Now, that's an impressive build-time.

[elfs]

The keyboard is tolerable, although it looks like it might be two weeks before I can buy a replacement. I called around to all the used places in Seattle and nobody had one. I checked Ebay and bought one for $39 from a reseller; here's hoping it's what I want. Unfortunately, the purchase has dropped my PayPal account below six bucks. Ah, well.

I continue to be impressed with some parts of Microsoft. The MS Shell looks to be a kick-ass application. Although Raymond's cadre will pooh-pooh the use of non-ASCII streams through the pipelines I think it's one hell of a good idea, and not one that could be too difficult to port to Unix. The only headache here is that it does require a consistent object model-- not something you're likely to see coming out of the Gnome project anytime soon. I also like C#; the "get" and "set" attribute handlers absolutely rock and ensure contract consistency within a given object and between objects. It's incredibly easy to write object relationships and application databases where the object's persistent representation is in a at-least-2nd-normal-formed database somewhere. C# and Ruby seem to be heading into the common space of modern languages, making some strong assumptions about how much horsepower and memory you've got and doing the correct thing with respect to the programmer. And the C# compiler for Linux works really well.

Now if only Microsoft didn't act like it had to rule the world, and if only it's C and C++ divisions actually learned how to do proper product development and not this cowboy crap they've been doing for the past fifteen years.

Hard as it is for me to believe, my laptop is still running an install I started 15 hours ago. It's not stuck, and I can see it performing useful work. Apparently it really takes over 16 hours for Gentoo to install OpenOffice on my little machine. Poor little workstation. Right now it's building the help files.

Comments

MSH looks nice

[norikos-author.livejournal.com]

It's ashamed that it's crippled by Microsoft's typical lack of vision (the lack of named streams I can understand, although it's annoying; the inability to pipe an html object to IE is ridiculous, after all the other trouble they went to to be able to pass things around).

I _want_ something like that for unix.

Re: MSH looks nice

[norikos-author.livejournal.com]

'a shame', not ashamed. It's been about a week of those mondays all rolled into one.