Andrew Binstock shares the advice he gives when vendors call to ask why they didn't become finalists.

Alan Zeichick's proposal of an organizational Threading Maturity Model is an excellent contribution. As with object-orientation, it does not suffice for a single person to have mastery or near-mastery; the average ability of the team must be fair in order to maintain quality, chaos can be wrought by just one …

My latest in SD Times is up, in which I decide to stop being polite about WS-*.

Sorry about the "Service Unavailable"s throughout the day. My post on "Top 10 Things I've Learned About Computers From The Movies and Any Episode of '24'" got >1800 Diggs today. My ISP called me in the middle of the afternoon and said that my site was consuming 100% CPU …

I'm the moderator of the "Development Environments" category of the Jolt Awards and this year the finalists are:

Development Environments

• EiffelStudio Open Source Edition (Eiffel Software)
• IntelliJ IDEA (JetBrains)
• IronPython (Microsoft)
• Microsoft XNA Game Studio Express, XNA Framework (Microsoft)
• NetBeans IDE (Sun Microsystems)
• Wolfram Workbench (Wolfram Research)

This makes for …

Change and Configuration Management

AnthillPro3 (Urbancode)

Automated Build Studio (AutomatedQA)

FLEXnet Connect (Macrovision)

Perforce: the Fast Software Configuration (Perforce Software)

Team Foundation Server (Microsoft Corporation)

CA Wily Introscope ChangeDetector (CA / Wily Technology)

Collaboration Tools

Adobe Acrobat Connect Professional (Adobe Systems)

Code Collaborator (Smart Bear Software)

Confluence (Atlassian Software Systems)

NetBeans …

Books (Practical/General Developer Interest)

Agile Software Development: The Cooperative Game (Addison-Wesley) by Alistair Cockburn

Catastrophe Disentanglement (Addison-Wesley) by E. M. Bennatan

Eric Sink on the Business of Software (Apress) by Eric Sink

Practices of an Agile Developer (Pragmatic Bookshelf) by Venkat Subramaniam and Andy Hunt

Software Creativity 2.0 …

Alan Zeichick proposes a Threading Maturity Model.

Allow me to reiterate. Update: Fixed link.

Steve Pietrek tagged me, so...

I may be the world's worst student. I graduated High School by the margin of a D+ (in English yet, where I had 780s on both my SATs and boards), I dropped out of college (where I had dual majors in Marine Biology and, yes …