I think Last.fm wants to be for music what LibraryThing is for books. Because it’s track and playcount focused, it’s a different experience. But I think if it could give me a similarity list for the contents of my library, it would probably turn up my Seattle friend Tom Harpel, on the basis of his recent Favorite Records list. Thanks for the listening suggestions—I’ll have to check the thirteen albums on the list that aren’t already in my library.

I have made available an old annotated list of interesting messages in the MUD-Dev mailing list archives.

A non-spam comment recently arrived on the old Boycott Sony site, which is something of a rarity these days. Reader PJ asks whether there is a known list of sites that are owned by Sony BMG, or Sony generally, so that he can block those sites for showing up in AdSense ads.

I don’t have such a list. Does anyone out there? I suspect that part of the issue may be that Sony Music/Sony BMG registers unique domains for its artists, meaning that blocking ads for them may turn into a game of whack-a-mole. But I’ll throw the question out to LazyWeb anyway.

Hide Your Shame: The A List Apart Store and T-Shirt Emporium is back. Hot new designs! Old favorites remixed! S, M, L, XL. Come shop with us!

Hide Your Shame: The A List Apart Store and T-Shirt Emporium is back. Hot new designs! Old favorites remixed! S, M, L, XL. Come shop with us!

Hide Your Shame: The A List Apart Store and T-Shirt Emporium is back. Hot new designs! Old favorites remixed! S, M, L, XL. Come shop with us!

An interesting essay by G. J. Chaitin on algorithmic information theory, which was anticipated by Leibniz already in 1686.
read more:

Hide Your Shame: The A List Apart Store and T-Shirt Emporium is back. Hot new designs! Old favorites remixed! S, M, L, XL. Come shop with us!

The Pragmatic Programmer suggests learning a new programming language (at least) once per year. Specifically, you should learn a language that changes the way you think about things - learning C# if you know Java doesn't count.

Last year I decided to learn Ruby - a lot of people told me how great it is. At first I thought it was pointless, but I eventually dived in. Man, I'm glad I did! I've since fallen in love with language.

Ruby is an incredibly clean and concise loosly typed OO language - a much purer OO than Java as everything is an object. It has some very nice features such as blocks/closures and the ability to create new types on the fly. But what it really taught me was the power of simplicity. Using Ruby I could solve problems quicker, with far less code which was easier to maintain and well designed. And the code looks so good to - zero fluff. Learning about simplicity was very much a theme for me last year.

On top of that I had to get to grips with maintaining loosly typed code. I never really mastered this in my Perl hacking days which is probably why I love Java so much. However, I've since become test-infected and cannot write a line of code that isn't test first (seriously - I can't - it's annoying sometimes!). The great thing about becoming test-infected is you end up with very very strongly typed code. Effective unit tests show many more problems than the compiler as they actually test the code does the right thing rather than just if it's syntacticly correct. And the tests provide an excellent reference manual for your objects.

So anyway, Ruby has changed the way I think and I really would write business applications in this language (if I could convince the clients I work for).

But it's a new year now and I'm looking for a new language. So what do I learn?

Smalltalk has been recommended but I think I may have already learned some of it's most important lessons through Ruby.

From chatting to colleagues, I've narrowed the list down to:

• LISP (with CLOS and MOP)
• Scheme
• Haskall
• Self

So, which one should it be? How will they change the way I think? What will you be learning this year?

Wow, this was a quick release, glad to see MS on the ball here for getting a SP out for 2k5 so quickly.

http://blogs.msdn.com/sanchan/archive/2006/04/19/579074.aspx

-         Learn about the new features and improvements included in SP1

A ton of new features have been added and a lot of improvements have been made in SP1 for SQL Server 2005.

You can learn more about it at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/916940/

-         Bugs fixed in SP1

Refer to KB 913090 (http://support.microsoft.com/?id=913090) for the list of bugs that were fixed in SP1.

Note that not ALL bugs that were fixed in SP1 have an associated KB article yet. As pointed out in this KB, you can expect to see more KBs on bugs that were fixed in SP1 in the future.

-         Download SP1

You can download SP1 for SQL Server 2005 from http://support.microsoft.com/kb/913089/

          Note that there is a separate version for SQL Server Express.

Planet Python and Planet Zope have been announced this week.

My 'Slices of Py' made the Planet Zope list, yet not Planet Python one. *shrug*, email sent.

I concur with Roberto Alsino that these groups need to define whether they're about a community or a topic. Many bloggers (/feeds) contain many 'off topic' entries. Some of these bloggers have sub-category methods to narrow the feed, others don't. Those that don't and rarely post a topic based entry should be pruned from the list or re-trench with a blogging engine or scraper that does. Those that do, please email the admin with your focused feed. Examples upon request.