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I was searching for a copy of Claude Shannon’s seminal paper on information theory, when I stumbled across this collection of links to Classic Texts in Computer Science.

It includes classics such as Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years by Peter Norvig, Frederic P. Brooks’s No Silver Bullet: Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering, the ‘Google’ paper that founded an empire!: The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine by Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page and Computer Programming as an Art by Donald E. Knuth, to name just a few. Well worth a few hours browsing.

Over at Gretchen Rubin’s Happiness Project, Wednesday is Tip Day. In this set of tips, a few words (“The days are long, but the years are short”) caught my eye and reminded me of one of my favourite, short pieces of poetry:

And the days are not full enough
And the nights are not full enough
And life slips by like a field mouse
Not shaking the grass
– Ezra Pound

Fran Allen is the first woman to receive the prestigous Turing Award. It was awarded for her contributions to program optimisation and high speed computing.

On several occasions, when working with SMTP email in .NET, I’ve wasted a few hours for a variety of reasons relating to firewalls, virus scanners, relay only from domain addresses and plain stupidity (pointing at the wrong server for instance), to name just a few.

Recently, a colleague fell victim to one such annoying problem. We both went through the list of usual suspects, trying everything we could think of, until we reached the ‘this is crazy!” point.

The Solution: If you’re running a later version of Mcaffee virus protection, you might want to turn off the default behaviour of blocking any outbound traffic port 25!

I’m tempted to mention the maxim of Sherlock Holmes:

“How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible,
whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth” – The Sign of The Four, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

There is a useful FAQ for the 2.0 .NET Framework’s System.Net.Mail namespace at System.Net.Mail covering a range of common and advanced scenarios (and a corresponding one for 1.1 here).

Lutz Roeder’s Reflector 5.0 has been released:

• Reflector 5.0
• Reflector 5.0 Add-Ins
• Reflector 5.0 New Features

As has Virtual PC 2007.

It’s probably old news by now; get it here.

Bob Walsh posted an entry on Information Overload and how he combats it with a technique he terms ‘framing’. I like the ‘mis en place’ like process he describes (especially turning off email, messaging software, telephones etc.)

The Visual Studio Team System Technotes are:

“short, focused technical articles that explain a specific concept or walk through a particular scenario. TechNotes are intended to supplement the product documentation and technical articles. In addition, we have brought together some
of our very best blog postings in a central location.”

A nice resource for Visual Studio Team System users.

As you are no doubt aware, Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell joined Microsoft when MS acquired SysInternals, but I think I must have missed the announcement of the SysInternals site becoming part of TechNet. It’s great that Microsoft is continuing to make these tools freely available. FileMon, RegMon and Process Explorer are just a few of the essential debugging and sleuthing tools available in the arsenal.

The Sysinternals Video Library is still available (though it is a fairly expensive) and the “Tour of the Sysinternals Tools” video is free for download.

Frank Arrigo and Nick Randolph have blogged about a new site site: Hooked on LINQ maintained by Troy Magennis.

It’s not hype; LINQ will radically improve the way that data is abstracted and consumed in .NET, not to mention make it easier for developers to create high performance, logically tiered designs.