The Pragmatic Programmers have a very good sense of software developmet trends -- they're doing today what O'Reilly did in the early 90s. Coming in July from them is Joe Armstrong's Programming Erlang. Erlang is seen by programming language mavens as one of the real contenders for the crown of "most …

I don't know if I missed an epochal MSDN article or what, but all of a sudden, PowerShell scripts are everywhere. There are too many to point to, but when it gets to the point of posting World of Warcraft utilities, something's afoot.

Andrew Binstock discusses a talk with Agitar about "how many unit tests are enough?" The upshot is that if the amount of test code is roughly equal to the amount of application code, that generally translates into code coverage of around 70% and is generally "pretty good shape."

I think …

I know that sounds like a some kind of Bayesian spam-evader, but apparently Edward Herrmann, a programmer at Colgate-Palmolive, and colleagues hacked their Wii controller to send messages to their Ruby On Rails application, which drove their SAP system (film after the jump). What a geek-tastic transcendance of normal categories …

Normally, I don't have a lot of problems making decisions like this, but I've changed my mind 3 times about which book will get my top vote in this year's Jolt Awards for Technical Books. This is a very, very good set of books:

Books (Technical)

Code Quality (Addison-Wesley) by …

Of course, debates on the theoretical effectiveness of programming paradigms may be missing the point entirely, given the too-horrifying-to-be-true assertion that many programmer applicants cannot:

Write a program that prints the numbers from 1 to 100. But for multiples of three print "Fizz" instead of the number and for the …

My dispute with Wesner Moise continues...

\<a href="http://www.knowing.net/images/IWerewolf_716D/image02.png"" atomicselection="true"> I'm going to take this post with good humor -- the "werewolf" being a reference to the question of a silver bullet and an image in one of my responses. And the "naked …

I have an email account on a customer's Exchange server and I need to ensure that I reply using that account to email traveling over that server. I don't want it to be my default account for normal email. Essentially, I want to say, "When replying to mail in Outlook …

Huh... I use Newsgator Online because I have so many machines. I don't know if I should hold this out as an example of the problem with browser-based applications, but suddenly Newsgator Online has stopped properly marking articles as read. The problem extends across both Firefox and IE7, so I …

Via Dale Churchward, standing in for Harry Pierson, comes word that Massachusetts lawmakers are considering a bill to punish retailers for personal data leaks. Dale speculates "there may be some good jobs in retail IT data security."

I think so. Of course, you should figure out what you love to …