I was struck by the statement "the version control system is a first order effect on software, along with two others - the build system and the bugtracker. Those choices impact absolutely everything else. Things like IDEs, by comparison, don't matter at all," in a post by Bill de h?ra …

Alan Zeichick points out the absurdity of the position, touted by Microsoft, that Windows Vista will "generate" \$10 billion in new revenue for the California IT industry this year. Alan observes that IT revenue means that "someone else's costs have to go up" and that it's perverse to "celebrate a …

There are those who say that American's time is past. That this great country, this bastion of ingenuity, has lost it's spark, it's insight, it's entrepreneurial spirit. To those people, I give molecular biologist Robert Bohannon, who has figured out how to mask the bitterness of caffeine in pastry, opening …

Hard on the heels of Ruby In Steel's debut, Komodo 4 was released today. This new version supports Ruby and RoR. via Binstock on Software.

I need to flash my motherboard BIOS in order to install Vista on my dual-processor desktop (I hope that will do the trick). I don't have a floppy drive anymore, not on any machine. I can't believe what a problem this has turned into. I go through my half-a-dozen rescue …

Ooh, this is tough; I've received a couple one-a-day challenges that are on things that I really do need to do. Jimmy Norton invited me into the Flickr Project 365 challenge, which is to post an image a day for a year. I am always dismayed to realize how little …

Peter Coffee, who's been providing some of the most insightful, technically-based discussions of the IT and software industries for 18 years, has left eWeekto become Director of Platform Research at Salesforce.com. This is a significant loss to the field (although I am sure a great benefit to Salesforce.com …

Ruby programmers using Windows should definitely give this a look; this is very high on my "IDEs to look out for" list. It should be noted that this is not a CLR / .NET-based Ruby; it's a plug-in to Visual Studio (Standard Edition and above; unfortunately, VS Express users are out …

Scott Hanselman goes ga-ga for the SideShow API, the Vista functions for auxiliary displays. When I was first told about SideShow quite a while ago, the emphasis was on displays embedded in the outer shell of the notebook, just as clamshell phones often have a little aux display on their …

Wesner Moise points to "generalized regular expression matching" as a moderately hard problem that might serve as the basis for comparing programming languages and approaches. He says "Microsoft's implementation of regular expression matching over strings is spread across 24 files and 14,455 lines of code including comments and whitespace …