My English still sucks

I wish I could find my aunt's new email address. She is american, a teacher, and she sports one of the finnest English accents I have heard. Some years ago she offered to help me with my English.

So, dear aunt Amber, I wish you could read this and tell me for once what is wrong with it. I just know it feels very bad when I read it.

I have just made a search on the Internet, and all I found was who you are voting for!

IronPython to join the Microsoft family?

"IronPython is a fast Python implementation for .NET and Mono". I read about it for the first time a couple of months ago.

Today something unexpected happened. Not only IronPython alpha source and binaries have been made available under the Common Public License, but its author, Jim Hugunin has "decided" to join the Microsoft CLR team!

I can see, in my crystal ball, a brilliant future for dynamic languages on the CLR. Also, the future looks more cloudy for Java, since Hugunin is also the father of Jython (probably the most successful and most frequently mentioned example of a non-java language running on the JVM) and co-designer of AspectJ.

On a sad note, I realized some days ago that Smallscript site has been down for some time. Any news about David Simmons?

What was Michael Robertson saying just a month and a half ago?

In his blog, Michael's Minute, the title was Bill - I don't want your $1,158:

But truth be told, I don't want Microsoft's money, I just want a chance to compete and grow my company.
...
No, I don't want your money, I just want to compete without Microsoft terrorizing us and everyone in the PC business who works with us.

LOL! Ok, ok, I don't blame him for accepting the Microsoft's US dollars 20,000,000 for the Lindows brand. I don't think this is his sin. For many others, tough, he has probably lost all of his coolness.

Counter farewell

I apologize to everybody that has visited my blog lately... Sadly, I know it is too late for this. Today I found by accident that the Bravenet.com counter was injecting unwanted pop-up windows in my blog. I didn't realize it before because of Google's toolbar blocking feature. This afternoon, when the issue came out, I immediately commented out the counter code from my blog's template.

I don't think spending my time investigating Bravenet's policy is worthwhile. I will just ditch it once and forever.

Anyway, I have been using RE_INVIGORATE lately for statistics, and I am very satisfied with it.

And Google buys Picasa

These days you don't really need to be purchased by Microsoft. Google is just as good. I hope this means that Lorna, Tara and the other good people I "met" while discussing Hello, are getting a job with the seach giant.

Lookout purchased by Microsoft

Perhaps this is easiest way to get a job at Microsoft. All I need to do is create an insanely great product and have an amazing success.
 
As seen in the news this morning:

Hi, Lookout Users,

We wanted to send you a status note about what is happening with Lookout.
You may have already read the news on our website or in the press. Over the last year, Lookout has grown from a hobby project into a real product. It is still gaining momentum rapidly, and we've been delighted to read all the success stories from people using Lookout. A lot of this success has come from all the great help that we've had from all the users willing to sacrifice life and limb to help us test this product. Thank you so much for all your support, we hope you are recovering smoothly from your beta wounds!

As of today, Lookout is being officially drafted from a minor-league, small software company into the majors. Eric and I are very excited to announce that Microsoft has purchased Lookout. The next generation of Lookout will be an enhanced product with a lot more power. We look forward to leveraging the strengths of Microsoft and MSN in making a great product and hope to infuse some of our own "Lookout culture" into MSN products as well. This should be a great thing for everyone.

Some of you may have concerns about Lookout losing its feel as it moves into a larger company. Hopefully it helps to know that Eric and I are not worried about that. We've met the MSN team, and they are very good, extremely smart people. So, actually, to the contrary, we're excited to be part of Microsoft. Joining Microsoft allows us to take Lookout in directions that we never could have gone alone.

At the same time, we hope to maintain close relationships with you as much as we can, and we hope to continue to build software that is simple, elegant, and just plain works. Your input will still be as necessary as it was in order to bring forward great products. So, as we go through this transition, please let us know what you think! You can still contact us with any comments, questions, concerns, rants, or raves at lookout@lookoutsoft.com.

And, please don't worry, if you have become dependant on Lookout and don't want to change, you certainly don't have to. You can continue to use Lookout just as you always have for as long as you want.

Finally, if you do decide that you don't want to be contacted by MSN regarding Lookout updates or related products and services, you can opt-out.
Your privacy is of utmost concern to us, and you can read our new privacy statement, which is consistent with our previous policy and explains how we may use your personal information going forward here:
http://www.lookoutsoft.com/Lookout/privacy.html. To remove yourself, just send an email to optout@lookoutsoft.com We hope to continue working with you, so please don't click that link! But, if you must, we understand.

Thanks again for everything you've done, we appreciate all your help.

Mike, Eric, and the Microsoft MSN Team

I wish I understood Persian

Somebody known by the nickname "Inprise" posted a link to an article about Garbage Collection in Delphi .NET that I wrote sometime ago here on my blog. I think it is an Iranian forum about Delphi.

I am very honored! I just wish I understood what he says.

Will SQL Server 2005 Express finally kill Jet?

Well, I wish! After all, MSDE 2000 almost did.

For some time I have been expecting Microsoft to ship a product that anyone could use as a an easily embeddable, reliable, fast and of course, SQL Server compatible database engine to ship with their applications. I understand it also had to be free because of the open source databases out there, but I would have settled for it just being inexpensive.

I would say MSDE covered 90% of the requirements. But now Microsoft comes with SQL Server 2005 Express and its darn 256 MB RAM required (512 MB recommended). And some even have the guts to call it a "lightweight version of SQL Server 2005". If planet Microsoft continues to get farer from planet Earth at this pace, I will soon have to give up on flying so often between them.

Guys, for gods sake, there are still billions of computers out there with 64MB RAM or less, and they won't upgrade soon. And yes, this will either be your market (I would better say our market) or MySQL's.

Ok, I need to check the runtime RAM requirments for myself. I still hope they are kidding or there is some way to destile something of a slimmer engine. Otherwise I will conclude that Longhorn is getting most of its bloat from SQL Server code.

I also want to find out if SQL Express supports full text searches, something I cannot find an answer for in the documentation I have read so far.

But so far the installation just fails in my computer before writing any LOG file. At least I will be able to fill a bug thanks to Sara Williams and the other people at MSDN that struggle to keep planet Microsoft in reach.