"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 …

Microsoft rapidly pushed out, via Windows LiveUpdate, a patch to invalidate the FairUse4WM application, which strips the Digital Rights Management (anti-copying) mechanism of Windows Media Player. Most comments on this have spoken of the apparently greater zeal applied to DRM than to security, but the incident is far more infuriating …

The release of IronPython is, in and of itself, A Good Thing. But maybe the best thing is that it's a shared-source release with a very reasonable license. Not because I'm a utopian about the quality of open source, but because I really quite like the code structure. Apropos my …

Amazon has released "Unbox," their video purchase / download service. TV shows are \\(1.99 each and you get \\)1.99 rebate on your first purchase. They've got all 3 seasons of Star Trek and I'm greatly tempted to have colorful glowing brains wagering quatloos (until Kirk teaches 'em what real …