• I was checking out the ASP.NET community site, and I noticed a small “Microsoft Communities” toolbar across the top. There’s a little menu that links to other MS community sites like Channel 9 and MSDN Blogs. I’m surprised the NetFx3 community site isn’t included.
  • My teammate Dale is blogging about Proper SOA. He lays out 6 Proper SOA principles, and then drills into the first three: meets business needs, requires governance and responds to changing business drivers. I expect to see posts on the remaining principles this week. Maybe Dale should turn this series into an article.
  • Speaking of articles about architecture, Architecture Journal 10 is online as a PDF. This issue’s topic is Composite Applications.
  • Malbolge is a programming lanugage that is “specifically designed to be difficult to program in.” Here’s Hello World in Malbolge:
    (=<`$9]7<5YXz7wT.3,+O/o'K%$H"'~D|#z@b=`{^Lx8%$Xmrkpohm-kNi;gsedcba`_^][ZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA@?>=<;:9876543s+O<olm
    Seriously. Actually, it’s worse than it looks. The effect of any instruction depends on where it is located in memory.  Malbolge is so difficult, it took a month to write a Lisp program to generate that program. However, Lou Scheffer thinks we should think about Malbolge as a cryptosystem. I wonder if it could be used for obfuscation? (via Good Math, Bad Math)
  • Nat Torkington blogs about teaching kids to program. He makes the point about “them to think in terms of small steps”. I was lucky to have a computer teacher in elementary school who did something similar. She had us write down instructions for making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and she then followed them to the letter. For example, if you wrote, “spread peanut butter on the bread” with out first instructing her to take out a slice, she’d happily spread peanut butter on the entire loaf. (via reddit)
  • To this day, my wife thinks the peanut butter and jelly lesson negatively affected my ability to communicate with “normal” people. She’ll even say “peanut butter and jelly” when she thinks I’m being particularly obtuse in my communication.