While reading the latest ThinkGeek ad copy, I find:

[W]e're jealous of today's students. They can now go online to find out if any washers are open, pay for the laundry with their student ID, and then receive an e-mail alert when the washer and/or dryer is done …

\<a href="http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/default.aspx"" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Visual Studio 2008 has shipped.

This is a very compelling upgrade, primarily because of Language-Integrated Query (LINQ), a new feature that is supported in the mainstream .NET languages VB and C# and will almost certainly …

Amazon has shipped the Kindle, which I think may very well be the game-changing device the eBook market has been waiting for. Compatibility with PDF, plaintext, HTML, "Kindle format" (structured HTML), plus free EVDO connectivity, plus email-your-document-to-the-Kindle (killer). Books are \$9.99. If O'Reilly puts Safari on this thing, they'll …

Paul Stovell is working on a project he calls "SyncLINQ" which provides databinding over LINQ queries. Although I've not yet tried SyncLINQ, it's clearly a great idea. [via Steve Pietrek Links (11/15/2007)]

Wes Moise's musings on Supercompilation led me to this discussion of the the myth of the sufficiently smart compiler.

The "sufficiently smart compiler" is still trotted out regularly, even though the market has moved away from demanding even moderate attention to performance at the compiler level. Have you timed your …

I realize that the preceding may, in fact, make me appear to be a hot-head. In fact, I may be a hot-head. But I think if there's one thing that we should value, it's our time. I spent an hour trying to "clear the cache" because he uploaded a file …

So we've got a page that allows clients to edit email addresses. Turns out that if there are no email addresses associated, the "Add an email" link doesn't show up. I glance at the page and see that the button is inside the loop that's iterating over the emails (this …

My commenting problem has to do with dasBlog validating the viewstate. There is a helpful debugging suggestion in the logs, but my ISP tells me that it is not appropriate to my situation. Until I can spend some time trying to figure that out, I won't subject people to the …

You've got friends visiting. They're in town for 9 days. One day involves driving 4 hours to go to a botanical garden which you've been to before and flowers aren't really your "thing" anyway. Do you do it, because, you know, they're your friends, you'll enjoy being with them, etc …

As the OLPC launch approaches, I thought I'd take a look at the development environment. Somewhat to my surprise, the \<a href="http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Getting_started_programming"" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">OLPC Development Wiki says that:

• Technically any language is usable
• Python is strongly encouraged, to …