I came across lots of interesting reading over the past week. The most amazing to watch has been the unfolding saga of the MS "switch" counter-campaign. I've been quite impressed to watch amateur sleuthing on Slashdot turn into headlines on Wired, MSNBC, Information Week, Associated Press and even the BBC. For some odd reason this incident reminds me of the phrase you are only as strong as your weakest link.

More below on Java (as well as C#) design issues, privilege escalation system calls in NetBSD, cool SourceForge .NET XML projects, recruiting trips, excessive HTTP requests for my RSS feeds, Noah Mendelsohn's ideas of the original thoughts behind the design of W3C XML Schema and lots more.

Poll: Favorite GoF Design Pattern?

Does your job have irritating IT policies? A recent discussion on Sam Ruby's blog reminded me how lucky I am not to work for a company with an overly restrictive Internet usage policy. I've always considered restrictive IT policies as detrimental to employee morale because they engender an us vs. them mentality, punishes many for the crimes of a few and encourages employees to leave work early.

Thoughts below on Fortune magazine's article on Generation Wrecked, the Office team's announcement of XDocs, musical condoms, ridiculous O'Reilly articles, and an amusing site on the Office of Homeland Security.

Poll: What is your favorite US generation?

More news from back home. Excerpt

Nigerian officials realized they needed to modernize their system after a trial run of the voter registration process in late September. The trial run resulted in riots when people were told that local officials had run out of registration forms.

There were also reports of shootings, lootings and takeovers of government and business facilities.

The only geek religous war I've ever seen rage on internal lists since I got to M$ from as far back as when I was an intern haven't been the "Emacs vs. vi" or "GPL vs. BSDL" flame wars I am used to but instead checked vs. unchecked exceptions in C# licks. I've seen at least three of these on the main C# list with the first having occured when I was an intern.

Being a Java head, I'm strongly for checked exceptions while a lot of the C++ heads seemed to be for unchecked exceptions which I assume is why C# has unchecked exceptions since most of those folks are C++ hackers.

At least now my need for checked exceptions is satisfied with J# but that doesn't mean I don't bristle when I read blatant FUD against checked exceptions. Counter arguments below.

Poll: Favorite Java IDE?

Every once in a while I receive an ICQ message via my contact page from old friends who stumbled on my website or total strangers with comments about some aspect of my web page. Recently I received an ICQ message that was basically a rant by some Nigerian female blaming my father for her plight (everything wrong with Nigeria is his fault, forget the years of kleptocracy by previous military governments) which ended which ended with the question in the title of this diary.

Of course, you know you're from a Third World country when the president has to promise not to rig the elections.

More thoughts below on being an autograph hound, Columbine paintball, CNN's plans to become more "hip" , and fretting about writing responsibilities.

Poll: How did you find this diary entry?

I ended up meeting two other Microsoft folks with weblogs yesterday while in the Web Services team's building. This brings the number of Microsoft folks with blogs whom I've met or know personaly over five which I always thought would never happen. Interestingly enough, most of them are Web Services folks.

Some news I read in Yahoo crystallized a question that had been nagging me about advertising in the US. There seems to be less regulation in this area than I expected given my exposure to British laws in the same area as a kid. I also have been thinking about a Slashdot article from a few weeks ago about a researcher who suedfor ownership of patents he developed on the job.

More thoughts about all the above below.

Poll: Favorite Borg Blogger?