Sam Gentile says:

[W]hen people bitch about WS-*, I don't get how its not obvious that "the main characteristics of Web services is communication over unreliable communication channels such as the Internet employing unreliable data transfer protocols such as HTTP, SMTP and FTP" and many of us need things …

Jim Gray, who did fundamental work on transaction processing and won theTuring Award, is missing off California's Farallon Islands. The good news is that weather has been good and he was sailing in a 40' yacht, which ought to provide ample shelter for a few days. The bad news is …

I lag behind in this brave new era.

I've been running Vista in VMWare virtual machines and having an acceptable, but not good, experience. No glass, no NUMA (one of the few interesting APIs targetting concurrency), performance less than stellar.

However, with the time at hand to install Vista to …

In order to provide Intellisense for Ruby, a language that does not have explicit typing, Ruby In Steel turns to type inference. The built-in inferencing can be aided by adding type assertions to a function, for instance:

#:return: => nil
 #:arg: c => String
 def Bar(c)
 @field = c
    puts @field
 end …

Here's the Ruby In Steel editing / debugging experience. Intellisense works dynamically -- as soon as you define a function, it becomes available to Intellisense. The debugging experience seems to be the standard VS one (that is, pretty darned good).

REPL functionality is provided by IRB in a console window: not ideal …

+-------------------------------------------------------------------------------+------------------------------------------------------------+ | | I am:\ | | | | | | > Gregory Benford | | | | | | A master literary stylist who is also a working scientist. | +-------------------------------------------------------------------------------+------------------------------------------------------------+

Which science fiction writer are you?

Joel Spolsky's review of Dreaming in Code makes the point that Chandler is yet another high-quality data point that, contrary to the initial exhortations, Open Source is not a significantly-more-productive development methodology. It turns out that Open Source is an interesting business model (somewhat to my surprise) and that free-as-in-beer …

I was struck by the statement "the version control system is a first order effect on software, along with two others - the build system and the bugtracker. Those choices impact absolutely everything else. Things like IDEs, by comparison, don't matter at all," in a post by Bill de h?ra …

Alan Zeichick points out the absurdity of the position, touted by Microsoft, that Windows Vista will "generate" \$10 billion in new revenue for the California IT industry this year. Alan observes that IT revenue means that "someone else's costs have to go up" and that it's perverse to "celebrate a …

There are those who say that American's time is past. That this great country, this bastion of ingenuity, has lost it's spark, it's insight, it's entrepreneurial spirit. To those people, I give molecular biologist Robert Bohannon, who has figured out how to mask the bitterness of caffeine in pastry, opening …