Mixed links and commentary

MS Office took a page out of IdeaJ's book and uses every available method to annoy users (check for valid licenses) - on the bright side hopefully I will time to update my machine to Ubuntu 8.04 today :-)

The Backup Song. Very, very funny!

Writing a small web crawler in Python. Why it demonstrates how you can write almost anything in a few lines of code, it most probably will annoy the hell out of people like IncrediBill (for example there is no checking for robots.txt there!).

A slightly older post I discovered recently: Four C Programming Anti-Idioms. A followup from David LeBlanc involving C++: Checking Allocations & Potential for Int Mayhem. This reminds me C++ is hard. I recently tried to read a book about it written by the man himself and was terrified by the incredible amount of complexities and possibilities to get it wrong. I think that it is a safe bet to say that 80% of the C++ programmers don't know event 10% of these pitfalls (then again, 60% of all statistics is made up on the spot) - my university professors certainly didn't seem to know them. Here is a post from Tomas Ptacek making the same points.