10 tips on making agile programming work

App dev: Don't believe myths, stay away from scary terminology, but do practice discipline and courage. Perhaps those words of wisdom could be applied to, well, to just about anything, but in this case they are just three of the 10 bits of advice on successful agile programming that Paul Krill shelled out after collecting them in Las Vegas. The rest are in his Tech Watch post right here.

Notes from the field: Robert X. Cringely declares that Dell Computer is hereby spared having to change its name to Dull -- since it confirmed rumors and snapped up Alienware. Several security firms have gone wild, according to Cringe, and Bill Gates, it seems, gets cranky just thinking about MIT's vision to outfit the world's children with $100 laptops that run Linux. Security snafus linger, Gates gives cheap PCs the finger.

Best of the blogs: The ever-inventive Jon Udell posts an application simply, but aptly, named See It, Try it. Based on the embedded micro-browser Bitty, it offers picture-in-picture capability which, as of now at least, is a function gaining interest, but along with it a certain degree of ambivalence. "Is it useful?" he asks. "I'm not sure. See it, try it, and decide for yourself."

Quoteworthy: Should we really care if the United States falls behind in IT? Some argue that tech is the only sustainable lead we have on the rest of the world and that it's worth holding on to. Others say we're so far ahead economically and militarily, we could lose a lot of altitude in 20 to 30 years and still maintain some kind of edge. I lean toward urgency. -- Dave Margulius in Can the United States stay on the throne of IT?

New to our site: We've added another podcast: InfoWorld Storage Sprawl. The first episode, about archiving via optical and tape drives, went live this morning. I'll be posting Storage Sprawl twice weekly at The Storage Network.