Went to Stan Kelly-Bootle's 73rd birthday party last night. I drank like a fish, ate nothing, buttonholed Steve Bourne (Bourne shell, President of the ACM) about my attack on P != NP, got so wasted I sang Leaving of Liverpool. Stan, meanwhile, mesmerized 3 young women and then drank them under …

Make that twelve secret herbs and spices: pot sold at a local KFC

I was looking for images for a slide called "stateless by design" and somehow came across this collection of lurid pulp magazine covers. Totally cool! Now I'll have to change my talk so that somehow I can use Death Hitches A Ride. Hmmm... maybe something on deterministic finalization?

We had a major spider ballooning event today! I saw the first pieces from our house and then, from the top of Pine Mountain where I went to walk the dog more than a mile later, which is about 2 miles and almost exactly across the wind from us. It …

Since everyone else is doing it, I guess I'll brag that I got my Everett beta last Thursday! Neener, neener, neener! We're all under NDA, which sucks, because I've got some Compact .NET Framework yellin' to do.

Just because I'm so freakin' pissed off at the government for playing stupid about the use of hijacked planes as guided missiles (what, you're telling me that Cheney doesn't read Tom Clancy?), here's Article 2 of the UN Charter.

Good heavens! Mac only has 2.2% Global Operating Systems marketshare? *nixs don't even show up on the study, which seems pretty dang fishy to me; surely UNIX/Linux's command significant shares of the server market, but could it be that the number of servers is so small in comparison …

In August 1998, U.S. intelligence learned that a "group of unidentified Arabs planned to fly an explosive-laden plane from a foreign country into the World Trade Center." So my question is: When are we going to start holding our elected representatives responsible?

In other, actually-related-to-programming news: I just posted …

This white-paper on SCM best practices appears in the October Dobb's. It's excellent. Incidentally, I enjoyed four articles in this issue; it almost restores my faith in programming magazines.

There's a pretty good article in the October Dobb's about complexity and the use of gaming agents. One caveat, though; the article includes a figure that shows a model outperforming various other strategies in a financial market. The text mentions something that anyone interested in using computers to do financial …