This is an eye opening and interesting account of how Tom Oward was able to data mine Amazon’s wish list database to get a profile of “subversives” based on their requested reading list. Makes you think twice before adding a book to your wishlist.

I’ll try not to bore you with the typical reflections of the past year. Yesterday it pretty much rained all day, ruining our NYE plans. But where one door is closed, another door opens. We ended up having a grand time at our friends place playing board games and drinking white russians. A toast to 2006!

So it looks like our New Years Plans have been derailed by the rain and the Fire Marshall event organizers as reported by the fire department’s blog. It stopped raining an hour ago, but the wet conditions and the sheer amount of electrical equipment needed for Giant Village has made it a safety hazard. Bummer.

In a blatant ripoff of Scott H, I am going to post the best of “You’ve Been Haacked” 2005 edition. This year, you laughed, you cried and when you were done, you came over and briefly glanced at my blog. But I took it in stride and continued to write, rant and rave… and this was the best I could come up with in 2005^1^.

While we’re on the topic of appropriate analogies for software development, my homie Micah writes a post about how certain analogies fall short, and he compares writing software to being an artist.

In some of my projects, I take a less purist approach to unit testing in that I allow unit tests to touch the database. In order to “reset” the database to the state it was in prior to the test, the code enlists COM+ 1.5 transactions via the [RollBack] attribute in MbUnit (there’s also one for NUnit).

Thanks to the generosity of my folks, I’ll be reading the following books. If you were planning (or want to) read them as well, click on the images below.

My parents are downstairs watching basktetball, my brother will arrive here tonight around 8PM, I’m wrapping a gift for my wife, and my coffee downstairs is getting cold.

My good friend Micah finally started a blog. He is the CEO of my company, VelocIT, which makes him a business partner as well as a friend.

As I recently said, you have to be a bit MacGuyver to be a successful consultant. I’ve also whined about how difficult hiring is, especially when you want to hire MacGuyver. But then there are times where you work with someone who makes MacGuyver look positively clueless.

I’ve learned a valuable lesson recently. To be successful as a technology consultant, it isn’t enough to just be able to hit the high notes. You’ve gotta be able to hit the middle notes too. You have to channel a bit of MacGuyver inside.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee starts a blog and it’s a veritable love fest in his comments section.

Hiring good developers is challenging. There’s a small bit of science and a lot of art. Even when a hire is brilliant, he or she might not work out. When hiring, you don’t just want a list of experiences, technologies and languages… You want a person who exemplifies being a self-starter (rather than just listing it as a buzzword on the resumé) who is also smart and can get things done. You’re hiring a personality as much as a liste of skills and experiences.

Just browsing around and saw this video of the most amazing soccer juggling skills ever. Yes, that is a screenshot of the guy jump-roping while juggling a soccer ball on his head.

Windows OneCare Live Beta reports that TestDriven.NET is a virus. Anyone else run into that?

Men who engage in online relationships in chatrooms and such are constantly suspicious that the person on the other end is not who they say they are. Often the vision of another middle-aged man looking for action is envisioned. That would’ve been a welcome relief for the guy in this news story.

If Joel can do it with FogBugz, I can try and do it with my blog. That “it” being to post a picture of the day.

I can’t believe I didn’t notice this when he first published it (I only saw an internal email on it), but Steve Harman wrote this excellent guide to branching with CVS, complete with an easy to follow diagram.

In this post, I plan to give out some rough code I hope you find useful. But first, an introduction. Occasionally, in the search to compress more into less space, web designers will create a form in which the text inputs double as labels. For example, this is a login control I wrote for a recent project.