Gee, what a surprise, no CGI can do justice to "broken-down drunk exiled prince of the armored polar bears." But The Golden Compass was not nearly as incomprehensible to those who hadn't read the books as I thought it would be. My wife quite liked the movie and hadn't been …

The biggest problem with tag-based languages (\<h1>\<% someCode %>\</h1> : the ASPs, the ColdFusions, the PHPs...) is that they facilitate monolithic code. This is related the big criticism of XML and DOMs for data structures, too: they facilitate the creation of hierarchies, not graphs. (As always with programming, the issue is …

Microsoft's new Volta toolset allows developers to develop their applications using standard OOP techniques and then use "declarative tier-splitting" to specify which functions should run on the client and which on the server. Erik Meijer says:

...Volta starts with a client-side perspective. That is, once developers are satisfied with an …

Jon Skeet's generation of the Mandelbrot set via LINQ chaotically oscillates between absurdity and relevance, sensitive to the input of what aspect of concurrency you're thinking about. If you're thinking about efficiency, you rapidly head towards "absurd," but if you think about mental models, it rapidly heads towards relevance (by …

Jeff Duntemann (a great competitor/friend from the Computer Language days) opines that:

[T]here are three different kinds of reading:

• Meditative reading is reading to change your state of mind....
• Autodidactive reading is reading to teach yourself something....
• Developmental reading is reading within the process of creating texts for …

This story of a couple that stole \$7 million on Monday and were nabbed this morning reminds me of a second-tier friend from High School who was very dim. A few years after HS I heard that he had gotten a job with an armored car company doing ATM refills …

Sounds like a great opportunity to hang out with compiler geeks. Since someone's already beaten me to an LOLCode compiler for the DLR, I'll have to put in some work on my other projects: \<a href="http://www.knowing.net/PermaLink%2cguid%2c8dc6782d-9207-4909-bcc4-f5dc7444c6c0.aspx"" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Excel …

The Kindle browser works much better with RESTful sites as opposed to AJAXian Web 2.0-y pages. To be more specific, the Kindle browser doesn't work well at all with AJAXian Web 2.0-y pages.

So this leads me to look for RESTful intermediaries / proxies for the two most useful …

A quick check with a hex editor revealed that the Kindle .AZW format contains the magic number "BOOKMOBI," which led me to this set if free eBooks in Mobi format. Sure enough, when copied to an SD card, MOBI files come right up in the Kindle Homepage.

Here is a …

I challenged Tim O'Reilly, who said "I'm rooting for Jeff and the Kindle," on the subject of O'Reilly's lack of support for the Kindle:

Why no O'Reilly books on the kindle? Well, Amazon has chosen to use a proprietary format, with a conversion cost of a couple of hundred dollars …