The writers killed the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull by
1) Trying too hard to set the sidekick up for a future spin-off
2) Telling the audience that knowledge is gold, but then kills the villianess by filling her with knowledge
3) Turning an action show into a cheesy father-son reunion. Indiana had too much to prove to [...]

I was having a play with custom renderers in Java Swing, and comparing them with the effort required in .NET. I find that in this case, the Swing approaches the problem at a higher level of abstraction (less effort), at the expense of a lot of new objects being created, while .NET goes for a [...]

Having trouble reciting alphabet names over the phone? Here’s a truly Australian wordlist you can use.
Aratula
Brisbane
Chinchilla
Dalby
Eromanga
F – ?
Goondowindi
H – ?
Illawarra
Jindabyne
Kallangur
L – ?
Melbourne
Nebo
O – ?
Perth
Queensland
Roma
Sydney
Tasmania
Uluru
Victoria
Wogga Wogga
X -?
Yamba
Z – ?

I was wondering why my posts aren’t showing up at the Planet Python aggregator. It turned out that Wordpress 2.5.1 broke feeds. More information at http://www.onebigdog.net/feedburner-and-wordpress-251/. Direct link to patches <a href=”http://trac.wordpress.org/changeset/7843″>here</a>.

Transcript of presentation plus my comments in blue.
Computing models have to evolve with new pressures:

many tiny devices – low powered, cheaper, but not faster
many little flakey data centers (put on a truck and drive away) … we are not seeing this. The reasons is clear: the technology proposed in this talk is not easy to [...]

What would you automate into your boilerplate code after having 10 years of writing database applications? Here are some links to promising projects/essays:

Andromeda
Django Admin
Dataphor
Promises: User interface “hints” integrated with the data model

Naked Objects
MS Access and Query By Form
I like how CodeIgniter makes it possible to compose declarative data validations e.g. “valid_email|matches[email_confirm]|min_length[6]“
We need standard ValueConverters [...]