As always, the last weeks of January are present-time for those of us who are judges in the Jolt Awards, which I launched 16 years ago (how old I am. How very old.)

This year, two books that I thought were exceptional didn't make the final ballot: Vincent Maraia's The Build Master and Michael Scott's Programming Language Pragmatics. Maraia's book is a look into the problems of operating an automated build system in medium- to large- settings (essentially, if the software takes more than a few minutes to compile and link) and, from the discussions of the judges mailing list, its absence from the finalist list is a real surprise. Scott's book is more academic, but is a great discussion of a topic near and dear to my heart, which is programming languages as a worthy subject of study in and of themselves. Usually, such studies are integrated into discussions of compiler design and implementation, but Scott rightly sees these as two different subjects.

Of the books that did make the finalist cut, so far I'm most impressed by Peter Seibel's Practical Common Lisp. I haven't programmed in Lisp since I edited AI Expert magazine back in the early 90s and I've never been tempted to pick it up again -- until I read Seibel's book. He does an exceptional job of introducing (or reminding) readers to Lisp's unique expressive power.

casey chesnut has solved the issue of streaming DivX to the XBox360, apparently even getting decent framerates over 802.11g. Since I recently upgraded to a “pre-N” wireless network (Linksys wrt54gx2 – highly recommended), I am totally psyched.

I love Geometry Wars on XBox360; it's a great arcade-style game that's perfect for killing a couple of minutes. Amazingly, though, it's apparently one of the few games that distributes its computation across the XBox's three cores.

I find it wildly amusing that something that is essentially an updated "Asteroids" is using three times the computational power of Project Gotham Racing 3.

Because "I've got a joystick in my pocket" is way too obvious to describe Levi Strauss' iPod-ready jeans.

Apple announced the first Intel-based Macs today. Presumably, this will drive down the eBay-arbitrated fair market value of second-hand Macs, especially the FMV of what had previously been higher-end machines but which would now be "good enough to develop on," machines. Hmmm...

From the MAKE newsletter:

there's a need for a Java-to-C guide--not just the language, but how it's really used in major apps, how to account for everything you're importing, best practices like unit testing, packaging, exception handling, etc.

It seems perverse at first, but the more I think about it...

Huzzah! IronPython 1.0 Beta 1 is released: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=94082d26-e689-4f7f-859b-fec6dacf3ae8&displaylang=en

Andrew Binstock , my colleague at SD Times has a fantastic column on the realities of OSS development. The idea of a community that contributes code (as opposed to contributing bug reports) is largely a myth.

So a second ago I brought up my homepage and was surprised to see a little "Suspicious Website" button beside the address bar. A phishing site? Moi? So, the good news is that you click on it and right away there's a link that says "I'm the owner, and I want to correct this report." Okay, good points for that. The resulting form, though, is filled with "Why do you collect personal information?" "Link to your privacy statement," etc. questions that assume guilt. To top it off, they give you the hardest damn CAPTCHA I've ever seen -- something like 6 or 7 totally obfuscated letters and numbers.

In addition to being irritating, this is pretty damning of IEs antiphish technology. This is a very straightforward site that is not on a dynamic IP, runs a well-known piece of software (dasBlog), and the domain is directly registered by me. If this site gets flagged as suspicious, I can't imagine how many legitimate business sites are going to be flagged.

Update: I received an "after review, it seems you are not a phish site" email in just over an hour. Was it an automatic process or a very efficient person? Hard to say, but I suspect that an automatic "closer scrutiny" gave me a pass and then a human approved it. Still, good response to a bad situation.