It appears that there is only one course on Software Engineering available from MIT's OpenCourseware experiment. That course, Laboratory in Software Engineering, looks pretty good as an undergraduate introduction to systems engineering; it uses Java as the implementation language. The materials, especially the lecture notes, are impressive.

C# standardization moves ahead. Microsoft and its allies make a quiet advance in pushing C#, a competitor to Java and a foundation for the company's next-generation Internet services. [CNET News.com]  Microsoft is moving towards ISO standardization of the C# language.

Jimmy Carter won the Nobel Peace Prize. Hooray! I don't know if the country's ever had a better ex-President.

Apollonians Beware! Thoughts on an evening at Sotheby's

Friday Five:

1. If you could only choose 1 cd to ever listen to again, what would it be?

The Deutsche Grammophon CD of Von Karajan conducting the Berlin Philharmonic for Beethoven's Symphonie No. 9.

2. If you could only choose 2 movies to watch ever again, what would they …

British Journal of Urology: "There was no statistically significant correlation between shoe size and stretched penile length." [Adam Curry: Adam Curry's Weblog] Note: this study is disputed by the International Brotherhood of Circus Clowns.

I'm not loving CloudMark, the Outlook anti-spam plug-in. It's supposed to be a P2P blacklist, but it appears to have some kind of default rule that marks a lot of legitimate email lists as spam. It just marked Jakob Nielsen's newsletter as spam, which is the furthest thing from the …

Finally back from BZ Media's WebServices DevCon (not to be confused with the Sells Brothers WSDC). I thought that I would be the skeptic, telling people that another protocol or the latest tool wasn't a golden bullet. Instead, I found a striking atmosphere of Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt -- people are …

Java vs. C#: Checked vs. Unchecked Exceptions

Billy Barrett writes:

I have come to the conclusion that writing a highly robust application with C# is nearly impossible because of [reasons such as...] you are catching the exceptions that are being thrown and then the person who wrote the component you …

All the cool kids are going to the Sells Brothers Web Services DevCon 10-11 Oct in Bedford, MA. I've been spending all my time preparing for the BZ Media Web Services Dev Con happening this week in NYC. Both should be good but the Sells Brothers is clearly more technically …