August 2003 Entries
If you're into making music using a computer you should check out Free Mix. I stumbled upon it today. Yes it's a Russian site but scroll down the page.
Nice article about stock options. Interesting point about the Microsoft move to giving out grants of stock will allow employee's to participate in future dividend payouts. If they wait a bit until more employee's hold stock, then a dividend payout will help employee morale while at the moment it doesn't make a difference to anyone holding stock options.
Scala is a cool freeware that allows you to experiment with musical tunings. Very extensive feature set and it allows you to change the tuning tables of various synthesizers. One of the softsynths that supports it is the z3ta+. Speaking of synths, I also ran into a review of an excellent synth called Crystal and it's freeware.
I've tried a couple of webcam conversations using MSN Messenger v6.0. It works really well. No firewall problems. The frame rate is rather low but good enough. Audio is much improved with new echo cancellation. We've hooked it to Jenny's laptop so we can roam around the house and garden with it since it's using WiFi. Cool. Drop by sometime.
Yes, I'm very interested to see the direction Microsoft takes with the Whitehorse project. I've heard various rumours but it's best to wait and see at the moment. No doubt the first version will lack quite a few features but it's the direction that will count. Note that to the best of my knowledge, Microsoft doesn't use modelling in developing any of it's own products.
Installed MSN Messenger v6.0. Looks pretty good. Can't wait to tryout the webcam conversation and see how that works. Worth the install.
Just updated the firmware on my router/firewall/wireless box and I'm pretty pleased to see they implemented a feature I requested a few months ago. You can now disable the wireless access point and turn off the SSID broadcast. Nice to know they listen to customer feedback. Only annoying thing was the the firmware updated destroyed all previous account settings and it took me a little while to reconfigure it. Need to see whether I can get the webcam working from Instant Messenger again.
"CodeSmith is a FREEWARE template-based code generator that allows you to generate code for any ASCII-based language."
Worth a read as it lays out in more detail what's going into the Whidbey release of Visual Studio.
Will be interesting to see whether this takes off. At $35 it seems a bit expensive compared to the free Internet chat versions. I suspect banks and financial institutions will shell out for the extra security and guaranteed service level but I'd be surprised if many other sectors took it up (for now).
Some interesting speculation after the $521 million dollar verdict against Microsoft in favour of Eolas over patent infringement of browser plug-ins and applet support. Software patents are a real slippery slope if you ask me. It's fine to patent a clever algorithm but some of the software patents seem quite shakey.