Indoor enthusiast. Co-founder of Stack Overflow and Discourse. Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about. Find me:
processor
I recently built a new, much lower wattage home theater PC using the Pentium-M processor. The P-M was, until very recently, a mobile-only part. And that’s why it’s ideal for HTPC duties – it offers very high levels of performance at an astonishingly modest power draw. For example, per
programming languages
In Revenge of the Right Brain, Daniel Pink sees a future where being technologically savvy isn’t enough: Few issues today spark more controversy than outsourcing. Those squadrons of white-collar workers in India, the Philippines, and China are scaring the bejesus out of software jockeys across North America and Europe.
ownership
One of the frustrations I’ve experienced with offshoring projects is the diminished sense of ownership. We’re still responsible for the software put in front of the end users, and yet we’re not allowed to put our hands on the code. Instead, we draw UML diagrams, we enter
hardware
The “beige box” PC industry has been slow to capitalize on Apple’s proven track record of design. I may not be interested in the Mac Mini, but I sure hope it spurs Taiwanese manufacturers* to produce more interesting looking small form factor PCs designs. And some of that will,
monitor
In multiple monitors and productivity, I proposed three LCD panels as the standard developer desktop configuration. The only thing holding us back was price, and the minor inconvenience of obtaining a second video card to drive the third monitor. I recently upgraded my home system to match my work configuration.
.net
I recently posted a question about console apps and AppDomain.CurrentDomain.UnhandledException – specifically, why doesn’t it work as described in the MSDN documentation? I even filed an official bug report on this. I guess it worked, because Microsoft’s Jonathan Keljo was kind enough to explain this behavior in
software development concepts
I’m currently building up my new Pentium M system for HTPC duties. This means doing a bench (open air) install, clean OS build and Prime95 torture test burn in. I also flash the BIOS to the latest revision from the manufacturer’s support page. Sometimes the motherboards are fairly
regular expressions
I’m a huge fan of regular expressions; they’re the Swiss army knife of web-era development tools. I’m always finding new places to use them in my code. Although other developers I work with may be uncomfortable with regular expressions at first, I eventually convert them to the
security
I stumbled across an interesting article outlining how to beat the MSDN visual CAPTCHA algorithm with some .NET code. Unfortunately, the author (a Microsoft MVP) demonstrated his “crack” by testing it on the blogs of other MVPs: (if you were one of the 94 people i comment spammed) sorry about
browser speed tests
Wondering which browser is fastest? These guys ran browser speed tests across an impressive array of operating systems. The hardware used is mildly obsolete by today’s standards – an 800mhz P3 with 256mb of RAM – but there’s no reason to think the benchmark results wouldn’t scale to faster
regular expressions
We’re currently supporting a third party application that, in addition to producing some truly impressive WTFs, generates incredibly verbose log files with zillions of ‘error messages’ that aren’t really errors. This makes diagnosing problems in their server code* very difficult. It is, however, a great use for a
keyboard shortcuts
Like Scott Hanselman, I view the mouse as an optional computer accessory.* Manly coders love the smell of compilation in the morning and we know that speed = keyboard. A mouse? C’mon. That’s so teenage girls can pick emoticons in AOL Instant Messenger. And for flash “developers.” Us tough