I was watching Ken Burns' Civil War documentary last night and it reminded me of something I've never understood. Why did the Emancipation Proclamation by the United States have any meaning in the Confederate States? On January 1, 1863, was anyone actually freed?

This article and this one (both by Paul Prescod) and this one by Sam Ruby I think are finally getting through my thick skull why "REST" is being used as a proxy statement for "the challenges that many Web Service developers will face." They're much better reading than the REST …

Apparently, someone fell for the Nigerian spam scam. Supposedly:

According to statistics presented at the International Conference on Advance Fee (419) Frauds in New York on Sept. 17, roughly 1 percent of the millions of people who receive 419 e-mails and faxes are successfully scammed.

Annual losses to the …

I've been working on ensuring compatibility with the upcoming .NET Framework 1.1 (and C# compiler v. 7.1) for the programs in Thinking in C#. Probably 98+% of the programs worked fine, although I'm seeing something very strange with one particular multithreading program. Almost undoubtedly, I introduced a defect …

HP will push .NET. Personally, I don't think of HP as a major force in influencing software development.

Liberty Alliance plans interoperability with Passport. Significantly good news.

NY Times has published the 10 Most Beautiful Experiments in Science. I can accept that nothing from Computer Science made the list, but to snub Michelson-Morley? An outrage!

Went to Stan Kelly-Bootle's 73rd birthday party last night. I drank like a fish, ate nothing, buttonholed Steve Bourne (Bourne shell, President of the ACM) about my attack on P != NP, got so wasted I sang Leaving of Liverpool. Stan, meanwhile, mesmerized 3 young women and then drank them under …

Make that twelve secret herbs and spices: pot sold at a local KFC

I was looking for images for a slide called "stateless by design" and somehow came across this collection of lurid pulp magazine covers. Totally cool! Now I'll have to change my talk so that somehow I can use Death Hitches A Ride. Hmmm... maybe something on deterministic finalization?