Apple and Intel, Intel and Apple

Earlier in the week, Apple announced that they were going to start making Macintoshes with Intel-branded x86 processors in them.  Adding to this is Intel's plan to support virtualization in a next-generation of CPUs.  My hope is that it means I could run the MacOS along side Windows on the same machine and both at native speeds, or slightly below that, but who's counting.  The whole situation reminds me of an ad I saw many years ago, which featured Apple's DOS Compatible Mac.  The idea was simple, take an in-production Mac, install an IBM-compatible on-a-card, and sell it as a package deal.  The ad featured a user switching back and forth between a Windows 3.x desktop and the MacOS.  Shortly thereafter I got a Power Mac 6100, which I happily used as my primary machine for about four years or so.  It was this ad that did it though.  In a small fit of nostalgia, I went searching for a copy of this ad.  I never did find it, but I did find a few other interesting Apple ads:

• A Pentium riding atop a snail


• The 1984 ad, which was playing during the 1984 Superbowl


• "Toasted Bunny", which centers around someone in an Intel-esque bunny suit catching on fire.

NOTE: The above ads were compiled and hosted at: http://www.esm.psu.edu/Faculty/Gray/movies.html

Integrating Lua Into Visual Studio

I do a lot of dual-language coding for work, most of which is in C++, but an increasing amount is in a scripting language called Lua.  It's a very nice language, with a highly flexible syntax and a small footprint (~200k on-disk for the entire environment plus an additional C++ interface.)  Using it is not without its drawbacks, particularly when it relates to writing C++ code in Visual Studio.  For example, the Visual Studio debugger cannot step-into or break inside-of Lua code.  Some Lua debuggers exist, such as the one provided in the LuaPlus library, however I've yet to find one that provides a good and stable of a debugger as Visual Studio has.  Recently however, I found a V.S. add-on which supports syntax highlighting and auto-completion.  It's not quite the full Lua/V.S. integration I was/still-am hoping for, but it helps.  The add-on is called lualite and if you're a Lua programmer, or are a V.S. user who's interested in checking out Lua, I'd highly recommend taking a look.