Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Morning Coffee 138

• In writers strike news, the WGA has made side deals with Worldwide Pants (aka Dave Letterman's company), United Artists (aka Tom Cruise's company) and The Weinstein Company (previously known as Miramax). The WGA strategy of divide and conquer seems to me making slow progress. Update: The Weinstein Company was founded by Miramax's founders Harvey and Bob Weinstein after they left Miramax. But Miramax is still around. Thanks to GrantC for the correction.
• They're still two games under .500, but the Caps completed a season sweep of the Eastern Conference leading Ottawa Senators last night. They're only 3 games out of the top spot in the (admittedly very weak) Southeast division
• Big tech news today isn't coming from MSFT-land. Sun is buying MySQL and Oracle is (finally) buying BEA. Both deals seem like pretty significant culture clashes, though Sun/MySQL seems like the better fit of the two.
• There's a new draft of Service Modeling Language 1.1 available. If you'll recall, this used to be called the System Definition Model, part of the Dynamic Systems Initiative. Hadn't heard anything from those folks in a while, good to see they're making progress.
• Stephan Tolksdorf dropped me a line to tell me he was able to "vastly simplify" FParsec, and as a result it now runs on the current version of F#. Awesome!
• Speaking of F#, Scott Hanselman has a new F# podcast, this time interviewing Dustin Campbell. Check out all of Dustin's F# posts.
• I didn't know about the "Copy as Path" feature in Vista. Why is it hidden?
• I was a big fan of the WDS deskbar shortcut feature - a feature that is missing in Vista. Enter Start++ by Brandon Paddock, which adds shortcuts to Vista's search box. It also supports "iPhone apps" and scripting. But JScript? Where's the PowerShell love, Brandon?
• EA released the source code to the original SimCity under the GPL. Bil Simser is digging into the code and it looks like he's going to port it to XNA. (via Ozymandias)
• Wes Haggard has published the source code to CodeHTMLer on CodePlex. He took two updates from me: the F# language definition as well as the ability to choose the font when not using PRE tags.