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.

Software pundit Joel Spolsky finally added titles to his RSS feeds (among other site improvements) and it’s about time. The title “November 5, 2005” tells me nothing about what he’s saying. Love him or hate him (why choose one or the other. Choose both!), Joel is definitely worth reading.

In response to the White House asking The Onion to stop using the presidential seal on the website, the onion added a link to this to its front page.

Every day I look at my current code and go, “Damn, that’s some sweet shit!” But I also look at code I wrote a month ago and say, “What a freakin’ idiot I was to write that!” So in a month, the code I’m writing today will have been written by an idiot.

By now, every developer and his mother knows that VS.NET 2005 and SQL Server 2005 has been released. Prepare for the generics explosion as legions of .NET developers retrofit code, happily slapping <T> wherever it fits.

Well, like Mr. Sells and Dave Winer, I am ready for the ninth grade.

Just found out that Harriet Miers withdrew from the running for a position as a Supreme Court justice via The Onion.

The great people at WebHost4Life moved my database and web server to new Windows 2003 servers. They put them in the same server block and I noticed a significant speed increase in the time it takes my blog to load. This explains why my site was down this morning.

Eric Lippert does a great job of defining the term Idempotent. I’ve used this term many times both to sound smart and because it is so succinct.

Sometimes someone writes a post that makes you say, “Oh shit!”. For example, Jon Galloway writes that writing a windows service just to run a scheduled process is a bad idea.

Welcome to the new pissing contest.

I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone. – Jack Valenti, former head of the MPAA

Ok, I may have misfired with the last video, but this is truly hilarious. It passed the “Wife Test” (the last one didn’t).

I’ve talked before about the various physical pains that software developers face on the job. For me, it seems that my pain likes to migrate around my body. If I have pain, it almost always seems to be one at a time.

My Contact Me page works again. Sorry for the prior inconvenience.

UPDATE: For the most part, I think young Phil Haack is full of shit in these first two paragraphs. I definitely now think unit tests should NOT touch the database. Instead, I do separate those into a separate integration test suite, as I had suggested in the last paragraph. So maybe Young Phil wasn’t so full of shit after all.