"There is a (not quite) new effort by the IETF to standardize a framework for network applications, called BEEP, the Blocks Extensible Exchange Protocol. Standardized in RFC3080, it takes care of all lower level tasks an application level protocol has to like framing, authentication and capabilities negotiation in a modular and lightweight way. In the current issue of Internet Packet Journal (a quite nice and free-as-in-beer technical publication by Cisco) is a well written Introduction to this framework. Why isn't anyone adopting this protocol besides some Java libraries like beep4j and PermaBEEP and a C library called RoadRunner. I couldn't find any applications based on this protocol, regardless of it's promised capabilities. Is everybody still inventing his own application layer protocol?"
http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/07/15/212226&mode=thread&tid=99

Scientific Battlegrounds in Diets
There's an interesting article currently carried by the NYTimes (free reg. yada yada) that talks about the world of dieting, National Institutes of Health, Atkins as well as low-carb vs low-fat. The interesting thing, from a scientific perspective, is the sheer lack of study - and the reticence from the scientific community to question the party line.

Software evolution article in Salon: http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2002/04/08/lehman/print.html

The guy claims that software evolves and that you have to take these dynamics into account as a software engineer or manager.

IBM's Sash Weblications for Windows is a dynamically configurable programming environment for rapidly building and deploying platform-integrated desktop applications using JavaScript and DHTML. This programming environment enables Web programming beyond the browser, and the resulting applications are integrated seamlessly into the common desktop environment and take advantage of the latest standards in Web services.

ERD Apps a Missing OSS Niche?
Pennyless Developer asks: "So the time comes when one must design a brand spankin' new database schema. You want to use an Entity-Relationship diagramming tool with hopefully some automatic schema generation tools, but do not have much money to purchase anything like Rational Rose. Like a true geek well versed in OSS, you head off to scan sourceforge, freshmeat, and google. But alas, it appears no such applications exist in the OSS world, at least none beyond the planning stage. The question I pose is this: What useful, OSS/Free/Cheap ERD applications have you found and used? Or do developers do all their ERD work under an evaluation period of commercial software?" http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/06/30/2323205&mode=thread&tid=156

ANTLR: A parser generator that targets many languages. (Is VB one of them?) http://www.antlr.org/

Pressman software engineering links: http://www.rspa.com/

Great software engineering links: http://www.cs.ubc.ca/spider/kwong/se.html

Great software syllabus from U of M: http://www.engin.umd.umich.edu/CIS/course.des/cis375.html

Another bunch of links: http://www.tantara.ab.ca/info.htm