The reason that I had to write a PayPal backend is that the publication of Thinking in C# has been delayed until something very close to the end of the year. The reasons have nothing to do with the content of the book, which is very frustrating, but these things …

I just wrote a C#-backed ASP.NET PayPal backend. I'm not going to post it because it was so trivial that I just made it totally custom to my needs. Wow, C# rocks, ASP.NET rocks, and this is an indication of why Web Services rock (even though the …

I saw Todd Solondz' Storytelling the other night. No sir, I didn't like it. Solondz wrote one movie that I liked for its honesty (Welcome to the Dollhouse) and one that didn't make a lasting impression on me (Happiness), although I remember that it was really "edgy" in that Philip …

"In the second quarter, partially due to the massive incentives it offered, Ford made less than \$8 in profit for each car it sold." Can that possibly be true? Not only do SUVs suck, they aren't even profitable?

Without naming names,  it's absolutely shocking how many people at development tool companies, don't know that SOAP is not an HTTP-only protocol. I was getting a preview of a very, very nice tool yesterday and was being shown its SOAP support. Very nice stuff, and I saw something that made …

McDonald's is going to switch away to a cooking oil that reduces the amount of trans-fatty acids. Okay, that's great. But the reason they're doing this is because "In July, a New York man sued four fast-food chains, including Oak Brook, Illinois-based McDonald's, claiming the contributed to his obesity, heart …

Hooray! Monster has made "C#" a searchable keyword. I can't figure out how to paste a direct link, as Radio "unescapes" the escape, but you can now use "C#" in job searches. (Unrestricted except for that keyword: 846 jobs in the US on Monster -- I smell a tracking program!)

"Few at LinuxWorld would dispute the increasing interest in Linux," according to a Wired News article from last month.

In another CACM article, there's a photo of Carlo Sequin's Sculpture Generator. Cross your eyes and dig this! Anyway, the article is by Danny Hillis and makes the important point that just as digital artifacts reflect reality, so too is our reality increasingly being influenced by digital artifacts. The thing …

The latest issue of Communications of the ACM includes an article (The Reality of Simulated Actors) that estimates that it will be 20 years of computing power advances before we'll see digital actors truly capable of verisimilitude. 20 years == 4 orders of magnitude. One can't help but wonder if grid …