Startup for sale on eBay (and it’s a great deal)

By Antonio Cangiano Posted On August 31, 2009 Startup World 1 Comment

One of the best programmers I know is selling a web application on eBay, that he’s been developing and running for the past three years. Given the starting price and considering what one lucky person or company will walk away with, I must say, it’s an amazing deal. I’m writing about

DB2 on Mac OS X Snow Leopard

By Antonio Cangiano Posted On August 28, 2009 IBM 15 Comments

Earlier today I headed over to the local Apple Store to purchase a copy of Snow Leopard, the newest version of Apple’s operating system. There was a decent line up, as I expected. Not the kind of line up you’d encounter with the launch of a new iPhone, but it was

Recommended Ruby and Rails books (August 2009)

By Antonio Cangiano Posted On August 24, 2009 Programming, Reviews 7 Comments

I finally got around to updating the Ruby and Rails book pages. The existing list was getting a bit obsolete and I didn’t like the idea of recommending old books to newcomers. I also had some interesting new entries. Without further ado: Recommended Ruby Books Recommended Rails Books A few people

Do programmers still buy printed books?

By Antonio Cangiano Posted On August 15, 2009 Programming 37 Comments

Yesterday I published a post titled My latest order of programming books, which received a fair number of comments both here and elsewhere online. Aside from a few good suggestions for other must-read books for programmers, there were several comments about how buying hard copies of books in this day and

My latest order of programming books

By Antonio Cangiano Posted On August 14, 2009 Programming 10 Comments

A few days ago it was my birthday. This year I decided to reward my aging self with some books I’d had my eyes on. My budget was roughly $250, nothing to snicker at, but programming and computer science books aren’t exactly famous for being inexpensive. The hardest part was shortlisting

How much faster is Ruby on Linux?

By Antonio Cangiano Posted On August 10, 2009 Programming 12 Comments

In a previous article I compared the performance of Ruby on Windows, built through Microsoft Visual C++ and GCC. The numbers for the MinGW version were very impressive. So the question now becomes, how does its performance compare to that of Ruby on Linux? To quote one person (Alex) who commented

On Scala’s future

By Antonio Cangiano Posted On August 7, 2009 Programming 23 Comments

Kenneth McDonald posted the following question about Scala’s future in the Scala mailing list: I thought it would be interesting to find out people’s predictions for how much of the Java market Scala will eventually penetrate. It’s nice to see Scala doing reasonably well so far, so now’s your chance to

The DB2 adapter now supports Django 1.1

By Antonio Cangiano Posted On August 6, 2009 IBM, Programming 1 Comment

This article is obsolete. Please refer to the following articles for up do date instructions: Ruby/Rails and DB2 | Python/Django and DB2. Thank you! I’m glad to announce that the API team has just released version 1.0.2 of the adapter for Django. And on my birthday to boot, what a nice

A faster Ruby on Windows is possible (benchmarks for 4 implementations inside)

By Antonio Cangiano Posted On August 4, 2009 Programming 17 Comments

In yesterday’s post I compared IronRuby 0.9, Ruby 1.8.6 (from the One-Click Installer) and Ruby 1.9.1 (downloaded from the official site) against one another. IronRuby did great, but the discussion in the comment section quickly veered towards what version of the One-Click Ruby Installer should have been used. I justified my

Comparing the performance of IronRuby, Ruby 1.8 and Ruby 1.9 on Windows

By Antonio Cangiano Posted On August 3, 2009 Programming 15 Comments

In my latest article I discussed the importance of JRuby as a means of introducing Ruby to the Enterprise world. Most of the companies that belong to this ecosystem are Java based, but we cannot forget that a sizable portion of them are Microsoft-centric. Within these companies, Ruby will be far