I think they're great to look at, and the fact that they scale almost indefinitely is truly remarkable. But lets be honest, unless you are looking for some new deep mathematical insight then they are just a fascinating diversion.

That said, Fraqtive is one of the fastest not to mention cross platform and open source. Developed by Michał Męciński, it's in the early stages of development but is already producing very colorful images.

You can just download the binaries and view for yourself or download the sources, making sure you have QT 4.3 or higher. You can compile it with gcc (using MinGW ) or Microsoft Visual C++ 2005+. It may not have much uses but the world would be a duller place without fractals and so I've added it to the C++ Games code page.

• Link to C++ Games Code library

It's not confirmed but I think I've got H1N1 which is a human virus, not a computer one! It's just a nasty flu bug and has left me a bit groggy. So I'm currently probably taking twice as long to do something as normal..

I installed the latest Ubuntu (9.04) and Webmin on my 64 bit AMD box and started to install the free IBM DB2-Express-C database. The advantage of Ubuntu is that Mono comes installed. There's a slight road bump as I wanted to try ASP.NET MVC but the Mono team accidentally left that out of 2.4. They did an intermediate release of 2.4.2.1 last week to include it. So I'll have to install that as well.

Installing DB2 was a little more problematic (or maybe it was the Flu clogging my brain) as Java wasn't installed by default on Ubuntu. I used the Synaptic software manager to install Sun Java 6 but the DB2 Download Director didn't seem to work with that and I ended up downloading the 440MB (AMD 64 Linux version) by http which takes about 5 times as long. Then my Ubuntu was missing a couple of files. It's not hard to get by but you have to know how to issue Bash commands like sudo apt-get install from a terminal. The db2setup needed libstdc++.so.5 and libaio-dev. You need to do sudo apt-get install db2exc to fetch db2 then these commands to get the missing bits.

sudo apt-get install libstdc++5
sudo apt-get install libaio-dev
sudo ./db2setup


I tracked down the dbstart command (it's in /sqllib/adm under your user directory so on my box its /home/david/sqllib/adm) but got this error: SQL1220N - The database manager shared memory set cannot be allocated. so I guess it's time to RTFM the IBM documents and the Redbook I mentioned before. If you know the answer, add a comment. My Linux box has 2GB of ram and 220 GB disk free so I doubt it's that!

• Link to Linux Programming Tools and Utilities

Earlier than expected (by one day), Silverlight was released a couple of days ago. This is almost as significant a release in itself as Silverlight 2 was over the original Silverlight.That added C# and a CLR running on Mac as well as Windows. This release provides hardware graphic acceleration putting work on the GPU and lessening the load on your CPU. it also now includes support for H264, AAC audio and MP4.

Graphic support includes perspective 3D plus you can now manipulate bitmaps at the pixel level. Add to this 100 UI controls that can all be styled on top of a navigation framework that allows linking to content; useful for search engines. Most relevant is the Visual Studio 2008 Tools for Silverlight (If you have Visual Studio 2008) and the Silverlight Toolkit.

I think Silverlight 3 is now on a par with Flash or possibly even better than it technically and once you get over the learning curve is easier to develop for than Flash. That said, I think Microsoft need to produce a free Microsoft Visual Silverlight Express to encourage take up amongst part-time and recreation developers. There are a lot of C# developers who could produce wonderful stuff if there's an easier path. Maybe the next Visual C# Express will have it when Visual Studio 2010 comes out. If not, I think Microsoft will struggle to beat Flash in the games market.

• Link to Silverlight 2 source code library

Thanks to Lennie de Villiers for the tip off. As well as Silverlight 3 which came out today, there's another .NET framework with a very small CLR; that's the .NET Micro Framework. The SDK for it (a whopping 10.8 MB in size!) SDK supports development of code, including device I/O, in the C# language using a subset of the .NET libraries, and is fully integrated with the Microsoft Visual Studio development environment. It's for developing small embedded systems.

This appears to work with Visual C# 2008 Express. I say appears because although I downloaded it, it wouldn't install as I don't have SP 1 for Visual C# 2008 Express. To be honest, my installs are in a state of flux as I have the Silverlight 3 Beta tools, SP 1 For Visual Studio 2008 etc. I need an hour or two to fix everything! I can't even install Silverlight 3 until the beta tools are removed!

I think sometimes it would be nice if all the development tools stayed stable and static for 2-3 years with no new versions of software but that's not the real world with competition and commercial pressure etc. I can dream!

• Link to C# Tutorials
• Link to Download and Install Microsoft Visual C# 2008 Express Edition