Qte.dk

eWEEK features an article on Bill Gates comments on the future of computer science education. On of the issues he addresses is the fact that the computer science industry uses an impressing small amount of its capital on R&D.

"We're saying to companies 'You ought to invest more in R&D,' this is our competitive edge," he said. "If you look at our competitors - put aside IBM, they're sort of a special case - the investment [in R&D] is pretty small."

If only the industry would use some more capital on R&D I am sure that a lot of cooler features would surface.

[Via eWEEK]

I decided to write a short letter to Kristian hoping that he will help me getting to the PDC.

Dear Kristian:

As my overlord and my obnoxious mentor, I am confident about presenting you with a unique opportunity to contribute to my overall geek cache. Whenever Microsoft gets excited they hold the PDC Conference where some of the world's great developers gather to learn and network.

Attending this conference will help me become more informed about upcoming Microsoft applications, so I can start using them in my job as soon as they're available. And it will help me become more informed about the future of the ubernerd industry. So whether you need my input in deciding what powerful new hardware to purchase, or what features our next application should include, I'll be a more valuable resource.

As you can imagine this is a tremendous invasion of Los Angeles that any savvy developer would have to be insane to miss. Thank you very much for your unqualified consideration.

Just gimme the bucks,

Brian
World's Best Developer

[With a little help of the Letter Wizard]

My co-student Kristian is going to Microsoft Professional Developers Conference 2005 (PDC) after having won an internal MSP competition. The PDC is taking place in Los Angeles, California - very close to San Francisco where we went on studytrip this spring.

After having watched a Channel 9 video about the PDC, I must say that I would not mind going as well :-) So who is giving me a ticket? Anyone?

While browsing the web for some interesting reading I found the following articles on shell scripting, hopefully they will be useful to others as well.

• Introduction to Shell Scripting - Part 2 - Introduction to loops, if and switch control blocks and simple error handling.
• Introduction to Shell Scripting - Part 3 - Shell commands cat, tr, head/tail, cut/paste and grep.
• Introduction to Shell Scripting - Part 4 - Parameter expansion, parameter state and array handling.
• Bash Shell and Beyond - Shell versions of C string functions, including strcat, strcpy, strlen and strcmp.

If only we had been tutored in using basic tools such as head, tail and grep, I am sure that the past semester would have been a lot easier and more rewarding for some of my co-students, that had no or little prior experience with Unix.

[Via Linux Gazette]

Just over a week ago, on monday the 27th of June, Fundanemt 2.1 was finally released to the masses - only 15 months after the last major release and 3 months after it were due at LinuxForum 2005.

We have been talking about announcing the release on Freshmeat, OpenSourceCMS.com and other software sites ever since LinuxForum - and so on the night of the release the Fundanemt finally hit the software sites, with instant success. After getting some sleep, and opening my inbox, I found that non-danish people (until now these users have been pretty rare) were very fond of it - and found it extremly easy to install and use.... WOHOO.

"Great product" and "This looks so good" e-mails really makes it worth releasing software - so apparently we did not do it complete wrong :-) Although getting lots of new users is neat, lets hope we do not need to take the same precaution as these guys.

People and sites posting about the release:

• Fundanemt 2.1 frigivet (by Kim Schulz)/
• Free opensource CMS "Fundanemt" out in version 2.1 (by Oscar Gensmann)
• The official Fundanemt 2.1 release note
• Freshmeat Fundanemt 2.1 announcement

I will get started at hacking on new features and bug fixes for the next couple of releases, so that we hopefully can release soon.