Several years ago Bill Gates invested into a little aviation firm founded by his friend Vern Raburn in his old stomping grounds of Albuquerque, New Mexico. Today their Eclipse 500 jet just received provisional FAA certification! This 1.3 million dollar plane holds 4 passengers and travels faster than commercial jet aircraft. It is small but comfortable, with an interior designed by BMW. Notable is that during certification it achieved the status of being the quietest jet aircraft in the world. The...

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Dear John Shadegg: In Arizona over the past couple of weeks we've endured record-breaking temperatures, at times four degrees higher than previous records. And those reports actually paint a more rosy picture than the real high temperatures we experience. Directly on the freeways during rush hour the temperatures are five degrees higher than what the weather reports indicate. Last week on the freeway it was 122 degrees during the afternoon rush hour. The true effect is huge. At this point I don't...

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The first cell phone with a lens cap?(And an optical zoom!) Available soon in the states is this way-cool Nokia N93, which captures video at 640x480 resolution and 30fps. Record up to an hour and a half in a 2 gig mini-SD card. Then share your creation online, uploading it via speedy 3G. I was in Japan on vacation last month, and stopped in at Tokyo's "electric town" (Akihabara) to gawk at the gizmos. While there I saw other evidence that a true video revolution is happening on a cell phone near...

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With careful programming, threads offer a great way to make your application more responsive. If you need to do some database access or call a web service, many millions of computer cycles could go unused before your application actually gets underway again. Instead of making your application sit on the bench that whole time, you may be able to keep it busy with other important tasks. This post offers a simple introduction to spawning your first thread. Here's a couple of lines that will kick off...

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A few months ago I wrote a simple Javascript beautifier, which suited my needs at the time. But since then while dissecting longer AJAX-centric scripts in various websites, I found some things that were giving the beautifier some trouble. So I took some time this morning to fix a few bugs and improve overall performance. Some of you may be asking, “What is a beautifier?” Put in nasty obfuscated code that is all run together, and it spits out something that's nicely formatted and very...

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I presented a session on WPF at the Arizona .NET User's Group last night, and today have been getting email and calls from several people who wished they could have been in attendance, and wanted to get started with WPF. So for those that weren't there last night, this post is designed as an intro to get you started. The version of Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) included in the June CTP is very polished. Being this late in the development cycle, the things you learn now in this environment...

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