welcome spammers Dear Spam Robot: I don’t have much time to read emails, and I especially don’t have much time to read unsolicited commercial emails. But I have decided to make an exception. If you would like to send me unsolicited commercial emails, then I agree to read them on the condition that y...

I went to the rOOts 2003 conference this year. As always, it was a great convention. ROOTS draws a fairly small, yet advanced audience. A recurring theme this year seems to be agile development. It also seems like all the speakers concluded with the fact that “everything was better in the good old d...

How Mortal These Fools Be… …Wherein we explore what it means to be a computer, or computation, or computrons, or a computer programmer, and why Ken is even touching a computer when he’s on vacation. (From Ken Arnold’s Weblog) [via Artima Weblogs]

I am so sick of reading about the poor economics behind arguments when it comes to tax cut. Being a Norwegian citizen, I am used to taxation levels that would make an American faint. And I don’t know if it really hurts us at all. What I miss in the discussion goes back to the basics of economy: I am...

A is for Apple You may have already known that A is for Apple. But did you know that O is for O’Reilly? Check out what Google reports for single character queries. (From Ward Cunningham’s Weblog) [via Artima Weblogs]

This book talks about the role of a tester in an XP project. So it is about acceptance testing, not unit testing (see Test-Driven Development by Kent Beck for that). The long and short of it is that I would really like to run an XP project with people who have read, understand, and become excited ab...

The best thing to happen since the inceptions of C#: “anonymous methods” are .NET delegates cum closures. Finally we can write syntax like: addButton.Click += new EventHandler(object sender, EventArgs e) { list.Add(new ListItem()); } Even better: Anonymous methods will be closures, so you can use va...

Very noteworthy quote: “I think that in the long term the larger code generation efforts, the “application generators,” will become a thing of the past. They are there because the underlying technologies and architectures don’t yet support programming at a high level. " (Pragmatic Dave Thomas) Truer...

Attributes. Keeps getting better ’n better. Check out Extensible C#, Clemens Vasters new demos, and the underutilized ContextBoundObject ADO.NET. The ADO.NET model for modeling and transporting data hits right on the spot. Better FFI. P/Invoke wins against JNI, hands down (too bad it is probably ove...

Open Source Community. The number of excellent open-source tools for Java is staggering. Look at HSqlDb, BeanShell, Eclipse, Recoder, JGraph, Tomcat, JBoss, and many more. More importantly, the Java community has proven much more interested in doing it the open-source way. Eclipse. Already mentioned...

The Psychology of Computer Programming (Jerry Weinberg) The Pragmatic Programmer (Andrew Hunt and Dave Thomas) - from Journeyman to Master (the view of the software professional as a craftman is the only thing that will save the business!) PeopleWare (Tom DeMarco and Tim Lister) Extreme Programming ...

Test-Driven Development describes in detail this technique from Extreme Programming. In addition, the author spends some time teaching the reader a useful set of mental tools for writing better code. TDD is a very fast read, but it is full of useful information. If I wanted my developers to only rea...

Brilliant book. “How the Mind Works” is a tour de force over many of the puzzling aspects of the human mind: Why can our eyes be fooled by optical illusions? Why would we evolve emotions? Why would we evolve behaviour that makes us unable to fully control ourselves, like rage? The book puts forth th...

A view on the conflict from the standpoint of cognitive science/social science Steven Pinker (“How the mind works”): People may use “doomsday machines” (strategies that are both harmful to themselves and an agressor) to deter agressors. Hernando de Soto (“The Mystery of Capital”) An important reason...

What does it really mean when they say stuff like “the fighting in order to capture Umm Qasr is heavier than expected”. What does it mean when the fighting is heavier? Do more people die on either side? Do any people die on either side? After almost three days of war, I have still to hear of any cas...

On the news yesterday, I heard Blair say that the british lawyer-general claims the present war on could be legal. I understand he finds his justifications in the UN resolutions 678, 687, 688, and 1441 (probably among others). These resolutions calls for disarming the Iraqi regime by any means neces...

This is exactly the kind of thing I have been looking for in C#. I am still some ways away from having looked at it as thorough as I would like, but it looks very good. Basically: Attributes that are processed compile-time with any code you like. This is the basic building blocks for AOP.

A fairly decent-seeming RSS feed reader. This entry was written with it. Pretty cool Comments: [Aaron Sevivas] - Mar 12, 2003 this seems to be a fairly decent-seeming RSS feed reader. That entry appears to be written with it. Pretty cool [Sarah] - Mar 12, 2003 Is there any way you can get rid of tha...