I've been writing an article about software brittleness and found myself asking a question I can't answer: Why was there so little software chaos in January 2000? There really were hundreds of millions if not billions of lines of COBOL that were at least potentially vulnerable to the rollover bug …

Supposedly, a group of scentists and academics in Britain have, on an investment of \\(8700, used a mathematical approach to win a \\)13M jackpot. (Source: A Statistical Approach for Winning Lottery -- Group Wins \$13M!)

Momentarily assuming that there's no "rake" and that the lottery pays \\(1 in prizes for each …

We went to see The Departed last night. I'm trying to figure out if I should try to figure it out or if, like "Snakes on a Plane," verisimilitude was not it's highest goal.

First, though, I have to say how gratifying it is to hear actual Boston accents (Matt …

I have to wire up a ColdFusion to an Axis Web Service. I've spent the past 3 hours trying to figure out freaking classpath issues: something about a ClassCastException from a org.apache.commons.logging.LogFactory. I'm giving up for the day. Stupid freaking classpaths.

Incidentally, my normal blog CSS screwed up the rendering in IE7 and Firefox. Since I have not yet updated my dasBlog installation to the latest, I've decided to switch to this staid theme until I upgrade and can do some browser compatibility testing.

Patrick Logan says that some Schemers have put a Scheme on the Nintendo DS. Naturally, my first thought was "Hmmm... I wonder if I could do that with XNA?" (Or, more generally, if one could write a self-contained interpreter / compiler that would run on the XBox360). You could certainly do …

Computer Gaming World has posted online their first 100 issues, going back to 1981. The first issue has a great essay by Chris Crawford about how computer-based wargames will be different than boardgames. Not surprisingly, he's pretty much spot-on with his analysis.

I also enjoyed it because it's a great …

The always insightful Peter Coffee has a good new column that offers a couple contrarian observations. To the generally positive buzz over Cisco's new virtual meeting system (HD screens, lighting, surround-sound), Peter makes the skewering concession "If face-to-face meetings were considered the high point of organizational productivity, I'd endorse the …

John Lam, whose RubyCLR bridge has been a fascinating and seemingly highly-successful project, is joining Microsoft. Details are vague, but he says he'll "be working in the CLR team" and "I'm not going to leave the Ruby community" but makes it pretty clear that he's looking to hand off the …

Serious Magic Communicator is a nice product: it combines teleprompter and chromakey (green screen) software, so you can rapidly create "talking head" videos with video or graphics in the background, a la TV weathermen. The quality, of course, isn't exactly Lord of the Rings, but it's a very fast way …