Barracude 160GB SATA drive discounted to \$99 at CompUSA. I post this because it's the first time that I've seen a SATA drive used as a come-on. Okay, a couple of these and I'll finally get my New Guinea video going...

I was wrong: you can watch Windows Media video at higher-than-normal speed (1.4x) (thanks Jonathan!). The pitch isn't shifted down, but it's perfectly comprehensible. So I d/l'ed a couple Channel 9 videos, more to judge the general premise of videoblogging than to react to the content in particular …

Microsoft has turned on a new marketing ... er ... communications blog called "Channel 9" whose stated goal is to create transparency into Microsoft's internal development processes. There's a Channel 9 doctrine which is basically a restatement of the Cluetrain Manifesto. There's lots of video snippets. Personally, I never download video snippets …

Just the other day, I was so damned sick of not having a persistent object image that I downloaded Cincom Smalltalk. Ah, Smalltalk! It's been years, my old friend... Where were we when last me met? Hmmm... where the heck's the object for a network query?

Anyway, Sean Malloy …

Microsoft's Robert Scoble calls himself "a human aggregator": he reads 1400+ Weblogs per day relating to his position as a Microsoft evangelist. (Perhaps everyone reading this blog knows of Scoble, but just in case...)

People who filter hundreds of blogs can provide tremendous value: they relieve readers of a reading …

There's been a small uptick in mentions of RentACoder. I subscribed to RentACoder's mailing list and what it primarily establishes is that freelance programming markets are years from maturity. The majority of RFPs are "I need a clone of xyz.com: \$200," or "I need an email program that automatically …

Ted Neward scooped the MS-Sun announcement.

Okay, this sounds like an April Fool's Joke, but it isn't: in the past week or so, the middle knuckle of my middle finger has started hurting. A moment ago, I just flicked the scroll bar on my mouse and had a serious shooting pain as my finger "tented": I …

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[[Good point. Does it invalidate my comments on visual programming? I don't think so; I think …

Eric Newcomer doubts that visual programming is viable. I disagree. Visual programming is usually conceived to be executable UML, which is a terrible concept. I've argued against visual programming in the past, pointing out that developers value information density and won't embrace something that takes half a screen to express …