Scott Ambler has launched this year's installment of his annual State of the IT Union Survey. The goal of this ongoing survey series is to find out what IT professionals are actually doing in practice. As Scott says, there's a lot of rhetoric flying around out there but not a lot of hard data, making it difficult for IT departments to make fact-based decisions as to how to organize the work that they do. You can help rectify this problem by filling out this survey as honestly and thoroughly as you can.

 The Center for the Study of Science Fiction has announced winners of the 2009 John W. Campbell Award for the best science fiction novel of the year, and the 2009 Theodore Sturgeon Award for the best short science fiction of the year.

Replace one neuron in your brain by a functionally equivalent chip. Would you still be conscious? Of course. Alcohol damages us more, and we remain conscious beings. But if you replace two, two billion, all the neurons? If you simulate them on a computer? What if you simulate them on paper, with a human emulating the computer? After all, hardware makes no difference. I've just discovered one of my favourite essays online, A Conversation with Einstein's Brain from Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett's book The Mind's Eye. And it's about this very question. Read it, and see whether you enjoy it as much as I did.

A programmer started to cuss
Because getting to sleep was a fuss
As he lay there in bed
Looping 'round in his head
was: while( !asleep() ) sheep++;

Templates can be a complex and intimidating feature. I know I'm never comfortable with a feature until I know how it compiles and works down to the bottom level. Any complex process can be broken down into simpler, lower level steps that can be mastered and then understanding built up from there. Rather than get into a long discussion of the arcana of templates, I'll show the step-by-step way

Cucumber is a testing framework for writing high-level natural language descriptions of software functionality. Translated to programmer speak this means that it's a compelling tool with which to write integration tests, and can be a big part of your Behavior Driven Development (BDD) strategy...

A friend of mine asked me, why did you include decimal floating point types in your VM specification. This is because I believe it has a good chance to become ubiquitous in the future as a hardware standard.

Sometimes people will describe an algorithm by saying that it works "with probability 1."  It is almost true, but nevertheless naive to believe, that such a claim is the same as saying that the algorithm always works.  The difference is subtle, in much the same way as the difference is subtle between the notions of "infinite" and "unbounded."

Here is a simple example.  Suppose you want to cause