[Update: You can now find
the source code for this on bitbucket]
Call me crazy, but I've wanted to run a linux binary natively under
windows for a while now; kinda like wine, but in reverse.
Well, the other day I was browsing through the MSDN docs (as you do)
and discovered that it is possible to install a "vectored" exception
handler. A quick bit of test code later, and I discovered that I can
trap "int 0x80" instructions using this technique--those are used by
linux binaries to initiate syscalls.
A couple of days hacking later, and I have a very small linux kernel
emulation environment; it's split into two parts--low.dll (the kernel
code) and low.exe (the bootstrap). The usage is quite simple; from your
command prompt, run the linux binary of choice by prefixing the command
line with "low.exe":
low.exe linuxsmallapp one two three
four
The code from the named linux binary is loaded (low.dll includes an
ELF loader) and bootstraps the process by faking an execve() syscall.
When the syscall returns, the code resumes execution inside the loaded
module. The code is running natively on your processor; and syscalls
happen in userspace (just like the binary) although they run under a
separate stack inside the win32 exception handler code. So, this is
almost like kernel space.
What I have now is good enough to run my simple hello world
application. It doesn't yet handle dynamic elf executables--they need
to be statically linked. Thanks to Tal Peer, I have a collection of
statically compiled coreutils from gentoo; they start up fine, but die
somewhere in the stdio part of libc. I'm trying to track down the
problem.
If anyone has any insight into why this might be (maybe windows is
doing stuff for software interrupt number 128? before it calls my
exception handler?), I'd like to hear it :-)
[Update] If you're interested in playing with it, please don't expect
to acheive much at this stage. You can download
it here.
During one of my hops through AMS on the conference run at the end of last year, I had a couple of hours to kill and picked up a copy of Michael Crichton's "Prey". I loved the story, having recently become a father and very recently just been in/around Silicon Valley. I even got Juliette to read it, and now she's gone Crichton mad. 
I had the pleasure of using 
For a long time now, I've wanted to do this; build up a fairly simple (yet powerful) Blog/Wiki/CVS/Bugs/Shopping-list/whatever manager. I was going to try to use 