People expect Extreme Programming to be undisciplined. That's not true. People seem to want to label any undisciplined process as being 'agile' or 'extreme'. That's not true either. People have found that writing an article of the form above, and sticking an inflammatory headline about Extreme Programming on it gets you lots of page-views. That, on the other hand, could be true. →

Everybody makes mistakes. My fine is attached. I believe we're even. →

Once you're used to automatic memory management, being forced to do it all manually is a real hassle. →

This mailbox is protected with an email password system, to have your email delivered please resend the message and include the string BLUEHILL in the subject. Thank You! →

Responding to Andy Oliver's "Why C# is better than Java", part two. 6-10 →

Responding to Andy Oliver's Why C# is better than Java, part one. 1-5 →

Microsoft's homepage, on the day the SQL Server worm crippled large sections of the Internet: "Today's News: Bill Gates reports on security progress made and the challenges ahead." (Image on site) →

The solution isn't defensive worms. The solution lies in the recognition (seldom expressed, lest we later regret it ourselves), that the failure to patch a seven-month bug is negligence, the failure to firewall non-essential open ports on network servers is negligence. In other matters, the failure to implement egress filtering is negligence. We could probably come up with a pretty good baseline of what is obvious systems administration negligence when it comes to security. →

Hello, Internet-wide denial of service attack. **** you, Microsoft. **** you, incompetent server administrators who are not only too lazy to get off their stupid asses and upgrade a broken piece of software, but are too ****ing clueless to put their servers behind a firewall and block access to administrative ports. →

The ancient Chinese encyclopaedia entitled Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge classifies animals into the following categories: →

They're creating a new movie for Websphere developers. It's called "Dude! Where's My Classpath?" →

Online personality tests are a load of bollocks. →

Two perspectives of where I live. →

Dan 'DJB' Bernstein can be a dickhead, but you have to respect software of the quality of qmail, and you have to respect his amusing fight against his university's patent policy. →

Dear Operating System Vendors. I no longer want to know where my files are stored. I no longer care. →

I feel pretty confident saying that a significant number of people who are using a Relational Database, shouldn't be. They shouldn't be for one of the following reasons: →

How do I remember the next morning, the last thing I was working on yesterday afternoon? →

I haven't posted a silly sign for a while. →

Apropos a discussion of the non-final-ness of final fields, a colleague came up with this gem. What does the following code do? →

(No excerpt) →

The NullPointerException in Java can be incredibly annoying. In some languages, such as Objective-C, the null (or in their case, nil) object doesn't throw an exception, it just quietly returns another nil for every method called on it. I prefer the Java behaviour. Many others disagree. →

Steve Waugh is a dead-set legend. Possibly even better than Boonie. →

Matt Olson: How to Write Like a Wanker, "A popular misconception about text messages on the Internet is that, to be an effective communicator and earn the respect and admiration of your peers, you must be able to write lucid prose; that your messages, articles, posts and pages must be easy to understand and pleasant to read." →