Dangerous speculations. Speculations on why Danger's upcoming Hiptop/Sidekick might be successful.     

Great business without innovation. You don't need an ounce of innovation in order to have a very successful business. At least according to David Wheeler. I guess David's intention was just to show Microsoft in bad light but if you put 2 and 2 together, the inevitable conclusion is that you don't need any innovative ideas in order to have good business, sometimes even extremely good business. I guess many people (those hung up on "innovation") don't get, but it's just one of many examples that "innovation" per se is not equal to "good" or "profitable". Ideas are worthless, execution is what matters.     

Ideas are worthless. I really have a problem with people who either think that they are so great just because they've come up with an idea or people who think that a great idea is a pre-requisite for a successfully program/business/you-name-it. So I'm not going to pass up the chance to link to someone, who shares my POV:

Ideas are easy. Books are hard.

So please, repeat after me: ideas are easy; it's the execution that matters. God is in the details.     

camworld:

Weblogs should have opinions. Weblogs should have character. Tie it all up together with good information, and you've got a site people will come back to again and again.

Amen.     

Three-way merge. Rare are the times when a piece of software amazes me with how good it is. Araxis Merge just did. Merging is something that sometimes programmers need to do. People using source version control system like CVS sometimes start developing code on a new branch. At some point changes made on the branch need to be merged into the mainline code. The fun begins when there are merge conflicts that cannot be resolved automatically, i.e. if since branching the same piece of code has been modified both in mainline and on a branch. Someone has to intelligently decide which changes will survive and which ones will be dropped. Araxis Merge does an excellent job of helping doing the merge by superbly visualizing the code. Well worth it if you need to do merges.