I need to flash my motherboard BIOS in order to install Vista on my dual-processor desktop (I hope that will do the trick). I don't have a floppy drive anymore, not on any machine. I can't believe what a problem this has turned into. I go through my half-a-dozen rescue …

Ooh, this is tough; I've received a couple one-a-day challenges that are on things that I really do need to do. Jimmy Norton invited me into the Flickr Project 365 challenge, which is to post an image a day for a year. I am always dismayed to realize how little …

Peter Coffee, who's been providing some of the most insightful, technically-based discussions of the IT and software industries for 18 years, has left eWeekto become Director of Platform Research at Salesforce.com. This is a significant loss to the field (although I am sure a great benefit to Salesforce.com …

Ruby programmers using Windows should definitely give this a look; this is very high on my "IDEs to look out for" list. It should be noted that this is not a CLR / .NET-based Ruby; it's a plug-in to Visual Studio (Standard Edition and above; unfortunately, VS Express users are out …

Scott Hanselman goes ga-ga for the SideShow API, the Vista functions for auxiliary displays. When I was first told about SideShow quite a while ago, the emphasis was on displays embedded in the outer shell of the notebook, just as clamshell phones often have a little aux display on their …

Wesner Moise points to "generalized regular expression matching" as a moderately hard problem that might serve as the basis for comparing programming languages and approaches. He says "Microsoft's implementation of regular expression matching over strings is spread across 24 files and 14,455 lines of code including comments and whitespace …

Tim O'Reilly posts his always-intriguing quarterly analysis of the tech book sector.

Joe Gregorio interprets the 53% growth in sales of Ruby-based books as evidence that there is no "next Java" or "next framework." I'm sympathetic with his thesis, but I'm not sure that 53% growth counts as any kind …

Andrew Binstock shares the advice he gives when vendors call to ask why they didn't become finalists.

Alan Zeichick's proposal of an organizational Threading Maturity Model is an excellent contribution. As with object-orientation, it does not suffice for a single person to have mastery or near-mastery; the average ability of the team must be fair in order to maintain quality, chaos can be wrought by just one …

My latest in SD Times is up, in which I decide to stop being polite about WS-*.