grack.com

Looks like NDoc is one of many .NET open-source projects to “bite the big one”, but certainly not the last. I stopped development on NProf a while back because I couldn’t build up any momentum around it. I suppose that it was slightly annoying that I found some of my GPL’d code in Jetbrains’ new profiler. Perhaps they could have contributed something back to NProf at least.

NAnt releases are getting further apart and the mailing list traffic is dwindling. Log4Net seems to be moving so slow I don’t know how they manage to get releases out!

Is there such a fundamental difference between .NET and Java developers that one community can sustain such a great set of open-source projects and one can’t?

The sad thing about the death of open-source projects on the .NET platform is that they end up being replaced by closed-source (or worse – shared-source) projects that you can’t fix bugs in or redistribute without a team of lawyers.

I’m not sure why, but they don’t seem to learn anything from the open-source equivalents that they clone either. Compare NAnt to MSBuild, for instance. MSBuild ends up being a horribly complicated system that doesn’t let you do half the stuff as clean or as elegantly as the equivalent NAnt script.

As the original author of the solution task in NAnt, I can now say that I’m glad that they have to deal with the numerous ideosyncracies in their bizarre world of .NET project building, like reading source files to figure out what the names of embedded resources are.

All I can really say to them is good luck re-implementing all this stuff.

I can’t believe how cool this technique is.

It takes a 3D mesh and calculates the lowest-error set of billboards that, when rendered, look very much like the object they are representing.

Take a look at this sample movie of a billboard-cloud-tree flyover.

Here is a comprehensive list of argument fallacies.

I haven’t studied this stuff since I accidentally took an argumentative logic class instead of a boolean logic class back in university and I don’t think people will ever learn what begging the question really means.

On a somewhat related note, I serendipitously came across an interesting new word while browsing some of the other pages on infidels.org: solipsism. After a bit of Googling, I came across this gem of a joke attached to a random slashdot post:

A professor is teaching a philosophy course, and he explains to his class solopism, the theory that reality is a creation in ones mind. After the lecture, several students rush up and introduce themselves to the professor and explain that the theory was really in-tune with how they felt and it’s really opened their minds and they just wanted to tell him in person how the felt about his lecture … to this the professor replies “Thats wonderful, so rarely does one solipsist meet another.”

While I find it interesting that somebody has coined a word for the concept, I find this quote from the Wikipedia entry to be somewhat relevant:

Some philosophers hold the viewpoint that solipsism is entirely empty and without content. Like a ‘faith’ argument, it seems sterile, i.e., allows no further argument, nor can it be falsified. The world remains absolutely the same—- so where could a solipsist go from there?

It has about as much potential as the thought experiment that involves imagining what would be if the universe didn’t exist. I find that the latter usually ends up with a popping sensation in my brain and my eyes watering.

</ streamofconsciousness>

For my own information, here’s a quick Javascript monitor size calculator. Enter the diagonal size in inches and the program will tell you what the 4:3 and 16:9 dimensions will be:

An interesting read, found via a recent Scientology article on kuro5hin:

Sex, Drugs, and Cults. An evolutionary psychology perspective on why and how cult memes get a drug-like hold on people, and what might be done to mitigate the effects

Perhaps there might be an opportunity to “vaccinate” against those with more vulnerable dopamine systems with modern technology. It’s interesting to read about the human ability to absorb and transmit memes. It makes sense from an evolutionary perspective: as our genes encode less genetic behaviour, we need to make up for it in some way. Memes end up being a second set of genetic coding – though one that isn’t permanent .

Here’s a bit from the abstract:

In the aggregate, memes constitute human culture. Most are useful. But a whole class of memes (cults, ideologies, etc.) have no obvious replication drivers. Why are some humans highly susceptible to such memes?

Note that the term meme was coined by Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene.