Oh, boy do you owe it to yourself to give this a read: Tunny, Colossus and Ada: Keeping an Open Mind .

It's a great story of a contest centered on the rebuilding of the Colossus Mark 2 codebreaking machine used by the Bletchley Park boffins. To celebrate, the British National Museum of Computing issued a challenge: They would transmit a signal encoded with an original WWII German cipher, and then

Dr. Dobb's talks with Michael Swindell, CodeGear's VP of Products and Strategy, and Nick Hodges, Delphi and Delphi for PHP Product Manager, about Embarcadero Technology's recent acquisition of CodeGear, what that means for future CodeGear product releases, and the release of Delphi for PHP 2.0. [audio]

Things have been quiet (perhaps a little too quiet) over at The Dobbs Challenge and particularly in the forums, which makes us pretty sure that you're all too busy beavering away at your entries to talk! However, we'll still like to remind you all that time is now of the essence, with the contest to close in less than one month's time on June 13th. Categories still open for entry include

I got a press release from Powerset today, which I think is identical to this blog entry. I've been following this company for over a year, interested in their claim that they were going to integrate natural language processing into a search engine.

Today they've gone public with their first demonstration of this technology, and while it is interesting, I'd have to say I'm underwhelmed.

Jon Erickson posed the question yesterday "Programming Art, Science or Both?", the answer is simple: programming is just an activity.

I really like web applications - wait - I mean Rich Internet Applications (RIAs). Whatever they are called, the ability to get at my stash of Google documents from any PC with a browser is pretty useful to me. And lately the scope of what can be accomplished in a web app seems to be skyrocketing.

Here are a few posts  -- guru and members -- that you won't want to miss. Let's start with...

Simplification versus Innovation

Thoreau saw a lot of value in simplification, and so does Christopher Diggins. His point being that the technologies which have had the greatest impact overall have been about making things simpler. Can you add to his list?

If the question is "Is programming an art or science?", then the follow up question is "Are programmers artists or scientists?"