My Secret Life as a Spaghetti Coder

Since the gift buying season is officially upon us, I thought I'd pitch in to the rampant
consumerism and list some of the toys I've had a chance to play with this year that would mean
fun and lea...

Active Directory. Sharepoint. Reporting Services. External DBs. Nightly updates to untold numbers of internal DBs, spread among 4 DB servers. Ruby on Rails, ASP.NET, and Javascript to customize spe...

In an effort to bring about a discussion (and hopefully diffuse some information on) scaling, last week I told the story of Origin Shabamtech and Gulfomatic's Solutioneers, bringing about an open q...

It was a sunny day in October, and Origin Shabamtech's web site had crashed for
the umpteen millionth time. Mr. Shabam, the company's
CSO, was desperate.

The money they were making from the we...

It's that time of year again where you reach deep into your brains
to learn something new, and I reach deep into my pockets to reward
you with a toy for sending it to me.

Last year the contest ...

With multiple monitors and mobile computing becoming the norm rather than the exception,
applications need to start behaving in a way that makes operation under those conditions less abrasive.
We ...

Why isn't Ruby's rand method defined like this?

alias original_rand rand
def rand(*args)
if args[0].class != Range && args.length 2
original_rand(args[0])
elsif args[0].class == Range
arg...

The IDE has been trying to be the one-stop-shop for software development since before any time that I can remember. Given its name, it was virtually guaranteed to follow that path. Integrated Devel...

This is the "I can't believe they're not releasing Fraggle Rock season 4 outside of the full set" edition of Programming Quotables.

If you don't know - I don't like to have too many microposts o...

The other day I thought I thought wanted an ||+= operator.


You see, in Ruby, there's this "if x is not defined, define x" idiom that goes like this:

x ||= 1

I was sick of seeing that follo...