About an hour ago I was sitting at my dining room table, working on a piece of fiction and the setting sun got in my eyes. And I realized that I was sitting in my house in Hawaii, writing fiction, and watching the sun set over the Pacific. Which is …

My most recent SD Times column, Dynamic Do-Over, is now online. I argue that what makes “dynamic” languages compelling is not implicit vs. explicit typing, but an interactive console. I also drop some quotes from my talk with Microsoft's Jim Hugunin on the future of IronPython.

If you are walking from point A to point B in the rain, do you get more or less wet depending on how fast you walk? [Via]{style="FONT-STYLE: italic"} http://www.actsofvolition.com/archives/2004/october/amathphysics 

Pondering this question was the great intellectual challenge of my youth. I …

Links to a bunch of free programming books. Nice.

Bad guys have apparently begun exploiting the security hole that can take over a Windows machine simply by displaying an image. This vulnerability requires patching both the OS and Microsoft Office.

Several news sites are beginning to parrot the meme that the root cause of last week's outage of air-control in the Southwest US is Windows Server 2000's “design” to shut down every 49.7 days “to prevent a data overload.“ This isn't true. This is almost certainly referring to the …

Half the Viagra sold over the Internet is fake, according to British scientists. In other news, the budget department of the University of London is very gullible when it comes to funding requests. I'm expecting money for my “Correlation of loneliness to sexual desire in Internet-using housewives,” study any …

FlexWiki, a Wiki project by Microsoft Program Manager David Ornstein, has moved from GotDotNet to Sourceforge and changed to a Common Public License. This is the third project after WiX and WTL that MS has placed on SourceForge. Clearly, Microsoft lawyers have worked their way through the CPL and found …

Peter Coffee, eWeek's astute analyst, says that Web Services should have a standard for crash analysis. The two biggest benefits to programmer productivity in the past decade are managed memory and exceptions that generate stack traces. I'm coming up to speed on a customer's system for which I have a …

There's a Big Honkin' Mushroom in Oregon that covers 2,200 acres and is claimed to be the “largest living organism.” My question is whether a mushroom is a single organism or if it's communal and therefore in the same class as the Great Barrier Reef (which extends for more …