A better hotel, collaboration tools, and development tools.

It's great that Google is moving to Unicode 5.1 and that UTF-8 is so popular, but I wish they'd get their terms straight!

Sun provides a good opportunity for non-profits to network with prospective developers, and a hotel horror story.

An example of parallel programming using all the CPUs on your computer or cluster. Also shows how to add a Flex user interface.

I'm leaving my company and heading back out on my own and that means I can talk again.

A year after its official debut, Apple's Java 6 implementation is now available for Intel-based Macs. Was it worth the wait?

A few days ago I was in the office of one of my clients, talking to the dev guys about Pantheios (what else?!), and they were asking why I do open-source. The resulting discussion was quite illuminating, not least to me, so I thought it might be useful to discuss it here and see why other people do it.

After having spent the last 15 frustrating months of too-successful consulting that has stolen all my time for writing and most of my time for researching/open-source development, something's got to give! Is blogging the answer to my quandary?

Functional programming languages are enjoying a renaissance. Even if not intending to use a functional language for daily work, learning such a language can improve one's programming style.

I'll be speaking Wednesday, April 23 on the subject of "hybrid programming." All may attend.

A business owner at a workshop I held made the very disturbing comment that he thought that 70% of programmers were "rowing backward," doing things that you had to fix in order to keep the boat moving in the forward direction.

Video of my February 7 talk at the Montreal Python users group meeting is now up on the web. It was a lot of fun, and the group seemed to enjoy it too.

For entrepreneurial software developers weighing the risks and benefits inherent in the mobile market, getting product to the customer is a key concern. It's clear you won't get much help from carriers, who seem to be convinced that software is just something they give away in order to help sell phone plans. That's the bad news.

Excited by the possibilities afforded by JRuby and the ability to plug it into various different Java environments, I decided to try implementing a JRuby interactive console in Eclipse.

Developers who have relied heavily on refactoring support available for static languages are suspicious of the productivity gains promised by dynamic languages.