According to Tim O'Reilly's always interesting quarterly analysis of the book industry, Ruby is doing extraordinarily well, with a 689% quarterly increase in sales and is now approaching Perl in terms of book sales.

Caveats include the (some would say profound) difference between book sales and use. Most Perl programmers …

On June 19, I posted 3 articles, "15 Exercises to Known a Programming Language," which came to the attention of Digg and was, for a few days, on the front page (and even the top item) in the Programming theme.

I've finally gotten around to reviewing my logs. While the …

I finally got a dual-processor motherboard that boots (a Tyan S2885) only to discover that I only have 2GB of "registered" DDRAM, making my other 4GB of RAM worthless on this computer. Well, easy enough to deal with later, I think, happily screwing the motherboard down into my case. Now …

AMD unveiled new chip pricing today, trying to steal some thunder from the outstanding reviews garnered by \<a href="http://www.knowing.net/ct.ashx?id=a33e3e93-f321-4afd-98ec-b909cfed4275&url=http%3a%2f%2fwww.intel.com%2fproducts%2fprocessor%2fcore2%2findex.htm"" target=_blank rel="noopener noreferrer">Intel's Core2Duo chips. Personally, I've got …

This site claims there is a car with powered wheels that can do 0-60 in 1.67 seconds.

You'd have to have wheels made out of glue to do that, but assuming that's possible, I make that out as 1.6 gees as the average! Must be pretty hard to …

The C99 language standard added support for variable length arrays (VLAs):

 void foo(int len){  float myArray[len];  ... }

In porting some C# code to C++, I had a method signature like that, so I tried to use a VLA. Sadly, VC++ 2005 produces "error C2057: expected constant expression," "error C2466 …

Word is that Borland has come to an agreement with a still-secret savior to purchase and support "DevCo": the former languages and tools division.

Details as they emerge, but that won't be for a few weeks

::: {style="direction:ltr;margin-top:0in;margin-left:0in;width:6.6041in"} ::: {style="direction:ltr;margin-top:0in;margin-left:0in;width:3.5229in"} Sloppy: Calibri @ 100% :::

::: {style="direction:ltr;margin-top:.0493in;margin-left:0in;width:1.384in"} Friday, July 21, 2006

7:36 AM :::

::: {style="direction:ltr;margin-top:.0722in;margin-left:0in;width:6.6041in …

NaturallySpeaking 9, coming out in August, claims to dramatically reduce the time it takes to model your voice, achieving the best-possible recognition soon after opening the box.

For some people, that best-possible recognition is said to be 99%. Maybe. I've probably gone throught the "voice training" process a dozen or …

The last thing I saw last night was something about "Do not turn off or remove the power cord from your computer" for some no-doubt-critical update. This morning, my desktop doesn't POST. It hangs right at the point the RAM count happens.

Now, I don't think an OS upgrade can …