Raymond Chen's psychic debugging of a deadlock is everything you need to know about why the mainstream model of concurrency (in which programmer's manually manage locks and can start their own threads) is fundamentally broken.

If you're a C# or Java programmer looking at this code, you might be tempted …

For the past few years I've felt that Subversion was a "good enough" SCM system, but I am beginning to wonder about that. In practice, SVN hits bumps quite often, especially when doing things like moving files or directories. This is always easy enough for an experienced user to correct …

Via Chris Sells comes \<a href="http://www.douglasp.com/blog/2007/12/27/EmacsNet.aspx"" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">this cryptic message from Microsoft's Doug Purdy:

We are looking for developers/testers to build a tool that I will roughly describe as "Emacs.Net".

No more details than …

A client bought me an iPhone for Christmas (more-financially-successful friend's instant reaction: "You aren't charging them enough.").

My reaction is that while it's an incredible gadget, it's a pale shadow of the Kindle when it comes to reading. I am dismayed by the number of people who say "Well, the …

Ruby 1.9, which involves a number of significant upgrades, is now available. This is development code, probably not ready for use in upcoming sprints / development cyclese, but I will be downloading it if for no other reason than to experiment with its Fibers implementation.

A client bought me an iPhone for Christmas. It's a pretty darn slick gadget, although I doubt that I'll keep a phone plan on it (I'm pretty much either at home in my wifi bubble all day long and, when I go out, I'm often going to beaches and other …

Were I to graph the calories burned per week exercising for group in my social network (were I to bother maintaining my Facebook page), it would create a normal distribution. This graph would probably correlate pretty directly to their perceived fitness and their enthusiasm for exercising. Within this group I …

BeepBeep is a high-accuracy acoustic ranging system for mobile phones. It supports Pocket PC phones running Windows Mobile 5.0 or subsequent versions.

I'm not even going to pretend to have the time to play with this.

Gee, what a surprise, no CGI can do justice to "broken-down drunk exiled prince of the armored polar bears." But The Golden Compass was not nearly as incomprehensible to those who hadn't read the books as I thought it would be. My wife quite liked the movie and hadn't been …

The biggest problem with tag-based languages (\<h1>\<% someCode %>\</h1> : the ASPs, the ColdFusions, the PHPs...) is that they facilitate monolithic code. This is related the big criticism of XML and DOMs for data structures, too: they facilitate the creation of hierarchies, not graphs. (As always with programming, the issue is …