The story of how a stolen laptop and a careless employee got me banned from my favorite pawn shop.

Alan Cooper impresses me. He has become the spokesperson for the software development community to me. Alan gave the closing keynote talk at Agile 2008. Alan blogged about the event and makes his slides and speaker notes available for download here. Here's what I got from the presentation...

Programming Groovy is easy to start with. This reference of best practices and idiomatic solutions smoothly guides you to the next step of achieving more expressive solutions that fully leverage the power of the language.

In this podcast interview, Peter Muir previews some of the upcoming features in Seam 2.1, including support for GWT and Wicket, improved security enhancements for identity management, permissioning, and single sign-on, as well as better support for RESTful application development.

The truth is that these programming blitzkriegs are some of my favorite periods in life. Under the right conditions, writing software is so intensely pleasurable it should be illegal.

Today, DZone has released its latest Refcard, IntelliJ IDEA. Download today and win a shot at a free personal license!

This refcard covers the System.Windows.Browser namespace in a whirlwind tour that includes: calling managed code from JavaScript, using managed code to control the HTML DOM, and accessing the user’s browser window.

Alex blogged about weird code snipped involving null throwables found by our colleague Tim Eck.

Its about 6.30PM here in Prague and the day 1 of The Server Side Java Symposium (TSSJS) is wrapping up for the day with an award ceremony.

We hereby announce our fourth annual contest to write innocent-looking C code implementing malicious behavior. In many ways this is the exact opposite of the Obfuscated C Code Contest: in this contest you must write code that is as readable, clear, innocent and straightforward as possible, and yet it must fail to perform at its apparent function.

I've heard the stereotypes about Java programmers being uptight nerds who don't know how to cut loose. Well, that's about as far from the truth as Enterprise is from Gene Roddenberry's original vision.

Sadly, DRY has become a philosophy that is dogmatically and blindly applied to every aspect of programming. I'm a big fan of firing silver bullets but if you go that path your number one priority needs to be finding where a solution does not fit. In fact, those who have applied DRY excessively have found that there are situations when DRY may not be advantageous.

We’ve written recently about how to preserve your equity when fundraising. This week we spoke with serial entrepreneur Chris Michel, who explained why founders should not be afraid to give additional equity disbursements — out of their personal stakes! — to reward senior staffers.

There is a great list of all of the new features in Silverlight 2 beta 2 at this link. The release is supposed to be out this week, which would be today or tomorrow, one would hope.

Listen to this tech chat from DZone with David Ward of JBoss on JBoss Developer Studio.

New free PDF cheatsheet from DZone on Windows PowerShell. This refcard covers starting and using Windows PowerShell, including the syntax for all statements, operators and other elements of the language. Also included are examples of how to use .NET, COM, ADSI and WMI objects from PowerShell. Finally, it includes tips and tricks - short examples showing how to perform common tasks from PowerShell.

Starting today, we have voted to move out of the Grizzly umbrella the grizzly-jruby extension and its OSGi bundle. Where the code is going? Under the new glassfish-scripting project.

The CommunityOne conference this year was on Monday, May 5, 2008, the day before JavaOne "proper". It's easy to think of CommunityOne as a "pre-JavaOne", or "JavaOne, Day 0" because, like JavaOne, it's sponsored by Sun Microsystems, it's at the same venue, and it is logistically managed as sort-of an extension of JavaOne (your JavaOne conference pass is used, but with an optional one-day add-on for CommunityOne). So why the distinct conference name and date? Aren't CommunityOne and JavaOne the same kind of conference sponsored by the same company?

Oracle believes Java is integral part of the upcoming transformation of the Enterprise to more Web-2.0-like -- to adopt the look and feel of Web 2.0 and fulfill the funtional expectations of the typical Web 2.0 user (creating informational mashups, creating new levels of integration between normally non-integrated modules of a web applicion, or at least data elements managed by those modules).

If you’re opting for an LPN program, then this article is for YOU! It contains some basic information about CNA to LPN migration, skill requirements and job responsibilities. I read it and I’m glad that I did!

This two-part article series studies object-orientation and service-orientation by providing a comparison of goals, concepts, and principles.

A comprehensive article about Chest Acne discussing causes, treatments and prevention tips. Includes a few pictures which show particular forms of chest acne. A must read for those affected by this skin disorder.

Over the weekend, Andrew Tokeley brought up an interesting point. If you ask most developers about their goals as a developer, most would like to be the team lead on a project. Is it really all gumdrops and candy canes?

Around 2000, Sean Quinlan and Sean Dorward built a content-addressed storage system called Venti. Their paper, “Venti: a new approach to archival storage” (PDF; also HTML), won best paper at the storage conference where it was presented. Today's post is about how Venti can heal itself.

What if you could run a single webapp with Java, PHP, and ASP.NET AJAX in one webapp? Stay with me for a minute, because I think there might be a powerful combination here!