Software is too expensive to build cheaply...

Joel's a pretenious schmuck a lot of the time, but he really does tend to know what he's talking about. His latest article, The Development Abstraction Layer really hits the nail on the head in oh so many way.

Looks like MS is making VS Studio Express free as in beer permanently.

I wrote up my responses to the free beta some time back; like I said then, I think this is a really good move for Microsoft, and it's driven by the quality of the free IDEs for other languages (notably NetBeans and Eclipse for Java).

I noticed today a little timer at the bottom of a co-worker's browser, showing him how long the web page he was browsing took to load. This tool just became a part of my standard toolkit - the Fasterfox extension to Firefox

It's official, it's up on our site, so it must be true: Wotif.com is in the last stages before listing, with the offical Prospectus now available for review.

One thing that I get sick of is how people take an estimate, expect it to be accurate, feed it into a plan, and when the plan is (inevitably) proven wrong, blame the estimate. This is a fallacy from the era of Waterfall development, but it still lingers on in many Agile environments.