P.J. Plauger was awarded Dr. Dobb's Excellence in Programming Award. He richly deserves it. There's his tremendous contribution to the C and C++ standardization projects, but I personally feel that his Programming on Purpose column for Computer Language was simply the best programming column ever written. It's the reason …

I receive a lot of press releases via email. Here's a note to PR people: I'm probably not the only writer/editor in the world who doesn't casually open Word documents sent via email. I know that you write the press releases in Word and it makes them look prettier …

Argh! I am writing an article for publication and need some eye-candy for the application. I was going to use my Amazon product-similarity graphing tool but I just realized that I use C# 2.0 generics throughout! The thought of bowdlerizing it to use object-based collections is ... just ... repugnant. But …

Someone's posted the whole of June, 1938's Action Comics #1 (including the first funnybook appearance of Superman) to the web as a series of medium-resolution scans. Link (Thanks, Eyes Spies and Lies!)) via [Boing Boing]

BZ Media, the clever folk who publish SD Times, have just announced a new conference dedicated to embedded software development. Sayeth the release: "The Embedded Software Development Conference (ESDC) is the only independent, cross-platform conference completely focused on the educational needs of embedded, mobile and wireless developers. The event will …

I uninstalled XPSP2, uninstalled the Lonestar alpha, reinstalled XPSP2 and my TIP came back. Amusingly, I found this by Googling a discussion board from a few months ago where the person asking the question was breaking NDA and a Microsoft representative was very politely, but very insistently, posting "This isn't …

Any other Tablet PC users lose access to the TIP after installing XPSP2? I've already filed a report with Microsoft. I don't even see the keyboard TIP during user login.

Today, during my 692nd hour SCUBA diving, my life was jeopardized by a computer malfunction. I was trying out a new piece of equipment, an air-integrated diving computer, that replaces a "conventional" dive computer (used to track safety relating to "the bends") and two analog devices: the depth gauge and …

Do I have to say anything more to explain my Tablet PC game idea?

For those who haven't been in an arcade for the past few years, "Dance Dance Revolution" is one of the greatest games of all time. You have to move your feet in synchrony with directional arrows …

Given Yahoo's infrastructure, this is very clever. But I don't think Yahoo Groups yet provides an RSS feed. But surely that's only a matter of time.

P.S. Phipps clarifies that he didn't call OS opponents Luddites or, if he did, he didn't mean it in the popular sense of …