Ruby 1.9, which involves a number of significant upgrades, is now available. This is development code, probably not ready for use in upcoming sprints / development cyclese, but I will be downloading it if for no other reason than to experiment with its Fibers implementation.

A client bought me an iPhone for Christmas. It's a pretty darn slick gadget, although I doubt that I'll keep a phone plan on it (I'm pretty much either at home in my wifi bubble all day long and, when I go out, I'm often going to beaches and other …

Were I to graph the calories burned per week exercising for group in my social network (were I to bother maintaining my Facebook page), it would create a normal distribution. This graph would probably correlate pretty directly to their perceived fitness and their enthusiasm for exercising. Within this group I …

BeepBeep is a high-accuracy acoustic ranging system for mobile phones. It supports Pocket PC phones running Windows Mobile 5.0 or subsequent versions.

I'm not even going to pretend to have the time to play with this.

Gee, what a surprise, no CGI can do justice to "broken-down drunk exiled prince of the armored polar bears." But The Golden Compass was not nearly as incomprehensible to those who hadn't read the books as I thought it would be. My wife quite liked the movie and hadn't been …

The biggest problem with tag-based languages (\<h1>\<% someCode %>\</h1> : the ASPs, the ColdFusions, the PHPs...) is that they facilitate monolithic code. This is related the big criticism of XML and DOMs for data structures, too: they facilitate the creation of hierarchies, not graphs. (As always with programming, the issue is …

Microsoft's new Volta toolset allows developers to develop their applications using standard OOP techniques and then use "declarative tier-splitting" to specify which functions should run on the client and which on the server. Erik Meijer says:

...Volta starts with a client-side perspective. That is, once developers are satisfied with an …

Jon Skeet's generation of the Mandelbrot set via LINQ chaotically oscillates between absurdity and relevance, sensitive to the input of what aspect of concurrency you're thinking about. If you're thinking about efficiency, you rapidly head towards "absurd," but if you think about mental models, it rapidly heads towards relevance (by …

Jeff Duntemann (a great competitor/friend from the Computer Language days) opines that:

[T]here are three different kinds of reading:

• Meditative reading is reading to change your state of mind....
• Autodidactive reading is reading to teach yourself something....
• Developmental reading is reading within the process of creating texts for …

This story of a couple that stole \$7 million on Monday and were nabbed this morning reminds me of a second-tier friend from High School who was very dim. A few years after HS I heard that he had gotten a job with an armored car company doing ATM refills …