After reading this post and being exposed to FOAF yesterday, I wonder if FOAF does not suggest a trust mechanism for *back pings. The moment you think about it, you realize it's just a matter of luck that the spammers haven't yet figured out that blog comments are vulnerable.

Microsoft has created PIAs for OfficeXP. Microsoft has created some PIAs for .NET COM Interop for Office XP. If you attended [Sam Gentile's] talk, you heard [him] talk about the importance of Microsoft creating "offical" "blessed" PIAs for a lot of their stuff which they haven't done a lot of …

A three-hour tour... A guy sailing from Long Beach to Catalina was rescued off the coast of Costa Rica after three months at sea.

Microsoft pushes on in server OS market. Linux only serious threat to Microsoft's increasing dominance, IDC says [InfoWorld: Top News]

I was watching Ken Burns' Civil War documentary last night and it reminded me of something I've never understood. Why did the Emancipation Proclamation by the United States have any meaning in the Confederate States? On January 1, 1863, was anyone actually freed?

This article and this one (both by Paul Prescod) and this one by Sam Ruby I think are finally getting through my thick skull why "REST" is being used as a proxy statement for "the challenges that many Web Service developers will face." They're much better reading than the REST …

Apparently, someone fell for the Nigerian spam scam. Supposedly:

According to statistics presented at the International Conference on Advance Fee (419) Frauds in New York on Sept. 17, roughly 1 percent of the millions of people who receive 419 e-mails and faxes are successfully scammed.

Annual losses to the …

I've been working on ensuring compatibility with the upcoming .NET Framework 1.1 (and C# compiler v. 7.1) for the programs in Thinking in C#. Probably 98+% of the programs worked fine, although I'm seeing something very strange with one particular multithreading program. Almost undoubtedly, I introduced a defect …

HP will push .NET. Personally, I don't think of HP as a major force in influencing software development.

Liberty Alliance plans interoperability with Passport. Significantly good news.