Allen Holub's latest Java Watch column for SD Times says that Ruby is "certainly not" the next big thing in programming languages. He says "scripting systems (I'm reluctant to call them languages) like PHP and Ruby, ... are too Wild West to be trustworthy."

My Windows and .NET Watch column for …

I'm thrilled that Microsoft is opening up game development to non-professionals. I believe that the destruction of a steady path from enthusiast to power-user to programmer was one of the great tragedies of the 1990s. But the idea that XNA will be "YouTube of video games," conflates "point videocamera at …

That tail must be l-o-o-o-n-g indeed...

BTW, so here I am in the 99.96 percentile and my AdSense revenue is enough to buy a few lattes per month. Blogging is a marketing cost, not a direct income generator.

This code applies a BackgroundFunction to elements of an IEnumerable using the ThreadPool. If you don't know what that means, it's probably not of interest to you:

::: {style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; BACKGROUND: white; COLOR: black; FONT-FAMILY: Courier New"} [   10]{style="COLOR: #2b91af"}     [delegate]{style="COLOR: blue"} [void]{style="COLOR: blue"} [BackgroundFunction …

Ten years ago today I quit Miller Freeman, where I was an Editorial Director of the Software Development Unit (that is, a publishing unit that produced magazines on developing software) in order to launch 1711 Software, a company developing middleware for what would become known as massive multiuser role-playing-games.

Yes …

Unfortunately, I can't figure out how to access the entirety of a blog post within my LiveWriter plugin. It's easy enough to embed an hReview in a post, but it's a harder matter to actually create a template. As far as I can tell, I can only edit the contents …

::: {#3FBB6C13-79A0-40b8-8A3A-160DEA9C52F3:02883555-b267-4c2f-90d4-6f77fe9f7526 .wlWriterEditableSmartContent contenteditable="false" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; display: inline; float: none;"} ::: {.hreview} 8/14/2006 10:48:27 AM by [[Larry O'Brien]{.fn}]{.reviewer .vcard}

::: {.item .fn} LiveWriter API :::

[]{.type style="display: none;"}

????? I take back my criticism. It is easy to write a plugin. (N.B …

I downloaded Windows Live Writer last night. It's definitely superior to writing in a browser window and setup -- generally a challenge with offline blog editors -- was okay (it didn't quite diagnose that I used dasBlog, but once I chose it manually, it worked out well. And configuring the FTP upload …

Microsoft has announced (well, not announced, but Gamasutra just spilled the beans) XNA Game Studio Express,  a free product which will allow independents and studios to write games for the XBox 360. It will actually cost \$99 to be able to deploy your games to the 360.

Oh, hey and …

Test.  Image upload working?