At the risk of sounding immodest, I think we SD Times columnists have been hitting on all cylinders for the past few issues. The latest issue includes Allen Holub on FitNesse testing, Andrew Binstock on free books for programmers, and some crap from me on XNA and non-professional programming (written …

This article on Code Project (found via Steve Pietrek) might be an excellent stepping-stone for someone trying to learn language-design and compiler technologies. While code-generation and templates are good first steps and are easy to do easy things, but you should be aware that as the semantics of what you're …

A researcher has been plugging away at the NSA with the Freedom of Information Act. He's recently received an index to NSA publications (the publications are not yet available). Among the articles that have appeared in NSA Technical Journal: "Extraterrestrial Intelligence" and "Key to the Extraterrestrial Messages." I'm going to …

Given the cheesy Photoshoppery of the image, I suspect this is fake, but supposedly, this is a pullover that you slip into for a videoconference. Given my recent 4 AM local-time teleconferences, I might be able to use this.

Alan Zeichick, the man who put the "Z" in BZ Media, has started to blog. Alan's been in the "writing about computers" business since Radio Shak Model 100 days and we've worked together since 1989. I have no idea where he'll find the time to blog, but on the other …

James Robertson is producing a series of screencasts providing a Smalltalk overview. I highly recommend taking a look if you are not familiar with Smalltalk. You've undoubtedly heard of Smalltalk and perhaps have seem some Smalltalk syntax, but if you've not seen the Smalltalk development environment in use, you might …

Here's some interesting reading on the challenges of and possible strategies for dealing with exceptions in concurrent versions of C++. The try...catch...finally model of exception handling introduces its own control flow. How will that interact with concurrent models in which you're passing around a "future" (essentially, an IOU …

I've been writing a series of articles for DevX on concurrent programming. The final installment was supposed to be "Multicore for multimedia." Plan A was to speed up the MAD (MPEG Audio Decoder) processing library using OpenMP. That went well enough except for the fact that the code was so …

Intel's announcement of a laser-based chip is frickin' cool and, at the practical level, may be a big deal (beats me). But one thing that blows my mind every time I think about it is that light can only travel \~11.8 inches in a billionth of a second. And …

One of the things that differentiates me from many of my analyst colleagues is that I don't generally delve into business stuff: I'm a technology guy. So normal boardroom shenanigans and so forth aren't "my beat." So let me see if I have this straight: the chairwoman of HP hired …