Ok. I'm not sure if I should link to a spam message (sort of), but since this is so weird and there's no URL's in sight, here goes...
I stumbled onto XSLTO via Peter Provost's blog. A nice looking utility. That might prove to be rather useful if I'd need to transform an XML file into a flat file format, for example.
Laurent has decided to read all the time. I've ended up doing pretty much the same (I recently discovered that I've read approximately 80 books within the past 5 years or so, a vast majority of them probably within the past 2 years -- that's an average of 3 weeks per book). In fact, I'm currently reading again two books at the same time. The other (smaller) one on my way to and back from work and the other at home. But I'm not even close to being the worst book addict living on this planet; I know a guy who reads books while driving a car. Ok, not really while driving a car but while sitting in stop lights. And those books are some of the freakiest titles a man can buy. Anything from software engineering to astrophysics to South-East Asian cultures to biology to nanotechnology. Enough to make my brain cells dump core...
Ruby on Rails version 0.10.0 was just announced with some cool stuff like web services support (both client and server, both SOAP and XML-RPC). More akward syntax for me to learn, though, since I've yet to do any real work with Ruby itself, let alone Rails. But I'd love to!
On a related note, Dion "Groovy Fan #1" Almaer is fantasizing about having Ruby as a scripting language in web browsers. I'd say it would be a lot more feasible idea to put Java on the client-side. In the end, we already have Java plug-ins so the leap wouldn't be that big to enable Java as a semi-standard scripting language for manipulating the DOM tree...
Tim Bacon blogs about the importance of agile shops investing on retention. He's right in that companies must invest in their people even after the recruitment decision. If they don't, their best staff will eventually jump ship. Unfortunately, the problem is even worse in non-agile shops. Think about it. If an agile shop has trouble keeping their people, how difficult it must be for a traditional sweatshop to keep their people when the working environment is, well, non-agile and they pay anywhere from 0-xx% less than what the employee's market value might be.
I know a certain big consultancy right here in Finland that has had a continuous stream of good developers walking out one after another. Yet, they're doing little to correct the situation. Well, their loss, not mine.