First-rate people hire first-rate people; second-rate people hire third-rate people. Leo Rosten

Today's BOTD (Blog of the Day) is "Good Math, Bad math". What it is about is summarized in its subtitle: Finding the fun in good math. Squashing the bad math and the fools who promote it. There is no need to add anything to this. Only maybe an URL: http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/

For those of you who asked: I started to put up some images from Europe 2007 trip on Smugmug. Small subset of course (total amount with NEFs is almost 20 GB). I will upload more as I get to weeding them out :-).

Software problems aren't like mathematical problems. They have no clear boundaries or axioms and the problem domain is always shifting and evolving and changing. This fundamental difference ensures that while mathematical knowledge has a long shelf life, technical knowledge seems to last little longer than most popstars. And the changes wrought in programming are not just shallow refinements or surface innovations but fundamental changes wrought by order-of-magnitude shifts in the virtual landscape.

During my recent return to Javaland, I have noticed many improvements in newer releases of well established frameworks and toolkits, as well as many new ones. One such new release is version 2 of Spring framework. It is not really a hot news, because the final version of 2.0 is out for almost a year (October 2006), but it is new to me, because I spend pretty much all of last 12 months in DotNet, C# and OLAP worlds, with only brief visits to older Struts based, Spring-free Java projects.