Big Dave’s Blog

Machinist: Tech Blog, Tech News, Technology Articles – Salon I have to admit, I never thought of checkers as being a game that needed to be solved — never mind that it would take 18 years and several CPUs to do it. Now, it’s time to solve chess, but that might take a while. Checkers…

I came across this excellent post on Philipp Keller’s blog: Tag History and Gartner’s Hype Cycles. I agree with Philipp’s take that we seem to be in the area of disillusionment. The question remains, however, whether tagging really is on the rise in the way that most of us expect. Don’t get me wrong, I’m…

Ruby is an amazingly productive language, and Rails is an awesome framework. However, you need to be aware of what you are getting into. There are lot’s of items that make life difficult for your web server. Some of the biggest culprits are has_one, has_many, etc. They are so powerful, but use them wrong and…

Corunet. El blog – Automatic CSS: The stylizator I came across this the other day. It’s a nice trick to get an idea how others are handling their CSS.

Derik Whittaker : Definition of ‘Done’ Having managed more than a few successful projects to on time completion, this definition is one of the hardest things to get right. Too many developers forget what done means when estimating tasks. Done is when it’s coded up, right? Done means it is really done. The software works,…

Atlantic Dominion Solutions – Blog Archive – JRuby 1.0 Released Saw this a while back, but I haven’t had a chance to comment. Ruby is fine system that is slightly hindered in performance by not being compiled. I’m curious how much this will help and how much extra complexity it will add. Once I make…

After the launch of Apple’s much awaited mobile phone iPhone in January 2007, Jobs said “Java’s not worth building in. Nobody uses Java anymore. It’s this big heavyweight ball and chain…” This is interesting coming from a guy and a company that were huge supporters of Java until recently. Apple used to make a big…