Peter Coffee Leaves eWeek for Salesforce

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 …

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Ruby In Steel (Ruby Development Environment in VS 2005) Goes 1.0

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 …

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SideShow A Breakthrough API?

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 …

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Bad Comparison: 14 Line Python RegEx evaluator vs. Microsoft's 14K lines

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 …

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Ruby Booksales Grow At 53%: Glass Half-Full or Half-Empty?

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 …

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How To Win (Or At Least Get Considered) For A Jolt

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

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The Personal Threading Maturity Model

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 …

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Give it a REST

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

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Dugg: Ugh!

Sorry about the "Service Unavailable"s throughout the day. My post on "Top 10 Things I've Learned About Computers From The Movies and Any Episode of '24'" got >1800 Diggs today. My ISP called me in the middle of the afternoon and said that my site was consuming 100% CPU …

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2006 Jolt Award Finalists: Development Environments

I'm the moderator of the "Development Environments" category of the Jolt Awards and this year the finalists are:

Development Environments

  • EiffelStudio Open Source Edition (Eiffel Software)
  • IntelliJ IDEA (JetBrains)
  • IronPython (Microsoft)
  • Microsoft XNA Game Studio Express, XNA Framework (Microsoft)
  • NetBeans IDE (Sun Microsystems)
  • Wolfram Workbench (Wolfram Research)

This makes for …

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