Microsoft Reader Free eBooks: This week's freebies are I Am Madame X by Gioia Diliberto, Open Innovation by Henry Chesbrough, and The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan.

RCA DCM215 Cable Modem reset technique: if you lose your cable connectivity, try resetting your power by physically removing the plug at the power supply (not just at the back of the modem). Apparently, this is a known issue with (at least) this particular modem.

Via Fazed, a really funny japanese table tennis video.... [via]{.768395422-10072003} [Curiosity is bliss]

[This is much, much better than The Matrix Reloaded.]{.768395422-10072003}

I love Mono, I'm very fond of Linux, and if you give me a Mac, I promise I'll give it a fair chance!

Josh criticizes my "disregard for non-Windows platforms as a whole" in this comment. I guess that's pretty fair, at least lately, as I've been living in an …

No penalty for programming J#.

Contrary to rumors that I've heard, I can find no runtime penalty for code written in J# as opposed to other .NET languages and specifically C#. The one significant difference I've seen in IL generated by the vjc (J#) and csc (C#) command-line compilers is …

Data point:

Once upon a time, to study the performance of square versus jagged arrays in .NET I ported to C# the source code of one of the benchmarks mentioned in the article "The NINJA project. CACM 44(10): 102-109 (2001)."

I dug it out today and ran it against …

["]{.963004418-09072003}dW: What do you think about software quality?

Beck: I wish developers would consider the enormous consequences of their actions. When I got my driver's license at 16, I was both elated and terrified; I had newfound freedom and responsibilities to go with it. Now, compare that feeling to …

Another app that better with "ink" http://www.inkwalker.com/products.htm [via]{.345555121-06072003} [Sean 'Early' Campbell & Scott 'Adopter' Swigart's Radio Weblog]

[This app implies that electrical engineers (or hobbyists) can "think" in circuits the way that programmers think in code. Is that true? Does an EE go:]{.345555121-06072003} ["Yeah …

[Barry White has died of kidney failure.]{.583065116-06072003}

Does computational power add programmer performance? I said no in this post, Josh sarcastically agreed: "I agree whole-heartedly, if you can be a engineering-puritan and use a simple text editor and compiler, without complex build/make/ant scripts which do far more than just compile. It seems to me that …