Ambiguous? Of course. But c'mon, there's clearly one reading that gives David Chase credit for being brilliant.

Having said that -- Could anyone stand watching more than the first 15 minutes of John from Cincinnati? I only made it that far because it was David Milch.

Dan Bricklin has posted a thoughtful article on Wikipedia's "Spreadsheet" page. Bricklin quickly establishes that the page is well below par and may be tainted by someone's personal agenda. Given Bricklin's knowledge and involvement with this important topic, the critique should certainly be taken seriously, both as an indictment of …

Google's interest in concurrent programming is no surprise -- indexing the Web involves a lot of parallelism -- but their \<a href="http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/06/05/google_buys_peakstream/"" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">acquisition of Peakstream, developers of a low-level programming tool, is startling.

To quickly review …

Have you ever noticed that "Buy This Book Used..." prices from Amazon and the like are often bizarre? Often they're strangely specific -- "\\(43.72" -- and often they're insanely overpriced "Paperback 23rd Printing of Programming with dBase II: \\)1,234.56"

Jeff Duntemann thinks it's due to 'bots. If it's not …

I'm aware that my blog has been troublesome lately (hopefully, your aggregator has borne the pain). I run \<a href="http://www.dasblog.info/"" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">dasBlog, which I generally like and in which I have an insane investment (oh, look, I started this blog 5 years …

I agree with Alan Zeichick's analysis of IBM's acquisition of modeling tool vendor Telelogic:  the overlap with IBM's Rational product line is high, the acquisition "is a bid to buy market share....we've taken a powerful innovator and strong IBM competitor out of the market."

The software development industry typically …

One of my few talents is that I'm really good dealing with bureaucracies. Not in the long run, where they drive me crazy, but in the short run, when they're telling you that you should buy the ticket and they'll refund it, or that you have to pay your entire …

A while ago, I posted my uninformed thoughts on parallel hard drives. \<a href="http://engagebrain.com/%3fp%3d41"" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Charles Lecklider says I'm wrong: that doubling the number of moving parts within a single drive is unlikely to be popular, that a good RAID controller …

I second Andrew Binstock's recommendation of "The Definitive ANTLR Reference" by Terence Parr (author of ANTLR), even to Binstock's sly observation that the book "sort of lulls you into the false belief that you could write a new scripting language fairly easily."

I really like ANTLR. Not long ago, I …

My first reaction to the book xUnit Test Patterns: Refactoring Test Code by Gerard Meszaros (Addison-Wesley) was shock: 800 pages on writing unit tests? Isn't that taking things a little too far?

I have a problem calling such an omnibus a "patterns" book. At 800 pages, xUnit Test Patterns is …