Adobe Flex Builder was one of tools, that I wanted to run native after my switch to Ubuntu desktop. Adobe released alfa version of  Flex builder build on top of Eclipse IDE.  Because my workstation is amd64, it is not so easy to install as on x86 architecture.

Yesterday Wolfram|Alpha launched it’s grid computing platform running on thousands of nodes all controlled using Mathematica. I was interested in Wolfram’s work since I first read some of his papers and books. Anyway you can watch them in action over on justin.tv.

I am happy to see that Microsoft responses to multi core challenges with a new weapon – a new programming language targeted towards concurrency named Axum (previously code named Maestro). As Erlang lover and .NET developer, I am really curious what is behind and looking forward to play with it (it will be hard job to convince me that Erlang  is not best in this area ).

It is great to see that Ext JS team is working hard on features that reflects people needs. New release candidate looks very promising and especially Charting, ButtonGroup (Microsoft Office 2008 Ribbon  style;)), Buffered GridView and Debug console are really sweet.

While  I am thinking about myself as OS agnostic person, I do have some preferences or opinions about what is an ideal OS form me. I switched my personal computer to Linux a few years ago, but my workstation OS was usually chosen by my employer IT department. To be honest I did not try Vista, I was happy with XP and this was true even after a lot of my colleagues moved to Vista (and back  to XP again). For software developer there are more essential things than Aero or new security model. Developer needs to write code, compile and debug. I have to say that best development experience on Microsoft platform was with combination of Visual Studio 2008 and Windows XP.