Jeff Atwood

Indoor enthusiast. Co-founder of Stack Overflow and Discourse. Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about. Find me here:

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Jeff Atwood

Universally Annoying Remotes, Revisited

Alex Gorbatchev posted his very favorable review of the Harmony H659 universal remote: This weekend I made one of the best purchases ever and I'm not exaggerating. Up until now I have been in the remote hell. Let me describe my living room setup: TV, DVD, Receiver, PVR

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Disk Space

Hard disk space, like CPU speed, isn't increasing as fast as it used to [http://www.digit-life.com/articles2/digests/hdd2k4.html]: Still, 400gb drives can be had [http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=22-145-067], and it's not difficult to build a terabyte array

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Some Lessons From Forth

It's easy to get caught up in the "newer is better" mindset of software development and forget that ideas are more important than code. Not everything we do is obsolete in four years. The Evolution of Forth, which outlines Charles Moore's guiding principles in

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Ideas Are More Important Than Code

Do you have coworkers whose shelves groan under the weight of hundreds of pounds of technical books? I do. And I always try to gently convince them that maybe they should buy books by content instead of weight: It took me a while, but I finally came to realize that

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A Modest Namespace Proposal

Jon Galloway recently pointed out something that's been bothering me for a while: I'm happy to see the huge growth of community contributed code - things like RSS.NET, sharpziplib, ftp classes to tide us over 'til .NET 2.0, etc. But one thing that

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Who Needs Talent When You Have Intensity?

Jack Black, in the DVD extras for School of Rock [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0332379/], had this to say in an interview: > I had to learn how to play electric guitar a little bit because all I play is acoustic guitar. And I'm still not very

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Screwdrivers vs. Couture

The appeal of the Mac Mini is totally lost on me. It's an underpowered, expensive box-- like every other computer Apple has ever introduced. And yet, a certain contingent of PC users are buying this thing on release day. I never understood that. Ed Stroglio may be the

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Micro-Optimization and Meatballs

In my previous entry on the real cost of performance, there were some complaints that my code's slow and it sucks. If I had a nickel every time someone told me that, I could have retired years ago. Let's take a look at the specific complaint

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Tog and Google on UI

You may be familiar with Bruce Tognazzini, who is widely considered the father of the Macintosh UI. He's no longer at Apple, but he is part of the Neilsen Norman [http://www.nngroup.com/index.html] dream team. He also maintains a website with the ten most wanted

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The Reality of Failure

How can you tell experienced programmers from beginners? New programmers think if they work hard, they might succeed. Experienced programmers know that if they work really hard, they might not fail. Allow me to elaborate with an excerpt from an interview with Steve McConnell: SM: One of the points I

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Net.WebClient and Deflate

In a previous entry, Net.WebClient and Gzip, I posted a code snippet that enables the missing HTTP compression in Net.WebClient, using the always handy SharpZipLib. This code eventually made it into one of my CodeProject articles. An eagle-eyed CodeProject reader noted that, while my code worked for gzip

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The real cost of performance

I don't usually get territorial about modifications to "my" code. First of all, it's our code. And if you want to change something, be my guest; that's why God invented source control. But, for the love of all that's holy,

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