.

After some investigation, I discovered that the simplest way to edit the master pages in SharePoint is... emacs.
Visual Studio's designer flips out, and SharePoint Designer breaks our master pages because it requires the use of safe mode parsing. Also, SharePoint Designer just sucks butt anyway.
So I'm running a VM, sharing its GLOBAL folder to the host, and editing default.master with far more validation support than before!

In case you weren't aware, files cannot end with ..ext for any extension.
I have no idea why, and it's not mentioned anywhere that I can find.

I really hope I get to meet the authors of Microsoft Sharepoint someday.
I did not believe that any piece of software could be more fragile than Plone.
If I meet the Sharepoint authors, Parking Lot Therapy is required.

After several hours working with SharePoint for the first time, I have rediscovered that using a web browser to create and edit web pages is really quite painful.
I feel like I'm back in the world of Plone...