I have a good friend who we thought would never get married. A few months ago, he became engaged which, oddly, got me thinking about software development. You see, marriage and software projects are not as different as you might think. Both begin with a small set of mutually agreed upon promises followed by a lifetime of compromise.

Traditional software development projects have generally followed the paradigm of "tight coupling." This is also similar to marriage in that you know exactly who you're connected to for the long haul. That's the upside. One of the downsides is that you can find yourself with legacy issues. Whether we're talking about a mother-in-law or a mainframe, tight coupling always leaves you with something old and brooding in your basement.

When I was in grade school, I had a watch that functioned as a timepiece, a calculator and a simple video game. It had a lot of features, but one thing it didn't have was class. There was a time when timepieces were something special, when pocket watches sat nestled in vest pockets, waiting to be passed down through time as family heirlooms.

Today, pockets are filled with phones, PDAs, music players or some combination thereof. In some ways, they fill many of the same functions of a pocket watch. They have some functional, pragmatic use, but they also communicate a few social cues about status and wealth. How many times have you seen someone conspicuously unsheathe their shiny new phone? What says "I'm important" more than taking a call or checking e-mail while in the washroom? The new breed of techno-gadget has become the shiny gold pocket watch of the new millennium.

"Frequency hopping" is a technology that is all the rage right now. There are many patents being issued and many articles being written that describe how new wireless devices will be able to avoid interference and deliver higher overall quality by "hopping" to unused portions of the radio spectrum. It seems like the kind of thing that was dreamt up by a whiz kid at MIT, so it might be of interest to know that the original patent for the idea was issued to a film star from the 1940s who was interested in improving torpedoes.

Hedy Lamarr is regarded as one of the most beautiful actresses of all time, and she's also the co-inventor on the first patent for frequency hopping. She came up with the idea as a way to prevent radio controlled torpedoes from being jammed during World War II. The idea was that the torpedo and controller could repeatedly hop to different frequencies, which would protect them from jamming signals on any given single frequency. Lamarr was very smart, but some of the inspiration probably came from her first husband, an Austrian arms manufacturer, who was wealthy enough to live in the mansion featured in The Sound of Music.