Lots of other blogs have found this site, so I'm not the first to link to it. But it was very informative, and I found it interesting.

http://www.tenthdimension.com/flash2.php

The 10th dimension for mere mortals. When you reach the site, move your cursor to "Navigation" (the right side) then click on "Imagining the Ten Dimensions".

I've told a lot of people that I was waiting for the Community Server 2.1 SDK to be released. It was a great excuse to be lazy. But IT'S HERE. I guess there's no more excuse to be lazy, huh? I'll get it out to you all just as soon as I can. Watch this blog for the announcement and http://developer.db4o.com for the bits.

Hey Microsoft! If you're listening, it would be really smart to link Xbox Live to Live Messenger (MSN Messenger). I'd love to be able to chat and send/recieve text messages to my MSN contacts from my Xbox 360...and see when my other contacts and friends are online from my Messenger screen on my computer. Who knows, maybe it would draw me into a game more often if I knew my friends were online before having to turn on my whole Xbox.

I probably missed it by a day or two, but CS 2.1 was released recently. The new build includes support for tagging and "subscribed content" blogs which suck external RSS into a blog as content. Useful for "blog mirroring".

As soon as the SDK shows up on the site, I'll release a beta of the wiki system. The CS team had offered to send me the beta code, but I guess they were just too busy getting the damn thing actually out. Thanks guys! I look forward to the SDK!

Just collecting good articles on multithreading:

What every developer needs to know about multithreading.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/05/08/Concurrency

The costs of parallelism and the benefits.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/06/09/CLRInsideOut

Thread coordination.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/06/09/ConcurrentAffairs

I hate to say it, but I think Blueray has already lost. That's really sad, because blueray is so much better than HD-DVD. I really liked that the Blueray people descided to update the DVD standards and went with an intelligent MPEG4 with a much improved menuing implementation. IMHO, the DVD specifications flubbed when it came to menus and user interaction. Things like only allowing a single-color overlay for menus, subtitles as 2-bit image masks requiring a blank frame between differing frames (making it impossible for subtitles to immedately shift from one line to the next, or moving subtitles for kareoke).

HD-DVD on the other hand just took the same DVD specification and upped the resolution and bitrates. HD-DVD players are going to be basically just overclocked dvd players. The DVD MPEG2 can't spec can't handle down-level players as well either, like MPEG4 can. If your DVD player or TV isn't 1080p (the highest resolution) AND widescreen, HD-DVD has to play a different data stream. Blueray and MPEG4 included the necessary down-sampling in the same data stream. Meaning that HD-DVD disks will have only 1080p and enhanced standard definition (DVD-quality 720i) and possibly 1 other data stream on the disks so that there will be room for at least those 2 common profiles. They might even possibly only include 1080i since there are more HDTVs out there that can only do 1080i and not 1080p.

Sometimes, "If it ain't broken, don't fix it" just isn't good enough. Not when there are obvious better choices. I'm sorry Blue-ray. If you had been faster to market, you might have stood a chance.

For the last 2 weeks, there have been posts up over at the Community Server and on the db4o jobs board indicating that even though this is the beginning of an open source endevor, my employer and I would like it to move a little faster. We've got some short-term contract money budgeted for some enthusiastic help. PLEASE HELP ME. I'm going to die under this workload, and it has to be done in the next 2 months. I'm going to quote this article from the ServerSide.NET: I'd better not get any letter bombs for going to slow, or any tears for giving up after doing it all myself. CS-Wiki is probably one of the most innovative wikis to happen to the internet.

Oh, first release coming soon. We launched the CS-Wiki about 2 weeks ago among the db4o developers and users and we found that it was lacking a few things. I'll have a usable system for all the testers asap.

The open-source world has one-upped the fat-cats in redmond once more with Zimbra: an open-source replacement for MS Exchange. Group calendars and contacts, full email services, web-based mail client, Salesforce.com integration... oh, and it's iCal and Outlook compatible!

We have a lot of plans for the Wiki system, and we need it complete and in place faster than is currently possible with only myself working on it. I got a budget for someone with experience writing ASP.NET 2.0 applications who wants to write some straightforward modules for the wiki system. These modules are mostly standard Community Server CSModules which filter and assist in the formatting of wiki topics and forum/blog posts.

More details found in this forum post. This is a great project to work on, and getting paid to work on it is even better. All of your contributions will be appreciated by the community and will be made open-source.

This isn't new to many people in the industry, but I stumbled across a reference to it and wanted to capture it here. .kkrieger is a complete multi-level FPS game. It has every feature that a multi-gig FPS game should have...but the whole thing is only 96 kb! It uses procedural texture generation to generate the textures instead of storing them as bitmapped graphics.

Download the full beta here.