Sean mentioned the idea of using YAML for MapServer configuration files instead of XML I wholeheartedly agree The most important thing for a configuration file is that it is...

One of the great ironies of the Web is that a huge number of technical people refuse to believe what is right in front of their eyes The Web is the world's most diverse and...

A great debate in linguistics is how much language influences thought In the world of computer science, I am firm believer in the theory Paul Graham, amongst many others,...

GEOS is one of the more important open source projects in the GIS/geospatial industry It provides rich functionality for analyzing and manipulating geometries and...

There are good tools for testing most parts of web applications At the base level, almost every language has a unit testing framework Above that, some web frameworks, like...

This post is long overdue - a number of people have asked me how to convert between lat/long and mouse coordinates on an HTML page First, let's define some terms since otherwise...

Last time I gave kudos to Sapphire in Steel for the addition of a Ruby console to their debugger This time its kudos for Arachno Lother Scholz, the develeper, sent me an...

In the religious war between the command line and IDE (integrated development environment), I'm firmly on the IDE side Having said that, there's no substitute for having a...

Update: ruby-prof 050 is now available and has significantly more features than 040, including better threading support, rails support, call tree output, etc After porting...

Yesterday I wanted to profile some methods I'm using on a Rails controller To get a feel for profiling Ruby code I put together a test case, added a "require 'prof'" to the top...