Reflective Surface

It may be old news, but somebody implemented .NET’s iBuySpy sample application in Cobol. I doubt any new company considering .NET would use Cobol for a new application, even if they had used Cobol before.

Phoenix 0.4 is out. This release landed a lot of improvements over the previous release including Type Ahead and theme support.

Richard Caetano thinks about thought in Thinking in Brain Speed.

The brain is a fascinating machine. I once read in a science maganize that the brain processes over ten thousand sensory inputs every second, automatically filtering what is irrelevant, and checking what is relevant against memory. Each of those inputs is considered as we decide the minute things we need to do each second, from blinking to hitting the next key in the keyboard at the proper location.

The interesting thing about the process is that we can “rewire” the brain with new assumptions affecting the way it will react next time, as Caetano noted and pointed as a good mental exercise.

Mark Pilgrim sums up the spam issues in an insightful post.

He comments on possible solutions and their effectiveness, noting that custom, isolated measures will not solve the problem in a satisfactory way. A article mentioned in his post points to the need of a distributed effort to cope with worms.

I think the same reasoning could be applied to spam. Blacklists are a step in this direction, but they are limited and sometimes penalize people good netizens which happen to be using the same network a spammer hijacked. But if the community works together, we may come up with a solution that makes spam costly to spammers — or less attractive, as Mark also puts it — and at least reduce the amount of spam flooding our mailbox everyday.

Kuro5shin profiles the blogosphere to find what types of bloggers are out there.

Yesterday, I went to the movies with my wife to see Reign of Fire.

As a fantasy fan, I like all things dragon. I expected a good show, and got it. Reign of Fire’s dragons are so real that you can’t help but believe them. Although simple, the story is good, and fact that it takes place in the future, unlike traditional fantasy settings, is an interesting twist.

In short, it’s a movie worth seeing. In my opinion, the only problem with Reign of Fire is that it is too short. I could use some more minutes with action scenes

Neil’s Place: 101 things that the Mozilla browser can do that IE cannot.

Realistic Internet Simulator: It’s the Internet as you see it.

This 404 page will waste your time

Despair, Inc: “Whether you’re a pessimist, underachiever or a chronic failure, I personally offer my unconditional guarantee that Demotivators will truly inspire you to new lows!”