Passion * Technology * Ruthless Competence

Monday, December 17, 2007

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Morning Coffee 131

On a recommendation from my mother-in-law, I've been watching Torchwood. Sort of Men in Black, the series and set in Cardiff. Since it's made in England, it'll be one of the few shows still running in the new year due to the WGA strike.
A while back I pointed out that many DotNetKicks articles were submitted by their authors. I submitted a few of my own, just for kicks (har har), with mixed results. Today, I discovered that the parse buffer post from my Practical Parsing in F# series was submitted, picked up some kicks, and made it to the home page. That's pretty cool. I guess writing more dev-focused articles is the way to go to get attention on DNK.
Amazon has rolled out a limited beta of SimpleDB, which appears to be S3 + query support. Cost is based on usage: 14¢/hour for machine utilization, 10¢/GB upload, 13-18¢/GB download and $1.50/GB storage/month. I'd love to see SimpleDB software that I could download and install, rather than hosted only. Even if I was going to use the hosted service, I'd like to develop against a non-hosted instance.
Research for sale! I was checking out the MS Research download feed and discovered a link to the Automatic Graph Layout (MSAGL) library. This was previously called GLEE (Graph Layout Execution Engine) and was "free for non-commercial use". Now, you can buy it for $295 from Windows Marketplace (though the previous free version is still available). The idea of directly commercializing research like this strikes me as pretty unusual. It must be a really good library.
Scott Guthrie shows off the new Dynamic Data Support that will ship as part of the ASP.NET Extensions. I'm like, whatever. Scaffolding wasn't that that interesting to me in RoR, so it's no surprise that it's not that interesting in ASP.NET.
Jeff "Party With" Palermo blogs about the IoC support in the new MVC Contrib project. Also looks like they're porting RoR's simply_restful. (via Scott Guthrie)
I need to try out some of Tomas Respro's VS color schemes (also via Scott Guthrie)