Staying home today, a bit of flu, but i need a break from sleeping.

I've been working on a side project, a software thingy to analyze audio signals. It's destined for a windows machine which will control an industrial machine, but for now i'm developing it on Linux. This pleases the lazy part of me. While i could do all the work on a genuine Windows machine, why bother getting up? WINE does such a good job running the Digital Mars tools, and i've found other tools to either create and test Windows software on Linux, or tools to run on Windows only but do fine under WINE.

Discovered Liberty BASIC which is popular, can call functions provided by any halfway normal DLL, and powerful enough to do real work. First heard of it on Frank's Corner. Being a flavor of BASIC, most traditional true hard-core software geeks will sneer at the idea - bah, letting regular folk write their own software? - but i like tools that are within reach of the masses, the casual non-professional programmer. It's no help to my productivity, but serves well to provide sample programs to clients for demonstrating how to use a DLL and other software thingies i make. It's a less pricey alternative to Visual Basic, though not meant to be a clone or compatible with VB. It runs fine in WINE 'cept for i can't read or write files - could by my wine setup, or maybe i should fork over the shareware fee so i'm not using the unregistered version.

LB is also far quicker for making simple test programs than using C++ or C# in Visual Studio - though that's a pretty slick system too, it's beyond what many people care to spend learning-curve-wise or money-wise. Haven't done anything beyond the trivial in VS since 2001 when i had a beta C#. Really been too tied up with Linux at CICLOPS. BTW, Microsoft does give away a free (as in beer, not open src) VS "Express Edition" just so that people wanting to learn real programming with Windows API,C#,COM/ActiveX etc. - get it here. (It don't run under WINE - only on an actual XP machine.)

For making quick and easy GUI apps in Linux, something that doesn't come up often anyway, but when i have a reason to do so, i've been using Python or Ruby with wx or gtk or tk toolkits. But now, from my search for Windows platform tools, i stumbled upon something called GAMBAS (wiki) Haven't tried it out yet, but it's on my "do" list after toying with 3D tools, audio editors and other software.

For a guy who doesn't really want to be doing software so much, who wants to get away from the computer all day, and itching to do more physical hands-on stuff, i sure spend a lot of time playing with software tools and tinkering with cross-platform and cross-cross-platform interfacing and hacking Ruby and Python extension DLLs and digging into compilers and interpreters.

Completely unrelated - good science reading on comets at Lunar and Planetary Institute. (This is serious professional science, not watered down pop level magazine articles) Another alternative to sleeping when i need another break from it!