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 …

"Keep those fingers snappin'"

Sun has hired Charles Oliver Nutter and Thomas Enebo, the two core JRuby developers with the charge of bringing JRuby to fruition.

I've held for a while now that the crucial step for Ruby to cross the chasm and become an "early majority" language was hosting / 100% transparent interop with …

I've recently have been working with a client using a very well-known Web-tier library (which will go anonymous for certain reasons). Under heavy load, their system started responding terribly. They asked me to take a look at things.

To make a long story short, the library has a race condition …

Mitch Walker provides an excellent screencast showing the use of components within XNA GSE. However, looking at it I kept thinking "Shouldn't this be a domain-specific language"? I have to be careful here because, obviously, drag-and-drop designers have proven to be successful. But using the design surface as nothing but …

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from Kathy Sierra via John Lam

Ah hah! Joel Spolsky posts a technique that allows Vista to instal on VMWare: edit the .vmx file (a plaintext file) and add the lines svga.maxWidth="640" and svga.maxHeight="480". This allows you to see the Vista install (with crappy posterized colors). After Vista boots, install VMWare Tools …

Infants exposed to a Mandarin-speaking adult for less than 5 hours (25-minute sessions over 4 weeks) were "able to distinguish phonetic elements of that language." Very impressive. But infants exposed to a similar amount of speech delivered over DVD could not. Fascinating. General-audience article here (via The Old New Thing …