How well does your voting system work?

Yee pictures show off graphically how various election mechanisms–e.g., plurality and instant runoff voting, as well as a collection of other esoteric methods–actually respond to the will of the populace. It’s interesting to see what happens in the case of ties and when the vote is split for several mechanisms (see the result for plurality above). It’s a good reminder about how problematic plurality is, but it’s also a good wake-up call for IRV supporters who think that ties won’t be a problem.

By the gleam of yonder moon

Welcome to a new age of .NET. With the Customer Technology Preview (CTP) of Silverlight™ 1.1, the first commercial cross-platform Microsoft® .NET™ components became available. Furthermore, my tongue is no longer officially tied. The cat is out of the bag, and thus I can now clue you all in on what I’ve been doing in the last year.

Since there’s already been quite a bit of posting on the subject of Silverlight, I figured I’d fill in some of the details about its composition and some of the nomenclature, since, even within Microsoft, it’s not completely obvious what’s in the package at first glance.

Silverlight
Intro- duced Version	Level	Technology
		Name	Codename	Description
1.0	0 (Native)	WPF/E	Jolt1	Windows Presentation Foundation / Everywhere is the browser plug-in variant of its bigger brother in Windows. It is XAML-based presentation engine.
		Windows Media codecs		These allow for high speed video streaming inside a Silverlight solution.
1.1	1 (Managed support)	CoreCLR	Telesto2	The core execution engine and platform adaptation components of .NET. These are the only parts of the managed support that are native; the rest are all managed libraries. Officially, the CoreCLR project is also responsible for the Base Class Libraries (BCL), which has been reduced for both size and portability reasons.
		UIFX		The standard framework libraries, similarly reduced from the Desktop for both size and portability reasons.
		.NET Language Runtimes		Managed libraries to support C# and VB.NET
		DLR		Dynamic Language Runtime support libraries

The “level-1” components of Silverlight are entirely to provide a managed programming model for WPF/E, as an alternative to its built-in JScript model. The part of Silverlight I’ve been working on is the CoreCLR component, focusing on Mac OS X integration, but have been banding together with my Mac counterparts on the other related teams (mostly WPF/E, with a little bit of UIFX) to make sure the collective Silverlight story on the Mac is a good one. If you have feedback for us, head on over to the Silverlight.net forums, specifically the Programming with .NET forum, and let us know. It may take more than one of us to give a full answer (for example, I know much more about how we handle native exceptions on the Mac than about what XAML you’d need to use for a particular operation), but we’ll help if we can.
--
¹In the era before marketing took over code-name generation, we could have tributes to fine beverage products. However, since code names regularly leak out of Microsoft, and out of worry that we will get stuck with a trademark lawsuit for something that isn’t the name we’re ultimately going to use, marketing now comes up with names, presumably with some kind of trademark search ahead of time to verify that we’re not going to run afoul of someone else’s.
²No, “Silverlight” isn’t the “the gleam of yonder (Telesto) moon,” but I figured it sounded good.

LOLCode.NET

Courtesy of my coworker, Andrew, who wrote the following on my whiteboard:

Plz Use namespace System
Awsum! KThxBye!

I don’t know if I have the heart to tell him that his syntax doesn’t appear to match the only known LOLCode.net implementation. Further alas that it’s GPL’d, which means that per Microsoft’s Chinese-wall-like policy, if I desire to keep my job, I can’t even look at the implementation. Ah, well. I guess, IM NOT IN YR CODZ.