Well, looks like my Christmas shopping is done for the year... [via Jeff Atwood]

Netflix is offering \$1M to the first person who can achieve 10% better movie recommendations than their current system. Sweet.

I have all sorts of ideas on this. Thank heavens I have copious spare time.

Jon Udell's latest Screening Room is about Windows Live Writer, Microsoft's quite-nice blogging client. However, the discussion of microformats glosses over a significant limitation in the current version of Live Writer, which is that addin content is atomic. For instance, I secured the domain name distributedreviews.com (it's just parked …

Borland is abandoning its two-year-old strategy of delivering a "software development platform" to further the goal of "software delivery optimization." As I feared from the start, Borland's over-stuffed product portfolio and large ambitions clashed with their limited resources.

To summarize: Borland was once the most loved brand in the programming …

Microsoft has granted two additional "grand prizes" to other "Made in Express" finalists. As you may recall, I declared "shenanigans" at the original winner, which was a team project that had been in development for years. An uproar slowly developed and after some reluctance (including a letter from MS Legal …

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The image above is linked to the 2680 x 982  original. If you've got dual-monitors and can stretch it out, it's an amazing vista of …

At the risk of sounding immodest, I think we SD Times columnists have been hitting on all cylinders for the past few issues. The latest issue includes Allen Holub on FitNesse testing, Andrew Binstock on free books for programmers, and some crap from me on XNA and non-professional programming (written …

This article on Code Project (found via Steve Pietrek) might be an excellent stepping-stone for someone trying to learn language-design and compiler technologies. While code-generation and templates are good first steps and are easy to do easy things, but you should be aware that as the semantics of what you're …

A researcher has been plugging away at the NSA with the Freedom of Information Act. He's recently received an index to NSA publications (the publications are not yet available). Among the articles that have appeared in NSA Technical Journal: "Extraterrestrial Intelligence" and "Key to the Extraterrestrial Messages." I'm going to …

Given the cheesy Photoshoppery of the image, I suspect this is fake, but supposedly, this is a pullover that you slip into for a videoconference. Given my recent 4 AM local-time teleconferences, I might be able to use this.