.net

OK, so while I love Linux as a server environment, it gives me the creeping horrors on the desktop and I stick to Windows there. This means I need a terminal emulator, and a good one would be nice. I've used the old stand-by, PuTTY, for approximately two centuries. (Or about ten years, but who's counting?) It's very functional software: does pretty much anything you need. No complaints about that, and I'm grateful to Simon Tatham and company for making such handy software. But it's always had some very un-Windows behaviors, and they're a real pain. Some are understandable, although could be worked around (for example, Ctrl-C is used as an abort command on the terminal side of things, but if you're highlighting text, it's not exactly rocket science that you want to copy that text when you hit Ctrl-C) with a little thinking. Some are not, and after having eight different PuTTY windows on my toolbar¹ today, I had enough of this crap.

I dig a lot of electronic music, and I'm interested in the guts of the technology used to make it. I was looking around the interwebs a few minutes ago for a copy of the Virtual Studio Technology specification for audio plugins (used by Ableton Live, my digital audio workstation of choice) and stumbled upon something way cool: VST.NET, an implementation of the specification for use with .NET applications. Ihaven't checked out Mono for VSTs on Mac OS X, but I'm curious.