An IM conversation I had with a teammate on a project today…

Wired News has a very interesting article on History’s worst software flaws.

Ingo Rammer writes about the theoretical limit to reducing latency. Since 1994, we’ve reduced latency by 10 times, but increased bandwidth by millions. We can make the pipes fatter, but we can’t make the data any faster than the speed of light unless, as Ingo points out, “you prove Einstein wrong”.

The title of my post is meant to indicate that this post is not technical in nature, but rather just a bit of small talk, chit-chat, idle conversation. You know, the sort of surface level conversation meant to break the ice and pass the time. How is the weather where you are?

FogCreek commissioned a documentary about their summer intern project named Aardvark which ended up releasing Copilot, a product to help your mom with her computer woes.

Logged into my ad-sense account and noticed that Google started a referral program. Very cool!

Or a better question that Jon Galloway asks is “What are many blogs worth?” Specifically he answers this question for every blog in the weblogs.asp.net OPML. Awesome work!

This cracks me up.

A while ago I wrote that a client often often does not know what he wants until he sees it. I was referring to software development, but this is common across many professional services organization, such as plumbing for example.

Parents. It is time to have a heart to heart with the kids.

So when should you choose to build a smart client rather than a web application (or in addition to). The typical answer I’ve seen is when extreme usability is required. As AJAX techniques get more mature, I think this will become less of a consideration.

Rob Howard asks the question Is “Smart Client” a “Dumb Idea”. Obviously I don’t necessarily think so as I pointed out in my post Overlooked Problem With Web Based Applications.

Perhaps there is a better term I could be using when I referred to “dynamic SQL” in my last post. To my defense, I did mention using Prepared Statements.

Craig Andera posts a technique for handling exceptions thrown by a webservice. He takes the approach of adding a try catch block to each method.

Now that ASP.NET 2.0 is released, a lot of developers will start to really dig into the provider model design pattern and specification and its various implementations. The provider model is really a blending of several design patterns, but most closely resembles the abstract factory.

It seems Sony has overstepped the line with some DRM it used to protect its music CDs.

I just had to post this in its full glory. Great leadup Matt!

While it may be exciting to see Microsoft jumping aboard the web-based application bandwagon, something that I am experiencing right now reminds me why I think there is still a strong place for rich “smart” clients.

I have a question for those of you who host a blog with a hosting provider such as WebHost4Life. Do you make sure to remove write access for the ASPNET user to the bin directory? If so, would you be willing to enable write access for an installation process?

The subject of this post is the title of an interesting article on page 58 of this month’s Wired magazine. The author, Patrick Di Justo, shows that compared to 1950 prices, we are paying more of our annual income for houses, but we get a lot more for our dollar.