If you're looking for the perfect Christmas gift for a geek and your budget is around \$1800, this reproduction of the kit that started it all would be perfect.

A few days ago was launched the biggest, most experienced, development tools company to be created since the dot-com era. A company that's explicitly turning away from managerial buzzwords in order to concentrate on language implementations, libraries, and tool-chains that will cross platforms. The company includes people who developed some …

There was a short piece on the news last night about a \$540M travel reservation system developed to aid the Department of Defense manage their travel costs (in peacetime). Apparently, it doesn't work (doesn't deliver low fares) and even if it did work, it would take 20 years of projected …

SD Times has a newsfeed. Huzzah! Subscribed.

A client relying on a 3rd party service which we had been assured was available received an email today that said "[The service] is in a stop sell mode at this time as we are evaluating etc."

I'm going to have to remember that the next time I approach a …

TeX and METAFONT have version numbers that asymptotically approach ? and e. This reflects Don Knuth's decision that it's more important to create consistency with those tools than to add features. I've thought about something similar with programming language design: languages like Java and C# were very "teachable" in their …

The new spinoff from Borland, CodeGear, is strongly hinting that they will produce at least one dynamic language:

CEO Ben Smith: "We're also working on plans that can help developers take advantage of growing and emerging areas like web services, Ruby, Python and Ajax. "

David I: "We are not limited …

In comments, Sun's Charles Nutter hints that JRuby may ship by the end of year. Or he may be taking a swipe at the Perl 6 guys: you decide. Ruby on at least one of the two major managed platforms: huge for Ruby. (In that post, I caution that it …

Borland's Developer Tools Group, including the Delphi, C++, C#, and JBuilder tools and the Interbase database tools, have been spun off into a new company called CodeGear to be headed by Ben Smith (Byte's old tech editor?). Contrary to all previous reports, CodeGear will be a wholly owned subsidiary, not …

Dr. Dobb's Journal has taken over the Jolt Awards now that Software Development is no more. Once again I'll be judging and, actually, serving as Moderator of the Development Environments and Languages category.

Given that we considered VS2005 last year (but, hey!, XNA) and given that Callisto is certainly going …