Get your boss to do this: have your entire company put all non-essential work (i.e., everything but your customers) on hold for a whole week and devote your time and energies to neglected projects and wish-list work that you never have the time, energy, or team to accomplish. And call it a hackathon.

ActiveState had a full week-and-a day of hackathon goodness last week, where we attacked projects as banal as moving the microwave (so the short people can see if their food is boiling all over the place and get it down without scalding themselves) and fixing the sticky lock on the ladies' bathroom to grander schemes involving taking a hatchet to some antiquated legacy systems that seemed to constantly slip through the rethink cracks.

We came up with a huge list of tasks and projects (although kept our scope to projects that could be achieved in a week), and each volunteered for the work we wanted to do. This wasn't some top-down cheesy corporate team-building directive

Komodo IDE and Komodo Edit 4.1.1 are now available, with more bugs squashed per square inch than the windshield of a semi driving through Winnipeg in August. Talk about graphic debugging, huh? (And you thought all the puns around here related to Tcl...).

You can read the release notes for all the gory details, but basically, the latest release enhances some key features of our Ruby-focussed 4.1 release at RailsConf, such as improvements to the Rails project template, as well as addressing issues for XML, HTML, JavaScript, Run Command and PHP tools. So download it now.

In related news that's

I just watched the latest screencast from the Komodo team, and it was fantastic. Seriously, I was totally oblivious to some cool stuff that I should be using to make my life easier. If you're reading this, you probably use Komodo like a pro already—and you're definitely far more adept at using it than me—but if not, and...

• you've downloaded a trial version of Komodo IDE or Komodo Edit and been kinda daunted by all the features; or
• you want a slick way to convert your co-workers/boyfriend/user group/Facebook acquaintances to Komodo (and the bait-and-switch program wasn't enough); or
• need another medium to explain to your bos
  
  
  ...read more
  
  

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  ActiveState at OSCON: demos, chats, swag and prizes!
  at 2007-08-12 15:11:22
  

  Sorry dear readers, but I was on holidays for the past two weeks. Not to say nothing has been happening around here, but I'm looking forward to my next trip already--Portland! Only 1 week away!

  Yes, for OSCON. The ActiveState team is excited to be a part of OSCON in Portland again this year as a Silver Sponsor. We'll have our latest releases on hand, including:

  • Komodo IDE: Your IDE for dynamic web development
  • Perl Dev Kit: Create and deploy professional Perl applications
  • ActivePerl ProStudio: The complete bundle for professional Perl programmers
  • Tcl D
    
    
    ...read more
    
    

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    LOLPerl
    at 2007-08-12 15:11:22
    
    

    I'm a huge fan of lolcats, thanks largely to Shane Caraveo (Komodo Dev Team Lead) and further indebted to Tara Gibbs (one of our in-house tech gurus) for this obsession. If your office is like ours, between lolcats and Facebook, it's surprising we get so many bugs fixed and new releases out the door, but I had to pass along this somewhat pertinent take on lolcats: LOLPUMPKING. You may go back to work now.

    (Thanks to KJ for helping me procrastinate.)

    
    

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