The July 08 (Vol. 30, #7) IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence has an incredible paper by Raykar, Duraiswami, and Krishnapuram. A Fast Algorithm for Learning a Ranking Function from Large-Scale Data Sets appears to be a game-changer for an incredibly important problem in machine learning. Basically, they …

CodeGear, the company semi-spun off from Borland's languages division, has been acquired by Embarcadero, the company best known for enterprise-y DB tools such as ER/studio.

The half-measure of announcing the division's sale and then holding on to it was always ugly and even though Embarcadero is probably not the …

In the Summer and Fall of 1999, at the peak of the dot-com boom, there was incredible competition for software developers. Starting pay for developers with no experience had already climbed to \\(60K and then, in the course of maybe 3 months, it went from \\)60K to \\(75K to \\)90K …

I'm trying to hire a couple developers. One guy sent a resume that looked great -- degree in CS, C++ experience, a year with Ruby in Rails. So I sent him a simple programming exercise. I sent him the testcases.

He shoots back an answer. I open a command-line, type ruby …

She was a good dog.

I recently wrote an encomium to ResolverOne, the IronPython-based spreadsheet:

[T]heir use of pair programming and test-driven development has delivered high productivity; of the 140,000 lines of code, 110,000 are tests....ResolverOne has been in development for roughly two years, is written in a language without explicit …

https://portal.acm.org/poplogin.cfm? .... etc ... (I can't post the whole URL since it's linked to my account)

It's been quite a year for Python, and Google App Engine provides the dynamic language a very high profile indeed. GAE is a cloud platform that is competitive with Amazon's S3 (much like Stratos, on the planet Ardana might compete with Cloud City on Bespin ). GAE provides Django and other …

Sometime after Space War and Asteroids, but before color was widespread in arcade games, there was a 2-person vector-graphics game in which you and your friend drove "tractors" around and grabbed little diamonds (or whatever) from a pile in the center of the screen and dragged them back to your …

"I wrote an encryption algorithm with 612 bits of security." (I really like to imagine the 'notes' from the studio on this -- "I like how this establishes that Hansen is a very talented programmer, but let's bump it up 100 to show he was really good.")

"We need Linux servers …