I know I'd be completely lost without LaunchBar on OS X:

http://www.obdev.at/products/launchbar/index.html

I initially thought that entering keyboard commands to run a program was completely opposite what a GUI was supposed to offer, but being a command-line driven guy (hey, I'm getting old!), it was amazingly intuitive, not to mention blazingly fast. I rarely use the toolbar to start programs any more, let alone navigate through the Applications folder.

Definitely recommended for all you OS X folks out there.

I've always had issues with comparisons that follow the 'constant == lvalue' format. For whatever reason, it always takes me longer to grok what the comparison means. When I use 'lvalue == constant', it makes much more sense. At least to me.

I'm not sure why you say this has anything to do with 'safety' - can you elaborate? I'm curious.

I will say that I've noticed this coding construct more in code written by developers from Asia and India. Something in the curriculum, perhaps? In my formal education I never saw the 'constant == lvalue' construct, and I went to University in N.A.

The U.K. has the world's largest civilian stockpile of plutonium.

A civilian stockpile? Can someone explain to me how the UK has a civilian stockpile of plutonium?

What, did we go through a time warp? Wasn't there a Moonbase Alpha back in 1999?

And, didn't the moon vacate the premises shortly thereafter?

D'oh! That should have been "now it's accelerating".

(sigh) I don't know why I bother to preview :-)

...but Star Wars will be soon (or is it already?) part of the list of those shows that 'Jumped the Shark'.

With Lucas at the helm, the death spiral has been been underway for a while, and how it's accelerating.

This sounds very much like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literate_programming/, as introduced by Knuth.

I looked at using Tangle and Weave for C development a long time ago, but found that it was a pretty difficult paradigm to get used to.

FYI, TeX and Metafont were both written using Tangle and Weave. Pretty impressive to read the source code, which had both code and documentation intermixed. It was a novel way (as in innovative, and as in a book :-) )to develop a complex application; I believe that Knuth even stated that creating TeX and MetaFONT were made much easier by using Literate Programming...

At my company we have a change freeze from mid-December to mid-January to avoid problems such as this. With a large (40B+) company, you need to have a stable environment to perform year-end financial activities, and an outage like this would be completely unacceptable.

While I don't personally use a Blackberry, I would be asking some serious questions about their change policies before I relied too heavily on a BB for business purposes...

I do not think that word means what you think it does.

This was thought about, and discarded. While on the surface it seems like a good idea, in actuality it's incredibly difficult to implement, since the dust on Mar's is so 'sticky' - from what I've read elsewhere, the electrostatic charge of the dust on Mars is very high, and any attempt to scrape it off the solar panels would just move it around, not really remove it.

Besides, with a two month life expectancy, I think it was determined that they wouldn't need to remove any dust from the solar panels since the rovers would have long since died...