KludgeHack

Evolution of a C# Query - Step by step from C# 1.1 to LINQ
30 June 2007 in Programming | Comments (1)

Jomo Fisher describes how a simple query looked back in the days of .Net 1.1 and how it evolved to a new feature of .Net 3.5 - lambda expressions.

http://blogs.msdn.com/jomo_fisher/archive/2005/09/13/464884.aspx

Supporting .NET Open Source Projects
30 June 2007 in Blogging & Microsoft | Comments (0)

Jeff Atwood (from Coding Horror) and Microsoft are teaming up to donate $10,000 in support of open source .NET projects.

He’s doing this using ads on his page, and Microsoft will match the amount.

You can find more info on the matter here.

Currently they are looking for .NET projects to inject money. If you know any .NET open source project that would make the money useful, make it known on his article.

DARPA Urban Challenge 2007
29 June 2007 in Fun & Tech | Comments (0)

For those who don’t know the DARPA Challenge, I must say, you are loosing one of the biggest event of the year. The challenge is a prize competition for driverless cars, sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the central research organization of the United States Department of Defense.

Every year university’s from all around the world build their powerful autonomous vehicle. The last two years, the challenge was to create the first fully autonomous ground vehicles capable of completing a substantial off-road course within a limited time. Now, this year challenge is scheduled to take place November 3, further advances vehicle requirements to include autonomous operation in a mock urban environment.

You can find Stanford video from last year here. The video is a talk about, how they won the challenge, both funny and technical. You can also find more info in the Wikipedia, where you can also find links to the official pages of the teams playing.

Demonstrating how fantastic this challenge can be, recently the the Stanford University car, Junior, just got it’s learning permit for basic driving.  What does “basic driving” entail?  Navigating a 4 way intersection with live traffic, passing a stationary car and doing a U-turn.

So it is a car that can do what a 16 year old can do but why is this such a big deal?  Well, think about all the rules you have to follow while driving.  Proper distance, checking if you can change lanes, using turn signals, and actually following the speed limit are just a few.  But in real life, you break each and every one of those rules.  So designing a system that respects those rules then is allowed to break them when it best suits the system’s needs is tricky.

If you saw the Stanford video (above) you will appreciate the advantages of a driverless car.

BumpTop: Virtual Desk
29 June 2007 in Fun & OS & Tech | Comments (0)

BumpTop is a 3D desktop prototype for Windows, does some must-see-to-believe wrangling of digital documents as if they were physical pieces of paper. Words don’t do this justice; just hit that play button.

Google Desktop now available for Linux
28 June 2007 in Linux & Random tidbits | Comments (2)

Finally the Google tool (my favorite) is available for all main platforms: Windows, Mac and Linux.

You can search your Linux files and applications on Debian 4.0, Fedora Core 6, Ubuntu 6.10, SUSE 10.1 and Red Flag 5.

The big advantage Google Desktop has over built-in search solutions (like the Mac’s Spotlight or Vista Search) is its ability to include Gmail messages in its results, and the use of Google’s advanced search operators, which are nice to learn once and use both on the web and desktop. For more on Google Desktop power using, see how to get more from Google Desktop. GDesktop is a free download, now truly cross-platform.