When Novatel Wireless released the Merlin XU870, an ExpressCard/32 3G mobile broadband device, they included instructions on how to use it on a Mac OS X machine. And while I was able to successfully connect to my wireless carrier with the product it suffered from a number of limitations:

• The card was not recognized if it was already in my MacBook Pro when it was turned on. To use the device at all it had to be inserted after OS X was fully booted
• About 75% of the time it would not disconnect from my carrier after I had established a connection. I would get a "Disconnecting..." message forever. There didn't seem to be any way of forcing a disconnect, and it never timed out. Popping out the XU870 would result in a warning message about lost data.
• It seemed to make my trackpad go all wonky. I can't explain this other than to say that after I established a connection the trackpad in my MacBook Pro behaved erratically. Both devices are USB.

Despite all of this, I was happy with the performance of the device and felt it was a much better solution than connecting via bluetooth to a cell phone and using that as a modem.

Enterprise architecture is a methodology applied to a business process, typically as part of solution delivery. In layman's terms this means that one way to ensure that any project an organization undertakes is successful is to follow a tried and true process throughout the life of that project.

This process is often called a framework, and the individual deliverables within the framework as artefacts. As you might imagine a framework used to describe any or all of an organization’s projects would necessarily be very high-level and broad in scope. Thus what most organizations do is begin with a comprehensive industry-standard framework and then out of that develop their own focused one.

Linux Journal is running an article about Ruby Gems. Gems is a package management system for Ruby that will allow you to install, update or remove Ruby libraries, and can even handle multiple versions of the same library. This short tutorial explains how to use Gems as both a user and developer as well as how to roll your own packages.

Ruby is an object-oriented, interpreted scripting language whose niche seems to be quite similar to that currently occupied by PERL. Ruby on Rails is a rapid development web framework based on Ruby.