John Udell interviewed John Lam, and has a backgrounder here. Some in the Ruby community didn’t see this coming.

Jim Hugunin has a posting on the new DLR, open source nature of the DLR on his “Thinking Dynamically” blog.

In addition to the Silverlight release, we’ve also made the full source code for both IronPython and all of the new DLR platform code available on codeplex under the BSD-style Microsoft Permissive License. All of that code can be downloaded today as part of the IronPython project at codeplex.com/ironpython.

The reality of being able to debug Ruby in a client-side UI framework on Safari on a Mac using Microsoft Silverlight tickles me, and others, greatly.

Blog from the keynote today, with all the ups-and-downs. Good to see I am not the only one who craves demos and has subversive thoughts in the midst of formal sessions.

Ryan Stewart has comments, and further links. The DLR adds 400K (what the!) to the Silverlight download. Wow.

zdnet has a sort of transcript of the Q&A that occured with Mike Arrington, Ray Ozzie and Scottgu.

Does Microsoft get Web 2.0? Yes.

"...We'll all be rooned," said Hanrahan,
"Before the year is out."

This whole poem seems to epitomise the current weather conditions, farmers and a fleeting glimpse of an old Australia, slowly disappearing.

Australian lexicon can leave you a few roos loose. And it’s been a corker for years — well, at least since cocky was a chick.
Not as dry as a dead dingo’s donger is the book Tobruk, by Australia’s smartest footballer Peter FitzSimons — a dead easy read, even for non-war history lovers. Highly recommended. Whilst I have read a couple of books on Kokoda, it is next on the list.

This book has stuck in the neurons, and now the virtual is becoming real. It really goes to show how hard science fiction depicts a future that current living humans will not see. Based on some work I was doing to Tricks of the Hypertalk Masters, creating what would be now known as a “skin” over CompuServe; the book was just science fiction.

True Names published in 1981, describes a world called “Other Plane” were people interact online. The premise of separating your online from your physical indentity; and the concept of a future Singularity pervade my personal world-view today.

Thanks Mitch.

Now, what does this have to do with today?

Second Life. It’s more than the technology; it is also about the platforms involved. It is also how it impacts real people: such as Dave Wallace. Second Life is what I visualised as “Other Plane”

Watch the first half of this video: Jim-Cory-SecondLife.wmv, Lang.NET Symposium.

The first half of the video is light on technology; but heavy on the economics, and wider-world impacts of the virtual world. The user creation rate (Writeness in the Read/Write equation) is over 60%; compared to the web which is less than 10%.

A key reason seems to be the economic value attached to virtual objects scripted in Second Life. As items in the SecondLife virtual world are intellectual property; an item can be created, sold and purchased.

Ensuring that intellectual property is valued is going to be one of the toughest challenges for upcoming generations.

Is the scripting in Second Life the new HyperCard?

Ross Coulthart, Great Land Clearing Myth, Sunday, Channel 9.

A meme started by the characterCarol Beer from BBC’s Little Britain.

Tony Abbott, National Press Club Address, 2nd August 2006.

To bogart: To hog something which is supposed to be shared.

The bus factor the degree to which something may fail when someone gets proverbially run over by a bus. Managers must consider this in their planning.

embiggen to make bigger.

Source:How Open Source Projects Survive Poisonous People. Or Snakes in a Project.

Today’s bad word is outcome.

Richard Dawkins on the evolutionary aspects of the birth of the Mac: Apple of my eye

Interestingly, Grace Hopper is accredited with the quote “It is always easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission.”

The Word Spy linguistic zeitgeist.

Camaraderie is the byword at this Silicon Valley stalwart known for its graphics products: frequent all-hands meetings, job rotations, Friday night beer bashes. Three-week paid sabbaticals every five years.

My comments: Adobe’s history has cemented a dichotomous industrial/company culture. It is a technology oriented company that has a strange mix of “sales orientation” (results are important) and “innovation culture” (smart engineers making cool products). Out here in the boonies (that is, not the US) we do not have beer bashes, cannot job rotate and hope to last 5 years to get that sabbatical! That said, it’s still a great place to work.

I posted the following on Thursday, 18 July 2002. In light of today’s announcements by Apple: Keynote, Safari etc its interesting to see that this is starting to come true.

Thursday, 18 July 2002: Something I remember thinking, if not saying, was that the whole NeXT heritage of easier software development tools was going to give Apple a significant competitive advantage with software. We are seeing a plethora of MacOS X based “digital hub” (or digital lifestyle) mini-applications tied to a web-services style backed (.mac) I am sure all of these, being MacOS X native, use the Cocoa (alias Yellow Box, alias NeXT frameworks) environment. The key to the volume of application production.

It is not surprising that Apple has “created” a new browser, it wants to control its own destiny. A browser should be a part of the operating system and are commodity applications. Created is an interesting comment, when in fact they have coopted some Open Source (Konqueror) HTML rendering code. Expect the browser component to be a part of the Cocoa framework, too. Developers will be able to place a robust HTML rendering element into their applications that is supported and maintained by Apple.

Whilst IE still has a bulk of the browser public (95% hitting this web site are from IE5 or greater), there is a fragmentation of the “last 5%” into micro-marketshare browsers such as Opera, Mozilla, Netscape and now Safari. Since the browser wars of the late 1990’s, there has been stagnation as far as browser innovation is concerned.