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2005-06-02 13:27:33

Ten Miscellaneous Unrelated Items

1.  I've seen Revenge of the Sith 3 times now, including the 12:01am showing on opening day.  Not bad for a 37-year old, eh?

2.  For the second year in a row, Vault has won the Readers Choice Award from Visual Studio magazine.  Thanks!

3.  I've decided to stop writing my Business of Software column for MSDN.  The folks at Microsoft were fantastic people to work with, and I really enjoyed writing for them.  I'm just ready for a change.  It'll be nice to once again be writing without the pressure of real deadlines.  :-)

4.  Kudos to Mainsoft for their new developer website.  Since I chided them for being opaque and having no presence at the community level, I definitely owe them a link.  I wish I could take credit for what they've done here, but it's obvious they were working on this long before I wrote about them.

5.  The last thing the world needs is another text editor, but people keep writing them as if there will be some big prize for being the one millionth person to do so.  I know this.  I know that writing yet another text editor is probably financial suicide for a micro-ISV.  So, as a level-headed business-minded person, I am not supposed to think this project is really neato.  But I do.  :-)

6.  It's terribly vain, but I confess:  I occasionally like to search Google for my first name and see where my weblog shows up.  After months of steadily climbing up the rankings, I appear to have reached a plateau on page 2 of the results.  All of the Erics ahead of me are big, including several links for a database of educational resources, legendary geek Eric Raymond, legendy guitarist Eric Clapton, and Eric Carle, author of one of my favorite books, The Very Hungry Caterpillar.

7.  It's somewhat rare to see an ISV which does really excellent integration with products from other vendors.  FinalBuilder seems like an exception to the rule.  These guys seem to be taking integration seriously.  I'm impressed, and I am reminding myself to take a closer look.

8.  I forgot to chime in last week about the big question:  Will Apple move the Macintosh from the PowerPC over to Intel chips?  My answer:  Probably not, but that doesn't mean Apple is completely happy with the PowerPC.  In the long run, Apple has some serious problems to face if they want to stay with their current CPU.  Personally, I would like to see them make the change.  PowerPC is not really an important point of differentiation for them.  Unsolicited advice:  Don't try to do any sort of emulation this time.  Just get everybody to recompile.  And don't try to support MacOS X on just any old clone PC.  The Macintosh hardware should remain proprietary.

9.  The interesting tech news for today is Microsoft's announcement about the new file format for Office 12.  I would have loved to be a fly on the wall at the meeting where the Office team processed that decision.

10.  I'm getting impatient.  I want to know what Project Aardvark is.