I just emailed my Kindle the PDF of Programming Ruby and lo! it works great, with even the ToC converted into hyperlinks.

The first thing that must be said about the Kindle is that the screen technology -- eInk -- is vastly more readable than any screen you've read from before. Pause. No, seriously, vastly more readable. My wife, no technologist, actually used the word "wow," and after reading a page opined that it …

U. of Arizona researchers have built a robot that's guided by the brain of a moth. I assume the resulting rampage can only be stopped by cantilevering a lightbulb over the rim of the Grand Canyon.

Darryl Taft's article "Toward a Discussion of Morality and Code" is quickly side-tracked into an exhortation that software developers should be moral people (recycle your punch cards, yo!). Not discussed is the more interesting question of whether there is a morality within coding decisions and, if so, what the higher …

While reading the latest ThinkGeek ad copy, I find:

[W]e're jealous of today's students. They can now go online to find out if any washers are open, pay for the laundry with their student ID, and then receive an e-mail alert when the washer and/or dryer is done …

\<a href="http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/default.aspx"" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Visual Studio 2008 has shipped.

This is a very compelling upgrade, primarily because of Language-Integrated Query (LINQ), a new feature that is supported in the mainstream .NET languages VB and C# and will almost certainly …

Amazon has shipped the Kindle, which I think may very well be the game-changing device the eBook market has been waiting for. Compatibility with PDF, plaintext, HTML, "Kindle format" (structured HTML), plus free EVDO connectivity, plus email-your-document-to-the-Kindle (killer). Books are \$9.99. If O'Reilly puts Safari on this thing, they'll …

Paul Stovell is working on a project he calls "SyncLINQ" which provides databinding over LINQ queries. Although I've not yet tried SyncLINQ, it's clearly a great idea. [via Steve Pietrek Links (11/15/2007)]

Wes Moise's musings on Supercompilation led me to this discussion of the the myth of the sufficiently smart compiler.

The "sufficiently smart compiler" is still trotted out regularly, even though the market has moved away from demanding even moderate attention to performance at the compiler level. Have you timed your …

I realize that the preceding may, in fact, make me appear to be a hot-head. In fact, I may be a hot-head. But I think if there's one thing that we should value, it's our time. I spent an hour trying to "clear the cache" because he uploaded a file …