Archive for January, 2008

Can a Hardware Platform be Closed?

Tuesday, January 29th, 2008

In the comments left for Jeff Atwood’s recent post on closed platforms, there is a discussion about his comparison between traditional dongles and the hardware of the Apple Macintosh itself.
A user named Brandon left the comment,

I’m not sure Apple hardware, say PPC and Intel on, counts as much of a dongle. Especially Intel based hardware. […]

Programming: Engineering, Science, or Art?

Tuesday, January 29th, 2008

When you’re looking to hire programmers, what do you look for in their education? How should the colleges and universities be educating the next round of students who are destined for careers in software development? There seem to be several schools of thought on this.
Programming as a Science
Traditionally, going to school with the intention of […]

Ruby on Rails under Windows XP with Cygwin

Sunday, January 27th, 2008

I like to use Cygwin for development under Windows, as I frequently use standard command line utilities like find and grep, and I find the Windows command line environment to be more painful to use than it is worth.
The first time I tried to get this all running, it was in this sort of hybrid […]

Mobile Phone Wish List

Monday, January 21st, 2008

I’ve been shopping around for new mobile phones recently. Not necessarily because I want to buy one (my current phone is working just fine), but mainly to see what’s out there. It’s been a year or so sinc e I last looked at what sorts of phones are available.
Since I’m not seriously looking to buy […]