An interesting an succint look at administration mistakes
Thanks to the work of Zac Bowling the Mozilla bindings for Mono and Gtk# (Gecko#) are now working on Windows, see screenshot here.
This is using the standard Mozilla DLLs. His code is available here
There are plenty of updates from the land of Mono, I will write about those later. The most important things is that the new Windows.Forms implementation has replaced the old version on our repository, and that Geoff has implemented native MacOS X support for it.
On the JIT world Zoltan has completed the work to produce Position independent code (PIC) for our ahead-of-time compiled programs which will reduce the memory usage for long-running Mono applications.
In the meantime Massi continues to improve our SSAPRE and is going to be adding elements from GVNPRE to SSAPRE which in a single pass will give us some nice performance numbers for computationally intensive tasks.
I finished reading Robert Fisk's Pity The Nation a book that recounts the last 20 years of the story of Lebanon from the point of view of a war journalist. The book is gripping and its hard to put it down. Robert Fisk weaves plenty of different stories, anecdotes and interviews to produce a detailed tale of life in Lebanond during the civil war.
I have not read fiction for a long time, partially because books like this one tell a more vivid and interesting story than fiction does.
This book goes into the living standards, the traditions and the sources of various conflicts as well as covering the mistakes that every army makes in their search for conquest or liberation.
Of particular interest was watching the news with the reports from Iraq by the time I was reading the second half of the book, as it seems that the more we live and the more documented humanity mistakes are, the less we learn from them. Those who planned the latest war would have benefitted tremendously from reading Robert's account of the Lebanese conflict as they repeated the same mistakes the large armies did twenty years ago.
Its only 12 dollars for 700 pages of stories.
Posted on 07 Jan 2005
