Silverlight on Rails

Jonathan Edwards has a great piece of speculation.  Man, if John Lam has produced a native CLR Ruby (maybe based on the IronPython codebase) in 8 months, he'd be the run-away winner of this year's He-Man Programming Award.

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Schadenfreude

Please, feel free to laugh at this column describing how I was completely pwned by hackers trading the German dub of 'Norbit'...

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It's Much Work, Measuring Turtles

Self-Righting ObjectThis object, which is of uniform density, is self-righting. It has a second balance point that is "unstable"/highly susceptible to perturbation (when I first read the article I thought it said it didn't have such a point, which freaked me out). I love mathematical objects that are complex and …

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Ageism in Software Development

Benoit Lavigne wonders if ageism is a problem in the software development profession. Oh, hell yeah. From the minute I began editing software development magazines (when I was 25) I began hearing from professionals in their 40s and higher who faced disproportionate difficulty getting work. There is not a question …

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Hyperlinks From CD To Web Patent (#6,314,574): I Have Prior Art, How Do I Help?

Disc Link, a subsidiary of Acacia Technologies Group (an organization that basically buys up patents so that it can sue anyone who violates them), claims that it's patent number 6,314,574 covers hyperlinks from documents stored on a CD that send users to sites on the web.
Last week …

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TurboTax E-Filing Server Bogged Down

Well, looks like I might have to run down to the Post Office after all. The TurboTax filing servers have not been working for hours. I thought that after midnight EST, things might calm down, but I don't know how long to waste before just printing out the forms and …

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DeveloperWorks Podcast About Jolt Awards, With Rosalyn Lum and I

DeveloperWorks interviewed Rosalyn Lum and I about the Jolt Awards (IBM was a big winner this year).

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Override Chicago Manual Of Style 13th Edition Rule 8.3

Eye-tracking studies by Jakob Nielsen lead to the recommendation "Show numbers as numerals when writing for online readers." This contradicts the traditional style rule of writing out numbers less than 100 (or sometimes 10) (I really had to stop and consciously use numerals for those!).

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