Borland C++ is back, slicker than ever

It's been sometime since I touched C++ programming. Everything seems to be .NET.
.NET is cool, a decent concept, a good base class library and a good enough IDE (Visual Studio 2005), yeah, but there still something missing; raw power. I first saw "Raw Power" delivered yet in a simple to use way in Delphi when VB was still in its infancy and VC++ programmers were considered cool. However coming from the C++ side of things, I was most delighted when Borland released Borland C++ Builder 1.0 - this was a very easy to use, TRULY RAD and powerful developer environment. The last release I used without any problems was Borland C++ Builder 6.0. After 6.0, ... nothing ... there was a C++ Builder Personal edition but the IDE was quite buggy, installation was a pain, .NET integration sucked (though I didn't care much for that)...all in all a pretty 'not happening' period of programming for me. The only thing available was .NET and its various version. Seriously, I hear people vehemently saying .NET programs are always optimized for the target platform since the runtime on the target machine is optimized for the target architecture etc etc etc...hogwash! A managed application still can't come even close to a C++ application as far raw speed is concerned. If I have to develop something for myself, nothing lesser than C++ will do! Sure VC++/MFC is there, but its a royal pain to do even slighlty complicated UI application using it; so I need Borland C++!. Good news: Borland is back, back with a spanking new IDE called CodeGear. I cannot recommend another IDE as highly as Borland's C++ Builder 2007. You can download the trial version at http://www.codegear.com/products/cppbuilder
Happy days are back!

iTunes or WMP11

I have been using WMP 11 for watching a lot of movies, never really faced any issues.
Today, I tried burning an audio cd for myself, WMP would not do it, c'mon, every CD I put in the burner, Windows Media Player kept saying insert a blank CD. The only way out was to save the song-list as a .m3u play-list file, open this file in iTunes and burn it without any hitches.

So, which media player do you use?

Programming language names getting ridiculous

Okay, we had 'C'. Then we had 'C++', quite catchy.
C#? ok, we can tolerate this. F#? wait a minute, what's going on here?
D? damn...I can't stand this anymore!

XP Customization

Seemed like I had seen every possible wallpaper and customization for XP, till I chanced upon http://www.crystalxp.net/. Highly recommended, specially the BricoPacks customization software which make Windows XP look exactly like Vista. They also have an amazing collection of wallpapers! The WWW is fun again!