"Ruby experts tell us why they are in love with Ruby/Rails. Recently, I attended a Ruby users group in Atlanta and I was very surprised to see over 50 people attending the usergroup on a weekday evening, and nearly all of them have been active members of the usergroup for at least over a year. I could tell that they loved Ruby/Rails unlike anything I have seen in the the C++/Java community (languages I work with). The expert panel below will tell us why they are "in love" with Ruby/Rails..."

"...As with most Ruby and Rails developers, my applications all end up deployed on Linux machines. While open source technologies make it easy to jump between different flavors of UNIX, something about OS X’s “everything for everyone” approach irks me when it comes to doing development work. It’d be like taking my city car on the track or putting a race car on the streets.. you can do it, but it feels better to have separate cars for different situations. While I don’t find Linux particularly useful for graphics work and general day to day use, it feels like a more natural operating system for developing on at the command line level..."

"shriharshb writes "Catalyst is a new book from Packt which helps users to design, develop, test, and deploy applications with the open-source MVC Catalyst framework. Written by Jonathan Rockway, this book will guide users through the features of Catalyst using real-world examples and systematic code snippets..."

Microsoft is facing growing criticism of its bid to have Office Open XML (OOXML) accepted as an international standard ahead of a crucial vote by the ISO scheduled for February.

Although it could be argued that your average fanboy has already got the present they wanted this xmas in the continuing growth of Linux in terms of both actual deployment and media popularity, or maybe the arrival of the Linux server for Unreal Tournament 3 or even the fact that the BBC iPlayer is now Linux compatible. But no, believe me, when they see the dancing plastic penguin that announces the arrival of new email all that will change.

"The Free Software Foundation Europe announced that Debian-Edu / Skolelinux, an international project, is the winner of the first Free Software Scandinavian Award, during the Free Software Conference Scandinavia 2007, in Goteborg, Sweden, December 7th, 2007..."

The following piece of code compiles and runs in C, Pascal, FORTRAN, and PHP, and in all 4 languages it prints "Merry Christmas"! Try it!