Pete Wright, whose TabletPC Sudoku program was "shot in the head" by Microsoft's surprise release of their own version (join the group, Pete!), has ended his long relationship with MS consulting in order to fully embrace a job working with Ruby on Rails. His post is obviously cathartic, but he …

I greatly regret having missed this conference, but personal issues trumped my travel plans. Videos (audio over PPT) of many presentations are now available. I haven't watched them myself yet, but word is that Cory Doctorow's presentation on SecondLife was a standout.

The most-excellent SF author David Brin has an article on Salon called "Why Johnny Can't Code" (you have to sit through a commercial to gain access). In it, he laments the approachability of dear-old "line oriented" BASIC, by which, I think he means that era of BASIC when every line …

\<a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0321486811/thinkinginnet-20"" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Compilers: Principles, Techniques, & Tools 2nd Ed. by Aho, Lam, Sethi, & Ullman is the perfect book for two niches: people writing C compilers for embedded processors and CS students running the gantlet of compiler courses …

Twenty minutes ago I was throwing up my hands in despair at the C# code being generated by ANTLR and, turning to my blogreader, saw that Microsoft has released the documentation for their DSL (Domain-Specific Language) tools. Boy, is that a frustrating set of Web pages.

I'm all for revisiting …

"Dog The Bounty Hunter" Duane Chapman, his son Leland (who we see around town), and Tim ("Youngblood") have been arrested and are facing extradition to Mexico. They are charged with kidnapping (bounty hunting being illegal in Mexico) a man who's now serving a 124-year sentence for rape. I wonder if …

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14825910/

According to this article, the X chromosone is responsible for generating the cone cells responsible for detecting red and greed, but in perhaps 2-3% of women (2 Xs, don'tchaknow) there is the possibility of generating a fourth receptor type halfway between green and red (orange-y). The resulting "tetrachromat" women can …

Dana Hanna intends to write a utility every day for a month. This reminds me of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), a brilliant way to overcome the angst and inertia of the first draft. It will be amusing to see how this plays out.

In comments, Daniel Crenna asked "What do you think of the Garden Point Ruby.NET compiler? If Microsoft supported this project financially, why do you think they didn't put together an in-house project similar to Jim's IronPython for the Ruby equivalent?"

I've swapped a couple emails with the GP guys …