Software is too expensive to build cheaply...

No, it's not an exercise craze (though I do want to get serious about losing weight soon). I'm talking about the FIT acceptance test harness. I looked into it recently, and this (rather extended) post describes what I found out.

Dear Mr. Architect:

Please design and build me a house. I am not quite sure of what I need, so you should use your discretion. My house should have somewhere between two and forty-five bedrooms. Just make sure the plans are such that the bedrooms can be easily added or deleted. When you bring the blueprints to me, I will make the final decision of what I want. Also, bring me the cost breakdown for each configuration so that I can arbitrarily pick one.

The New York Times has a really interesting article on the faith-based presidency entitled Without a Doubt. It covers a lot of the concerns, particularly within the Republican party, that people have about Bush's willingness to ignore inconvenient facts.

At work, there's been some debate on how best to structure our J2EE servers to maximise utilisation of a scarce resource (per-CPU licenses!). The crux of the debate centered, for some reason, on how we can allocate more JVM instances per server.

As this video makes abundantly clear, e-voting is simple... as long as you want to vote for Dubya.

On a more serious note, Slashdot covered some real problems with the e-voting machines in Florida recently.

Stumbled across this one recently. Stumbled as in I fell down, grazed my knees, and couldn't get up properly for a couple of hours. Turns out that arrays in Javascript can have a length that is totally utterly wrong. :(

The New Yorker has an article on talent management in modern corporations. It looks into how companies manage talent to improve performance. Quite a good read.