From time-to-time, its time to catch up, which means I have to go into the office, re-introduce myself to the staff, and wander through the various departments to find out what I've missed. Here's what my most recent sojourn turned up.

 As Michael Swaine pointed out in It's Time to Get Good at Functional Programming, it's time for you to get good at functional programming.

 Pattern matching is one thing computers do really well. Take a bushel of data, throw it at a computer, and be amazed by the results. That's more or less what Sebastian Bernhardsson, Luis Enrique Correa da Rocha, and Petter Minnhagen, all members of Sweden's Umea University Department of Physics, did anyway. What is particularly interesting about their data was that it was a collection of books by Thomas Hardy, D.H. Lawrence, and Herman Melville -- authors I haven't thought much about since university.

 Ivar Jacobson, Bertrand Meyer, and Richard Soley don't look like revolutionaries, but that's what they claim to be. Politics? Pshaw! What they want to change is something more important. They want to re-establish software engineering as a rigorous discipline that's based on a solid theory, proven principles, and best practices -- and the vehicle they've launched to make this a reality is SEMAT,  short for "Software Engineering Method and Theory."

It's long been my belief that the most useful developer tools come from "what I need" rather than "what if." You know the tools I'm talking about -- the ones you use everyday. The ones that may not be pretty, that aren't (yet) a product, but were devised by developers to solve specific problems day-in and day-out. Of course, the fun factor is when someone in product marketing runs across one of these tools and says, "What a cool idea. We could make a product out of that if it had a GUI."

At this writing, I'm sitting in an airport. LAX to be specific. Waiting to get out of Los Angeles. But according to the airlines there appears to be some nationwide glitch that's disrupted my plans. Ever the curious and not getting the full story from CNN, I dropped a note to someone  who knows about this kind of stuff. Bill Curtis is chief scientist at Cast Software  and I was able to catch up

I'm in LA, attending PDC, which is being held at the LACC. In non-acronym English, I'm in Los Angeles, attending Microsoft's Professional Developer's Conference, which is being held at the Los Angeles Convention Center. There's a lot going on here. Let's see, last night, Kobi and the Los Angeles Lakers took on the Detroit Pistons next door at the Staples Center; and tomorrow night, its my man