Information Awareness. This article should have been an indictment of how the government has failed to protect the voters from identity fraud, and instead protects only the banks and government bureaucrats.  In fact, the government is completely impotent to prevent similar and ongoing fraud -- the problems with identity security across …

Cedric Beust's blog entry from the J2EE / .NET Smackdown event. Since he was in the audience, he was actually able to see the slides! He's got some good quotes.

Matt Gripes wrote: What about platform independence? I thought one of the paramount reasons to write applications in Java was "write once, run anywhere". I like that my java apps work on any platform that has a JVM. When did that become unimportant or unnecessary?

I'm glad Ximian wrote a …

Everett (Visual Studio .NET 2003) is now in final beta and available for download to MSDN subscribers.

Big news for me is that all the code for Thinking in C# (did you know that you can download the digital version?) has been checked and that VSN2K3 (oh yeah, that's attractive …

J2EE vs. .NET "Smackdown"

I was a "referee" last night at the J2EE vs. Microsoft "Smackdown" event created by SD Forum and held in Redwood Shores. There were about 300 people in the room and afterwards I talked with both teams and both felt that it was a good event …

Byte going pay-per-view in bid to stay afloat. Byte was the magazine for the personal computer enthusiast "in the day." Personally, I think that a cycle has come full around and there's probably demand for a print Byte-like magazine again but in the words of Austin Powers: "Alas, that …

Baby.msi Installation complete, reboot?

I'm proud to announce that at 1:07am this morning Christina and my first major release went gold. Claire Elizabeth Whittington was born at 8 pounds even.  Mom and baby are both doing fine and are asleep.  Dad is sooo sleepy.  Guess I've got plenty …

Blogging with ink from a Tablet PC

If you have IE, check it out. Unfortunately, Netscape can't render it. This is what it says:

Blogging from Tablet

Well, it's easy enough to write a client app that uses the Blogger API to add ink-based notes to your blog, but the …

~~Anyone know how to hook into an IRDA connection?~~ ~~Interesting. An Irda connection is just a specialized kind of socket; .NET provides good low-level access to sockes, so it should be possible to write a managed app that hooks into Irda connections.~~ Apparently, there is a nice high-level interface called …

Dan Bricklin's first impressions of the Tablet PC. [Scripting News]

Having used an Acer TravelMate for about 3 weeks, I think Dan is spot-on with most of his comments, especially about the primacy of reading, instant-on, etc. to the tablet experience. However, I seem to have had the best luck …