The IEEE Spectrum has a rational counter argument to the singularity crowd who believes that technology is on a runaway performance increase. See: http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/robotics-software/singular-simplicity/0 . For me, this is a long needed reality check to the optimistic singularity promotion that has been occurring.

When doing web programming there are many times when a response doesn’t come back as expected. Sometimes it is hard to determine the exact post that was created and the redirects that were followed. Adding debugging statements can help, but in complex post and redirect situations a tool like Fiddler can really speed up the diagnostic process.

An interesting piece of research on Wikipedia shows that the growth rate is slowing. This doesn’t surprise me much. Even though I’m not a contributor (I have made a few corrections to spelling, grammar and sentence construction, but have never added any substantial content) I have watched the site as it went from a free for all into a very tightly controlled hierarchy of user classes.

Another of my favorite Firefox add-ins is Greasemonkey. Requiring a bit of knowledge of JavaScript to even get started with this isn’t a tool for everyone. However, if you have some knowledge of JavaScript and how web pages are represented in a browser (the DOM, or Document Object Model), then this tool can do things that would otherwise require a full blown extension.

LLBLGen is a Object Relation Mapper, or ORM. We started using it long before LINQ to SQL was available (or even discussed) and it have provided years of reliable data access with type safety that ADO.NET doesn’t provide inherently.