Quoted: "... [the] human side of the equation is not understood to people outside the field ... they think we're all Monty Python quoting, Star Trek loving, Cheetos eating, caffeine addicted, girlfriendless freaks ... when in fact most CS people barely eat any Cheetos."

A book about "why software is hard" from a Salon co-founder (and non-programmer). Sounds very interesting.

Quoted: So while I hope that programmers will enjoy this work, it is meant equally or more for the rest of us. It poses a question and tells a tale. Why is good software so hard to make? Since no one seems to have a definitive answer even now, at the start of the twenty-first century, fifty years deep into the computer era, I offer, by way of exploration, the tale of the making of one piece of software -- a story about a group of people setting their shoulders once more to the boulder of code and heaving it up the hill, stymied by obstacles old and new, struggling to make something useful and rich and lasting.

Great blog post about math for programmers, and teaching methods.

Great article on a major gotcha for client-side .NET code (on Windows) which talks to a network.

Quoted: One of the issues in the .NET Framework 1.1 proxy support is that when the registry is read, the automatic configuration part of the proxy settings is ignored. Only the static portion of the proxy settings are read. However, if the default proxy settings in Internet Explorer are configured for automatic detection and static settings are not populated, the result is that Internet Explorer seems to download the resources correctly, while applications using the .NET Framework 1.1 get an exception that reads, "The underlying connection was closed: The remote name could not be resolved."