Huw Collingbourne turned me on to Sapphire in Steel, a Ruby programming environment implemented as a VS2005 plug-in: "Ruby In Steel 0.5.12 provides syntax sensitive code colouring and collapsing; a fully integrated interactive console which can be docked within the Visual Studio environment; integrated syntax error handling - click …

The other shoe is dropping.

This was inevitable; one of the "hard decisions" that Borland and DevCo had to face. Still no word on a buyer for DevCo.

"Most of the layoffs will come from a restructuring of Borland's international operations," says the wire and I don't take the news …

Rot in peace.

It's probably not shocking to hear that as a teen I played Dungeons & Dragons. Rob, the super-cool guy who worked at "Games People Play" (he wore leggings, a buck knife on his belt, and occasionally carried a bo staff. We worshipped him), told me there were some good DMs at …

John Montgomery is wondering how people learned to program, especially non-professional programmers. Well, some years I make more money writing than programming, so here's my story:

My desire to learn programming was sparked by my Dad bringing home Ted Nelson's "Computer Lib/Dream Machines" -- an oversized paperback that contained cartoons …

1. Megapixels aren't important: What determines the resolution of a photograph or audio recording is the "enhancement" algorithm run on it. Any image, when run through the proper enhancement, will reveal sufficient detail to recognize a face, read a license plate, etc.
2. Computer screens output text at 4800 baud and make …

I'm not a forgetful person, but in the four days before Tina's first surgery, I forgot at various times: my jacket, my credit card (x2), and my Pocket PC Phone Edition PDA. Must have had something else on my mind. I got the jacket and credit cards back, but my …

This post by Wesner Moise reminded me of my own post a few weeks back. Basically, the observation is that the "functional programming" paradigm, in which variables are immutable once bound, really seems to have something going for it.

In functional programming, the context necessary to achieve a function is …

::: {.Section1} [Ouch. A company called Laterooms.com gave up on Mono, saying that it’s GC was essentially non-existent (maybe because it didn’t pack memory?). Via [Cook Computing]]{style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:Calibri; color:#1F497D"} :::

Okay, since I've spent the whole damn day talking about other people's languages, let me tell you something that I would give a lot of thought to if I were designing a language. Consider C# 3.0 extension syntax:

static void Foo(this String s){ ... }
static void Foo(this Int32 …