If you like science fiction, join tor.com

Tor.com is giving away eBooks of apparently-well-known authors. It's been a long time since I've followed SF, but "free eBook + Kindle" is too good to pass up. So far, I've received:

  • Old Man's War by John Scalzi -- I'm reading this now; it's kind of like an updated Starship Troopers …
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Ted Leung, Python-ista, joins Sun

Ted Leung has joined Sun to help support Python "in a similar fashion" to the JRuby project.

This is not just about Python on on the JVM. Sun will try to make its platforms, OpenSolaris and the JVM, the best place to develop and deploy Python applications.

But it's mostly …

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Lead-Developer Compression Ratios

Let's assume you're a pretty good programmer (and good looking to boot!). It's Monday morning and you're looking at a task that has some solid complexity to it -- it's going to take you 40 hours of effort to get through. Or you have the option of delegating components to 2 …

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Subprime Bailouts

Philip Greenspun

Governments at various levels have decided that they have to bail out people who spent more than the houses turned out to be worth and the financial companies who weren't wise enough to notice that the U.S. is in fact not short of forests that can be …

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Ottawa Mayor Larry O'Brien Promises Blog -- Enraged Ottawans Support Me

imageI'm going to be interviewed by CFRA (580 News Talk Radio) in a bit about the plans of Ottawa Mayor Larry O'Brien to bypass mainstream media by blogging. 

Early feedback is that Larry "Amulet of Protection" O'Brien's rants on light rail are vastly less entertaining than Larry "Chillin' at the …

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Lang.NET Videos Up

http://barrkel.blogspot.com/2008/02/langnet-symposium-videos-are-up-in-wmv.html

Recommendations :

http://langnetsymposium.com/talks/Videos/1-05 - Lively Kernel - Dan Ingalls - Sun.wmv

http://langnetsymposium.com/talks/Videos/2-01 - Newspeak - Gilad Braha - Cadence.wmv

http://langnetsymposium.com/talks/Videos/3-08 - Cobra - Chuck Esterbrook.wmv http://langnetsymposium.com/talks/Videos/3-09 - Intentional - Magnus …

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LINQ to XSD Alpha 0.2: Now We're Talking

LINQ seems to be an overwhelming success (I've been having a hard time finding anyone with bad things to say about it), but what most people are talking about is the nice Object-Relational mapping tools. The ultimate goal of LINQ, though, includes uniting not only objects and relational data but …

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1/3 of Jolt Finalists Available In Kindle Edition

There were next-to-zero technical books available for the Kindle shortly after its launch. I was delighted to discover 4 of the 12 books that were finalists for Jolt Awards this year are now available in Kindle form:

  • Geekonomics
  • Outside In Software Development
  • WPF Unleashed
  • xUnit Test Patterns
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Why Am I Not Receiving PayPal Emails -- Through Two Different Email Addresses?

I need to reset my PayPal password. I went to their Web and requested a reset. "Check your Inbox" it said. 24 hours later, I called PayPal and they manually sent me emails: one to that address and another to another email address! Neither appeared. Neither are in the respective …

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