• John Backus, leader of the team that developed the first high-level programming language, died yesterday. It’s been a hard year so far for IT industry luminaries. (via Good Math, Bad Math)
  • Yesterday, I followed on Martin Fowler’s post on going transactionless. As I said yesterday, I didn’t agree with the idea of no transactions inside a service, but I agree 100% with no transactions between services. Via Paul Brown, we learn that EBay does allow forbids the use of client-side or distributed transactions, but doesn’t outlaw the use of transactions in general. That makes much more sense to me since transactions between services would have to be are distributed.
  • Wired just launched a new blog called GeekDad with the mission statement “Cool toys and fun projects you and your kids do together”. Subscribed (via The Long Tail)
  • DevHawk made Todd Bishop’s Microsoft Blog Directory. It’s in the “Software Development and Design” section. Not sure why I’m listed above Raymond Chen, John Montgomery, Chris Sells and Don Box in that section, but that’s nice company to be included with.