I have to admit that new, exciting acronyms annoy me, especially when explaining what they mean is a chore. JSON is one of these meaningless names, even though it’s a really reasonable approach. REST is another useful, but poorly named technology. Acronyms as monikers work great if you’re knee deep in the thing, but to an outsider they’re all geek.

An interview with Richard Hipp (author of the SQLite library) at The Guardian. I’ve used SQLite for several projects now, and am very impressed.

The Most Revolutionary Microsoft Technology You’ve Never Heard Of talks about a generalized event-driven framework that puts the CLR’s and Vista’s eventing systems to shame. So where is it? Microsoft has it hidden in a closet, as a supporting library of their Robotics Studio.

A recent Stroustrup interview.

Joel Spolesky measures technology like the rest of us, but is honest enough to talk about it. I think it’s sensible to be wary of tools that offer amazing returns, waiting other people to prove them out (or measuring them yourself without betting the farm).

A detailed description of Google’s BigTable, an interesting chunk of back-end technology that does all sorts of magic.

An ACM forum short: Why Features Don’t Matter Anymore: The New Laws of Digital Technology.

The Way We Eat Now, an essay that describes how our ancient bodies collide with modern technology (to produce a flabby, disease-ridden populace).

How To Pick A Programming Language. A classic paper about fundimental motivators for programming language selection.

Engineering Everquest
“EverQuest is not just a social phenomenon or a source of cash for Sony; it’s also a phenomenal example of how a company manages rapid growth and the art—and science—of scaling up computing technology. More than 1500 servers around the world run EverQuest; collectively the machines have the bit-crunching capabilities of one of the world’s top 100 supercomputers. In just one of the data centers, more than 30 kilometers of wire and cable connect all the boxes. More than 9 million gigabytes of EverQuest data have been downloaded from Sony’s servers in the past six years.”