We've just passed the three year anniversary of Ruby on Rails' first release to the public. Which in turn means that I've been working on the framework for more than four years. Wild.

It's been an incredibly rewarding experience. I've met so many great people. Worked with so many talented programmers. Seen so many amazing sites and applications be launched off Rails.

To image that this whirlwind tour all started because I wasn't happy working with the mainstream environments and decided to give Ruby a try. And to image the impact Ruby on Rails have had on the industry with none of the big-company backing that traditionally is needed to make waves there.

What's even more rewarding is knowing that we're not done. That the work to make web-application development ever more pleasant continues every day.

We might have taken the pace of radical changes in the core framework down a few notches (remember when we did multiple releases per month?), but the steady stream of improvement and refinement continues relentlessly.

So cheers, Rails.

Just days after Microsoft announced spending a billion dollars on extending the Xbox 360 warranty, my own console surrended to the dreaded three flashing red lights.

Now you'd think a billion dollars would buy Microsoft some premium, grade-A service and expedition to make short order of such a widespread problem, no? Think again.

It took three separate tries to even get through on their support line. The final attempt required about an hour on the line. All that to get a paper box shipped as the return package using UPS 3-day service (unlike, say, Apple's overnight delivery).

But much worse, expected service time is 4-6 weeks! Between the attempts at calling support and shipping boxes back and forth with snail service, I'm looking at a two-month turn-around from problem to resolution. Yikes.

How am I supposed to cope with no Forza Motorsports for that along!? It's inhuman, I tell you.

I've actually never been to Berlin before, so I'm excited to get the chance to not only see one of the great cities of Europe, but at the same time share in a meeting with the Rails community in Europe and around for RailsConf Europe 2007. The doors for registration have just been opened and until August 6th, the price is €645 (after that, it jumps to €795).

I really had a smashing time last year in London. There was somehow more time to get into more discussions with people than the more hectic version in the US. And I got to premiere a bunch of new Rails features I had been working on over the Summer.

So I hope to see a lot of the familiar faces from last year and new ones too when we convene from September 17th through 19th in Germany.

New CPUs are growing in cores and not in GHz. That's a tough problem for applications that have been traditionally single-threaded, like games. They have to learn all new techniques and rework their thinking to get the most out of the next-generation platforms.

But the fear of that transition has bled into places where it's largely not relevant, like web-application development. Which has caused quite a few folks to pontificate that the sky is falling for Rails because we're not big on using threads. It isn't.

Multiple cores are laughably easy to utilize for web applications because our problems are rarely in the speed of serving 1 request. The problem is in serving thousands or tens or hundreds of thousands of requests. Preferably per second.

Threads are not the only way to do that. Processes do the job nearly as well with a drop of the complexity. And that's exactly how Rails is scaling to use all the cores you can throw at it.

The 37signals suite is currently using some ~25 cores for the application servers that all the applications have dips on. We'd welcome a 64-core chip any day.

Read more: A good summary of a discussion on multi-core programming in general.