This is probably obvious, but my life has been eased since I've created a OneNote section called "Product Keys" and used it to store serial numbers and keys.

Joel Spolsky briefly explains this very common security defect. Because my last name (O'Brien) contains an apostrophe, I'm particularly conscious of how common is this vulnerability.

This has been around for a month, but I wanted to lament that Microsoft has cancelled their plans to hold next year's major conferences in New Orleans. New Orleans is one of my favorite cities (and is a great place to ~~get really drunk~~ hold a conference) and certainly needs …

My very favorite technical book of last year was Peter Seibel's Practical Common Lisp. APress has recently released Practical OCaml by Joshua Smith. OCaml is the language implemented by F# (I don't know if F# is super- or sub-set -- perhaps the book will clarify).

I doubt that lightning will strike …

I've been writing an article about software brittleness and found myself asking a question I can't answer: Why was there so little software chaos in January 2000? There really were hundreds of millions if not billions of lines of COBOL that were at least potentially vulnerable to the rollover bug …

Supposedly, a group of scentists and academics in Britain have, on an investment of \$8700, used a mathematical approach to win a \$13M jackpot. (Source: A Statistical Approach for Winning Lottery -- Group Wins \$13M!)

Momentarily assuming that there's no "rake" and that the lottery pays \$1 in prizes for each …

We went to see The Departed last night. I'm trying to figure out if I should try to figure it out or if, like "Snakes on a Plane," verisimilitude was not it's highest goal.

First, though, I have to say how gratifying it is to hear actual Boston accents (Matt …

I have to wire up a ColdFusion to an Axis Web Service. I've spent the past 3 hours trying to figure out freaking classpath issues: something about a ClassCastException from a org.apache.commons.logging.LogFactory. I'm giving up for the day. Stupid freaking classpaths.

Incidentally, my normal blog CSS screwed up the rendering in IE7 and Firefox. Since I have not yet updated my dasBlog installation to the latest, I've decided to switch to this staid theme until I upgrade and can do some browser compatibility testing.

Patrick Logan says that some Schemers have put a Scheme on the Nintendo DS. Naturally, my first thought was "Hmmm... I wonder if I could do that with XNA?" (Or, more generally, if one could write a self-contained interpreter / compiler that would run on the XBox360). You could certainly do …