What makes blogging cool, and what is the ultimate expression of that concept? In short, what defines "blogging heaven"? This blog post is the first in a series aimed at that question. Along the way, the idea is to rope in concepts of "knowledge sharing" and "collaboration" and see how they interplay with blogging.

A review of The Humane Interface, by Jef Raskin.

Many Java programmers believe that they should include an instanceof test in equals methods. Many authors egg them on. This article explains why this is very wrong and muddleheaded in almost all cases, and urges programmers to test for equality of classes instead.

Is programing an art, science, or engineering? Paul Graham thinks art, and I mostly agree.

How many software developers does it take to change a lightbulb? 10 to discuss the requirements, 10 more to do the analysis, 10 more to do the design, and one to write the code, 12 years later.

Musings on the reasons people like me prefer static type checking for building systems.

...Wherein we explore what it means to be a computer, or computation, or computrons, or a computer programmer, and why Ken is even touching a computer when he's on vacation.

I'll be interviewing James Gosling one week from today, my fifth annual interview with the creator of Java. I'm collecting ideas for the interview. What would you like to hear James Gosling talk about?

For many years we've been using statically typed languages for the safety they offer. But now, as we all gradually adopt Test Driven Development, are we going to find that safety redundant? Will we therefore decide that the flexibility of dynamically typed languages is desirable?

Serialization is a powerful feature of the Java language, but failure to use it properly can cost you.

Two wiki sites are sisters if they join their namespace in such a way that happy collisions occur. Here are excerpts from a conversation as two quite different wiki implementations are joined by this technology.

Passing or failing: these are the usual states of JUnit tests. But discover a third state that many use but only few acknowledge, and how you can elegantly manage these tests with JUnit-addons Runner.

Where we find out what Dave will be talking about, and maybe get enough information to form an opinion as to whether it might be worth paying attention to or if it's just a bunch of mindless blathering.

A trip report from the Python UK conference (and the C/C++ conference of which it was a part).

Researchers in Rotterdam have positively identified the virus responsible for SARS