21 Rules of Thumb

A great list of 21 Rules of Thumb in developing software on time. Great read! Thanks to slashdot again.

Dirty Bombs Unharmful?

It would appear the our government is overreacting to so called "Dirty" Bombs. At least according to the Tech Review at MIT, dirty bombs, which are made up of a normal explosion spreading pre-existing radioactive material, would harm people far less than just a really big explosion. There is no fission or fusion causing a chain reaction in these explosives. Read it for yourself here, and they have a very convincing argument:

http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/wo_muller062304.asp?p=2

firefox speedups

I found these settings on slashdot for speeding up firefox 0.9:

Enter about:config into the title bar.

Set network.http.pipelining to True
Set network.http.pipelining.firstrequest to True
Set network.http.pipelining.maxrequests to 8 (I'm told higher values get ignored).
Finally and most important, set nglayout.initialpaint.delay to 0