Programming
A shutdown hook is a Thread designed to be run after a program receives a signal to exit, but before daemon threads stop, finalizers run, and the JVM goes poof. Shutdown hooks are great for clearing dirty caches, closing out open resources, and announcing this shutdown to other processes.
Coupling in software architecture seems to form a spectrum, based on what has to change to make the system do something different. At one end of the spectrum are dissociated ubiquitous services, like those envisioned by JXTA. At the other end are the highly-coupled systems of architectural nightmares. I haven't found anything that lays out the spectrum well, so here's my attempt.
