Serious Magic Communicator is a nice product: it combines teleprompter and chromakey (green screen) software, so you can rapidly create "talking head" videos with video or graphics in the background, a la TV weathermen. The quality, of course, isn't exactly Lord of the Rings, but it's a very fast way …

Based on people commenting on my previous post, it looks like RedGate kind of "owns" the database-refactoring tools market. I downloaded the 14-day trial of SQL Dependency Tracker. It gives an excellent first impression: not a wizard interface, but very obvious how to start.

After you point it at your …

Borland is abandoning its two-year-old strategy of delivering a "software development platform" to further the goal of "software delivery optimization." As I feared from the start, Borland's over-stuffed product portfolio and large ambitions clashed with their limited resources.

To summarize: Borland was once the most loved brand in the programming …

James Robertson is producing a series of screencasts providing a Smalltalk overview. I highly recommend taking a look if you are not familiar with Smalltalk. You've undoubtedly heard of Smalltalk and perhaps have seem some Smalltalk syntax, but if you've not seen the Smalltalk development environment in use, you might …

The Made In Express contest is over, with the winner being an "All Terrain Self-Maneuverable Robot." This is unfair for at least two reasons:

1. It's a group entry ("Group entries will not be accepted"), and
2. It's been under development for years

I downloaded the source to the robot and the …

The most-excellent SF author David Brin has an article on Salon called "Why Johnny Can't Code" (you have to sit through a commercial to gain access). In it, he laments the approachability of dear-old "line oriented" BASIC, by which, I think he means that era of BASIC when every line …

\<a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0321486811/thinkinginnet-20"" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Compilers: Principles, Techniques, & Tools 2nd Ed. by Aho, Lam, Sethi, & Ullman is the perfect book for two niches: people writing C compilers for embedded processors and CS students running the gantlet of compiler courses …

Sun has hired Charles Oliver Nutter and Thomas Enebo, the two core JRuby developers with the charge of bringing JRuby to fruition.

I've held for a while now that the crucial step for Ruby to cross the chasm and become an "early majority" language was hosting / 100% transparent interop with …

Mitch Walker provides an excellent screencast showing the use of components within XNA GSE. However, looking at it I kept thinking "Shouldn't this be a domain-specific language"? I have to be careful here because, obviously, drag-and-drop designers have proven to be successful. But using the design surface as nothing but …

The September 1st issue of SD Times contains two opinions on Ruby, "It Isn't All A Gem," by Andrew Binstock and my "Crossing the Chasm." Allen Holub's column "Just Say No to XML" is also provocative. As usual, surface disagreements belie underlying agreements: there is nothing that either Andrew or …