IBM CEO stakes \$10 billion on 'on-demand' future. Palmisano says next wave of connected computing worth betting on [InfoWorld: Top News] I can't find the whitepaper referenced in the article, but I think that what they're talking about is what elsewhere on the site they call "autonomic computing" along with …

Little kittycats wearing viking outfits sing Zeppelin. Not that I'm avoiding work today or anything.

A cool utility in TweakUI for XP allows you to add "search prefixes" to Internet Explorer. For instance, if you add http://www.google.com/search?q=%s you can say "google foo" or if you add http://www.dictionary.com/search?q=%s you can say "define cow".

Borland gets TogetherSoft for \$185 million. The software maker says acquiring TogetherSoft will help Borland bolster its programming tools lineup. [CNET News.com]

Well, this is interesting. TogetherSoft has never been the best CASE tool, while JBuilder has traditionally been the best Java-based IDE. Will TogetherSoft bring down the quality …

Smart guy joins Microsoft, film at 11.

Peter Drayton, who's written some of the better stuff about REST and SOAP has taken a job at Microsoft as a Program Manager in the Common Language Runtime group. Reading the job description, which Peter called his "dream job" in a blog entry …

Friday Five

1. What is your favorite scary movie? Jaws is my favorite movie, period.

2. What is your favorite Halloween treat? Oh, let's say Reese's peanut butter cups.

3. Do you dress up for Halloween? If so, describe your best Halloween costume. We have a couple of fright masks …

.Net developers get new tools. ClientSoft, Visible Systems unveil offerings for modeling, mainframe migration [InfoWorld: Top News]

Better testing tools could save US companies \\(22B / year. According to this study, quoted in the September 2002 *Scientific American*, buggy software costs \\)59.6B per year, but better testing tools could reduce that by the aforementioned \$22B. So download NUnit.

Highlights from A Measure of Software Development Risk. This was a good paper in the September issue of the Project Management Journal, which I do not believe is available online. Nothing here will be shocking to experienced software development managers, but it does provide some useful statistics, a breakdown of …

Proof of Pentagon alliance with Klingon Empire: Cloaking device, bent wings, heck, the thing's even called the Bird of Prey.