My long-time favorite Java editor JetBrains/IntelliJ IDEA has added a Ruby plug-in that supports Rails. My initial reaction is that the vitally important quality of code completion is well below that of both Ruby In Steel and Komodo. Don't be too excited by the presence of the Analyze and …

Hmm... If a site delays its association with a spammer until after it's been insinuated as a "friend" within target blogs, it can at a ripe moment trigger a slew of spammy FOAFbacks. Thoughts?

Sexy cetacean sounds... oh yeah, baby ...

Showing how clueless aggregator sites are, no one seems to be properly freaking out about the claims of D-Wave to be demoing a 16-qubit quantum computer with plans for a 1K-qubit computer within a year. CNet story here, straight link to company here.

The shocking thing about this is that …

An "official replica" of the movie bird was stolen from a restaurant in San Francisco.

The reward would be higher, but with a dollar of this, you can buy ten dollars of talk.

Dmitry Shecthman, who knows more about OpenID than I do, doesn't get why OpenID is important to making FOAF the validation route for Trackback. Here's my thinking, which has a 90% chance of being wrong (based on historical averages):

FOAF looks like this:

<foaf:Person>  <foaf:name>Leigh Dodds</foaf …

Is a limited recursion through a FOAF graph based on OpenID the solution to Trackback? If that sentence isn't understandable, don't worry about it, but if it parses, continue...

The big problem, of course, is the initial trackback from those outside the limits of the graph. In such a case …

John Lam, whose RubyCLR bridge led to a position in Microsoft's CLR team, hints that an announcement on his project (my guess, X:Ruby::C#:Java) will be forthcoming. Sadly, he hedges as to whether it will be MIX or PDC. Of course, I'll be going to PDC, but if …

Alan Zeichick relates what happened when the first .docx file was sent to BZ Media, a company that runs primarily on Macs. Microsoft says that everything's just swell:

We are running on target and expect to release a free public beta version of the file format converters in Spring 2007 …

My house is built on a bit of a ridge between two gullies (well, two collapsed lava tubes -- I do live on the side of an active volcano, after all). Grand plans include decks and terraces, but I can't envision them without a plan. Of course, I could hire surveyors …