Please, feel free to laugh at this column describing how I was completely pwned by hackers trading the German dub of 'Norbit'...

This object, which is of uniform density, is self-righting. It has a second balance point that is "unstable"/highly susceptible to perturbation (when I first read the article I thought it said it didn't have such a point, which freaked me out). I love mathematical objects that are complex and …

Benoit Lavigne wonders if ageism is a problem in the software development profession. Oh, hell yeah. From the minute I began editing software development magazines (when I was 25) I began hearing from professionals in their 40s and higher who faced disproportionate difficulty getting work. There is not a question …

Disc Link, a subsidiary of Acacia Technologies Group (an organization that basically buys up patents so that it can sue anyone who violates them), claims that it's patent number 6,314,574 covers hyperlinks from documents stored on a CD that send users to sites on the web.
Last week …

Well, looks like I might have to run down to the Post Office after all. The TurboTax filing servers have not been working for hours. I thought that after midnight EST, things might calm down, but I don't know how long to waste before just printing out the forms and …

DeveloperWorks interviewed Rosalyn Lum and I about the Jolt Awards (IBM was a big winner this year).

via Dan Fernandez

Eye-tracking studies by Jakob Nielsen lead to the recommendation "Show numbers as numerals when writing for online readers." This contradicts the traditional style rule of writing out numbers less than 100 (or sometimes 10) (I really had to stop and consciously use numerals for those!).

One of the reasons that functional programming is worth studying is that it abounds with opportunities for implicit parallelization. As Jon Harrop discusses in this post, the map function takes a function object f and an array [a, b, c, d] and returns [f(a), f(b), f(c), f …

In the way of computers and their miserable antics, my attempts to figure out my system freeze led to a disaster. After determining that my system continued to freeze even when using the "VgaSave" graphics adapter, I began to suspect that it might be my Wireless Network Card (a WMP54GX …