Ruby on Rails Hits a Wall; Twitter Stutters

April 13, 2007

Twitter is currently the largest Ruby on Rails site in operation today. And they are having trouble keeping up with the load.

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Embracing Umbraco: ASP.NET Content Management Done Right

April 11, 2007

I’ve posted in this spot before about some of the annoyances of working with DotNetNuke. DNN taught me the value of a good content-driven web site framework, but its general clunky feel was making me crazy. There had to be something better.

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The Dark Side of Tagging in Windows Vista

April 10, 2007

I don’t want to rain on everybody’s parade, but there is a really significant fly in the ointment when it comes to the gee-whiz media tagging feature in Windows Vista’s Photo Gallery application.

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FastCGI: Improved Support for PHP under IIS on the Way

April 9, 2007

For all those who like to complain about how “closed” Windows is, have a gander at the latest technical preview of a new CGI implementation that will improve stability and performance of PHP under Windows.

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Unstable Video Drivers Appear to Be the Weak Link in Vista

April 9, 2007

I’ve come to the conclusion that the weakest link in Vista is the video driver system. My wife’s new Vista Ultimate installation on a brand-new box has been the source of so much trouble I scarcely know where to begin. But I know most of the cause: video drivers.

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The Death of Microsoft is Greatly Exaggerated

April 7, 2007

I had a good chuckle today at this naive screed from Paul Graham, a Silicon Valley renaissance man by any standards, whose shoelaces I am no doubt unworthy to tie. Still, I think he’s full of … himself on this one.

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DotNetNuke Breaking Changes: Beware the Edge Cases

April 7, 2007

One of the things you have to weigh when relying on a particular technology is the level of acceptance and penetration that technology has. In general, the bigger the user base, the more active the user community, and the more mature the product, the safer you are in the long run. Reputation is huge, too. But there is another factor that is sometimes overlooked, and that is whether your use of the technology is “typical” or more of an “edge case”.

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Blurring the Lines: C# Extension Methods

April 5, 2007

Here’s another reason why any debates about static vs dynamic languages, prototype vs inheratance based OOP, and so on, are getting increasingly irrelevant.

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Spock vs. Stallman: A Way to Look at Static vs. Dynamic Languages

April 5, 2007

Yesterday I wrote a bit about religious fervor vs hyper-skepticism regarding popular development fashions. One of those fashions is “dynamic languages” such as Ruby and Python. I have a way of looking at dynamic vs static languages that I find helpful that I haven’t seen written up elsewhere. So here it is for posterity, for […]

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On Software Development Fashions

April 4, 2007

The pseudonymous “Ed Johnson” over at HackNot has produced another bit of priceless satire entitled “Invasion of the Dynamic Language Weenies”. It got me thinking about the language and technology fashions I’ve seen come and go over the last generation. Are popular dynamic languages, agile techniques, and TDD empty fashion or the Second Coming? The truth, as usual, lies somewhere in between.

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