With no particular intention of looking at something in particular, I was looking at a few blogs and came across KPL - Kid's Programming Language. An official website is hosted at www.kidsprogramminglanguage.com and MSDN has a few articles on KPL (owing to the fact that it is developed using C# - if you didn't know, MSDN has a section called coding4fun which has to do with Game Programming and stuff).

Now, KPL is pretty interesting. It is a language with editor and all, and is pretty simple. I am not quite sure how easy it would be for kids to work with, but I guess if somebody has the aptitude, they could pick it up pretty soon.

KPL revived some memories of my own younger days. I was in school when I first got introduced to programming. BASIC used to be the language for kids then and I got a hang of BASIC pretty soon. BASIC continued to be my favourite language for a long time and I worked with various BASIC interpreters - BASICA, Microsoft QBASIC and the others that shipped in floppy disks at that time.

I still think kids can learn a lot more with BASIC. I have met many kids and students of late who were born in the Windows era. They have absolutely no exposure to DOS - not that I blame them. But DOS was fun. BASIC was great fun - screen modes, sounds, animation and all.

I wish there was still a version of BASIC (not Visual Basic) floating around for the kids. KPL is probably attempting to take that place, but it is not quite BASIC, arguably the first PC computer language and the one Bill Gates himself coded in years ago.

UPDATE: Check this Channel 9 post on KPL: http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=166995

Manoj G is the latest addition to thinkingMS. Great to have him included.

At the moment, www.thinkingMS.com/manoj is just a migration of his older Brinkster site.  He'll be updating the site shortly and creating his own space.

Manoj also blogs on http://msmvps.com/manoj/

Welcome Manoj!

Sparkle is out. Awesome!

If you are one of those who installed IE 7 BETA 1 and then got a little frustrated every time:

• You open a website with too many cross-scripts and your browser hangs up
• You have 100% CPU utilization every now and then
• You didn't think the RSS reader feature was too much
• You had a few instances of iexplore.exe always running under your processes without any browser window open
• You tried deleting a registry key as mentioned in the IE blog that promised to help you out, but didn't
• You have provided enough feedback to MS now through crash dumps and are now set to wait for the next version, which hopefully will be more stable
• And you don't blame MS at all, because you agreed to install a BETA product

If you were wondering formatting your system is the only option, just read on.

There are multiple options available to get back to good old IE 6:

1. If you were smart enough to set a restore point in Win XP, revert back

2. If you weren't that smart, you still can uninstall IE through the control panel. But hey wait a minute - I can't see IE listed there. Just check on "Show Updates" and under Microsoft Windows XP, you will see Internet Explorer 7 Beta 1.

I got my invite to Live Mail BETA.

Simply fabulous! And my Hotmail ID continues with a 2GB storage space.

Microsoft is turning 30 years old!  Three decades is a long, long time to stay at the top!

Here's a special: http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/goingbeyond/indexFlash.html

Do check out the timeline.

I had read about Wine long, long ago. It is heartening to seem them finally dropping a BETA.

Check out http://www.winehq.org/

Wine is a fascinating project. It is an open source implementation of the Windows API on top of the X and Unix platforms. This means that any Windows application can now run on Unix. They also have a program loader allowing Windows apps to run straight out on x86 systems. Cool stuff.

Check out http://appdb.winehq.org/ to see applications that have already run on Wine. Microsoft Money, Paint Shop Pro, several games, Internet Explorer, Dreamweaver, the list is endless.

With Microsoft Windows Services For Unix (which by the way took way less time to develop than the 12-year Wine project - I just had to say that!) and the Wine BETA release, can I dare to say that the desktop is almost unified?