Not that I particularly expect this GNOME language issue to be resolved anytime soon, but still: assuming that the choices are Java and C#, do people actually want to standardise/bless/whatever the language, the runtime standard (that is, "JVM" or "CLR"), one particular runtime ("Kaffe" or "Mono"), or some combination thereof?

On a totally unrelated note, I always wonder why on earth Microsoft chose a totally ungoogleable name for their language.

Lukutoukka is a speed reader for the GNOME desktop. Inspired by this post (or really, originally, the Eastern Standard Tribe speed reader.)

It doesn't look like much, especially not without animation, but here you go, anyway:

The idea is to push words from a text file to the screen one at a time at a quick pace. After a while it feels like your brain is melting, but you do end up reading the text far faster than you would scanning a page because your eyes and mind don't get a chance to wander. Depends on your viewpoint and the text you're reading whether that is good or bad :-)

It's also the first significant piece of code I've written in Scheme. I used Guile. It's not the fastest or the most feature-packed implementation out there (compare to MzScheme, Bigloo and Chicken) but it does have a rocking Gtk+/GNOME binding.

Oh, and to keep life exciting, I'm using Darcs for version control. And loving it.

From Charles Stross, on why British SF is these days teh rawk.

And a great interview with China Miéville.

Books by both are highly recommended, by the way.