I've been building computers since the 1990s, so I've seen a lot of new technologies work their way into the mainstream. Most were the steady, incremental improvements predicted by Moore's law, but others were game-changers, innovations that really rocketed performance forward in a surprising way.

Whether you're a fan of the shambling brain-munchers or you prefer your undead to sprint from victim to victim, zombies are amazingly popular. In an ironic twist, the most unhealthy members of humanity, or former members, can help you become the healthiest!

Many of us grew up with LOGO, the kid-friendly programming language that guided a little turtle around a screen. Yes, it was simplistic. Yes, it taught only the very basics of programming concepts, but it also inspired an entire generation of programmers. The applications you run every day were written by people who steered a digital turtle around a screen in third grade.

Integrating Twitter into your application is easy, fun and useful.

Spiders are really cool. Granted, they're terrifying, but they're still really cool.

Regular readers of this column won't be surprised to hear that I love both Ruby on Rails and PostgreSQL. Rails has been my primary server-side Web development framework for about eight years, and it has managed to provide solutions for a large number of consulting and personal projects.

Last October, our last look at graphics focused on the plans laid at September's X Developer's Conference. In the three months since then, these plans have come to fruition, reasserting the continuing relevance of X.org compared with Wayland and other compositing display servers.

Zato is a Python-based platform for integrating applications and exposing back-end services to front-end clients. It's an ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) and an application server focused on data integrations.

Fractals are one of the weirder things you may come across when studying computer science and programming algorithms.

The Net as we know it today first became visible to me in March 1994, when I was among several hundred other tech types gathered at Esther Dyson's PC Forum conference in Arizona.