Back when my proper computer still worked, I had an article I was writing in an on-again, off-again kind of way. The article was on extending and embedding the programming language Ruby. Well, this morning I found an e-mail from someone interested in such an article. So I'm going to be starting it all over again, and hopefully have it ready some time in the near future.

For quite some time now, I've been using a service called Geni to keep track of my family tree. Actually, I've been able to get a couple of other relatives on there to also manage it. Unfortunately, things come to an end only three generations above me. It'd be nice to have more of my living family on there, but I'm even more curious about my ancestors from Ireland, Wales, Germany, and Ukraine.

I opened up a Toastmasters meeting for the first time as club president last night, and was I nervous! It was a really strange feeling. This hasn't been the first time I've opened up a meeting of Toast IT, but it was the first time in my new officer role. Still, as stressful as it was at the beginning, the experience was exhilarating and fun.

The irrepressible Raymond Chen recently mused about "security holes" that aren't – that is to say, features which may be misused but don't actually cause security vulnerabilities.
While Raymond's blog is always worth reading, this is more about something from one of the comments on this entry. Commenter Erzengel mused that "impersonating a plugin could be an initial delivery system" for malware. For sure, this is a potential entry vector, and I'm honestly surprised that there are very few if any malware mods out there. Given the number of games where you can actually build mods in C/C++ and have access to the system that way, one would expect that the popularity of the games industry would cause malware authors to flock to the idea.

I've done a bit of work on the site today, changing what feeds are aggregated for my blogroll (see the Syndicated block on the sidebar). I've also added the FeedBurner module to the site for tracking the main feed, blog feed, and the new articles feed. In the near future (perhaps tonight or tomorrow) I'll also put up the feed counters, although the numbers will be disappointingly low (at least to begin with).

With this week, notable online game magazine The Escapist starts it's third year of publication! Unfortunately, part of the celebrations of this anniversary have included killing what made it so unique.

Via the Canadian Developers MSDN blog we now know when Microsoft will be launching the next version of Visual Studio (commonly known as Orcas), as well as SQL Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008. The release takes place on February 27. There's nothing available regarding the Canadian launch parties yet, but I'm sure that they'll be great, like others Microsoft has held!

Via David "LetsKillDave" Weller, an article by programmer and former GDMag columnist Jon Blow about the increasing complexity of engineering computer games.

Remember my fuss when my computer died? Well, I tried to use an old computer until I could get a new one. Well, the old one is pretty poor for development, and it turns out that one of the hard drives from my system was damaged – the one with all my projects and assorted code.

Hot on the heels of VS2008's launch date (Feb 27, 2008) comes news that the next version of Visual Studio will still ship by the end of the year.