Person: Paul Lutus

Very interesting person and podcast interview

Hanselminutes Technology Podcast - An Interview with Paul Lutus:
"Paul Lutus designed electronics for the NASA Space Shuttle, retired at 35 then moved to the country. There he purchased an Apple ][ and proceeded to write the best selling Apple Writer. Paul also sailed around the world over 3 years and wrote about the experience."

Paul Lutus web site arachnoid.com has many interesting (free) utilities, and articles.

.NET Portable Class Library

.NET platform is significantly fragmented now:
.NET that runs on Windows 8 is not same as one on Windows 7 and XP,
and Windows Phone 7.x and Windows Phone 8 are just similar, not the same.
Xbox is another dialect with similar, but not same features.

A suggested solution for reusing code between .NET platforms is
"Portable Class Library" (DLL) type of projects.
It includes a subset of features of .NET,
and until recently it didn't include new "async" feature from .NET 4.5.

Visual Studio 2012 is required, and it does not support XP.
On the other side, Windows Phone 7.x is not supported on Visual Studio 2012.
Sounds complicated? It is...

Microsoft is determined to get people to upgrade from XP...
(The other option is to just install Chrome browser on XP :)

Cross-Platform Development with the .NET Framework.

Async/Await Now Available for Windows Phone, Silverlight 4

Big Data: Freebase

Google has recently acquired Metaweb, and data/knowledge collected is available as free data damp or as online services.

That data dump could also be interesting for testing performance of various databases, in particular NoSQL...
The data are in form of Semantic Web triples.

Freebase - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia



Free Base Data Dumps
5 - 35 GB