The ability of applications like Ultravnc and Hamachi to operate behind firewalls through NAT traversal intrigued me. Newport Networks has a whitepaper detailing current NAT traversal solutions for SIP:

Universal Plug and Play (UPnP)
Problem: … relies on the NAT opening pinholes to the outside world under the dynamic control of the UPnP client - maybe a [...]

Domain specific languages (DSLs) are usually implemented as declarative languages, where the only data is expressed, and invariant rules are coded into the language interpreter itself.
Dave Herman has thought through some of the practicalities of using declarative languages, particular when a complex system has to be broken up into modules. This leads to problems like [...]

The Malaysian stock exchange (Bursa Malaysia) had to suspend trading on 3 July for an entire day due to system failure.

Sounds like all the planets were in alignment, two hard disk failures, one cpu failed, and connectivity issues. The secondary system couldn’t even start up in time. Uh uh, this would be costly.
Transcript:

I just want [...]

Ran into this interesting post by by Tom Rafferty with a run down of popular Web 2.0 tools a company can use to communicate with their audience.
The biggest takeaway from the talk is that Web 2.0 is democratizing the web, in a way beyond what 1.0 had to offer. One man one vote means that [...]