O'Brien's Law

O'Brien's Law: Any "Surname's Law" formulation labeled as such by its creator is likely a facile exercise in self promotion.

more ...

Lapjack?

Spencer the Katt gives brief mention to a forthcoming device that, like the Lojak car system, gives location information on a lost or stolen laptop. If you accept the premise that a thing that is not obvious but not entirely invisible is a useful anti-theft technology, couldn't equivalent functionality be …

more ...

Danny Thorpe, Borland's Delphi Architect, Blogs

Danny Thorpe has a blog. Definitely worth subscribing to: Borland has a great tradition of out-innovating Microsoft in software development tools. The joke used to be that you bought Borland in even-numbered years and Microsoft in odd-numbered. The market could definitely use that kind of competition again. The first example …

more ...

Re-Throwing Exceptions

A smart tip on throwing exceptions by Brad. via [ScottWater]

more ...

WinFS, We Hardly Knew Ye!

According to BusinessWeek, Microsoft is cutting features in Longhorn in order to achieve a first-half 2006 ship date. BusinessWeek says that the biggest casualty will be WinFS, the metadata store that would go beyond things like size and creation date to track an enormous number of attributes about files. BusinessWeek …

more ...

The Viagra Closure: 600 Quintillion Spellins

There are 600,426,974,379,824,381,952 ways to spell "viagra" using standard spammer substitution techniques. So I thought: "Wow, what a great example for explaining closures in C# 2.0!" but then I realized that some creep would probably use the code to, y'know, generate 600 quintillion …

more ...

Barracude 160GB SAT

Barracude 160GB SATA drive discounted to \$99 at CompUSA. I post this because it's the first time that I've seen a SATA drive used as a come-on. Okay, a couple of these and I'll finally get my New Guinea video going...

more ...

Channel 9 Video at 1.4 Speed: Still Not My Thing...

I was wrong: you can watch Windows Media video at higher-than-normal speed (1.4x) (thanks Jonathan!). The pitch isn't shifted down, but it's perfectly comprehensible. So I d/l'ed a couple Channel 9 videos, more to judge the general premise of videoblogging than to react to the content in particular …

more ...

Channel 9 From Redmond Space

Microsoft has turned on a new marketing ... er ... communications blog called "Channel 9" whose stated goal is to create transparency into Microsoft's internal development processes. There's a Channel 9 doctrine which is basically a restatement of the Cluetrain Manifesto. There's lots of video snippets. Personally, I never download video snippets …

more ...

Just The Other Day I Was So Damned Sick Of Not Having A Persistent Object Image That I Downloaded A Hrefhttps

Just the other day, I was so damned sick of not having a persistent object image that I downloaded Cincom Smalltalk. Ah, Smalltalk! It's been years, my old friend... Where were we when last me met? Hmmm... where the heck's the object for a network query?

Anyway, Sean Malloy …

more ...