Indoor enthusiast. Co-founder of Stack Overflow and Discourse. Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about. Find me here:
Is anyone else as sick as I am of all the mainstream news coverage on Twitter? Don't get me wrong, I'm a Twitter fan, and I've been a user since 2006. To me, it's a form of public instant messaging -- yet
In Why Isn't My Encryption.. Encrypting? we learned that your encryption is only as good as your understanding of the encryption code. And that the best encryption of all is no encryption, because you kept everything on the server, away from the prying eyes of the client. In
If you've followed my blog for any length of time, you know that I am a total regular expression fanboy. It's almost embarrassing how much I love the damn things. I'm pretty sure my teammates roll their eyes every time they see yet another
Unix turns 40: The past, present and future of a revolutionary OS is fascinating reading. Forty years ago this summer, a programmer sat down and knocked out in one month what would become one of the most important pieces of software ever created. In August 1969, Ken Thompson (pictured at
Everybody loves BitTorrent. And rightfully so. With BitTorrent, you also start by placing your large file on a central server. But once the downloading begins, something magical happens: as clients download the file, they share whatever parts of the file they have with each other. Clients can opportunistically connect with
Emrah Diril [http://emrahdiril.com/] recently asked me this via email: > Steve Yegge mentioned in the comments of his last post [http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2009/05/programmers-view-of-universe-part-3.html] that he gets quite a bit of hate directed his way. > Fake51: you underestimate the ability of people to
One of my all time favorite blog entries is a truly epic tale of dating gone wrong that culminates in the strangest reference to P=NP you'll probably ever encounter. Joey: So you really did graduate from computer engineering? New Girl: Yes I did, from UBC! Joey: And
It's pop quiz time! Put away your notes, and let's begin. a) Do you own this book?* b) Do you know who this man is? c) Does this FAQ look familiar to you? 3) OUR LITTLE FRIEND, THE COMPUTER 3.1) Are there any OSes that
I've always been leery of RAID on the desktop. But on the server, RAID is a definite must: "RAID" is now used as an umbrella term for computer data storage schemes that can divide and replicate data among multiple hard disk drives. The different schemes/architectures
Late last year, I encountered what may be nearly perfect evil in business plan form: Swoopo. What is Swoopo? It's a class of penny auction, where bidders pay for the privilege of bidding: [Penny auctions] offer new televisions, computers, game consoles, appliances, handbags, gold bars and more for
There's an inherent paradox in motivating programmers. I think this Geek Hero Comic illustrates it perfectly: It's a phenomenon I've noticed even in myself. Nothing motivates like having another programmer tell you they're rewriting your code because it sucks. Dave Thomas has
In Why Isn't My Encryption.. Encrypting?, many were up in arms about the flawed function I posted. And rightfully so, as there was a huge mistake in that code that just about invalidates any so-called "encryption" it performs. But there's one small problem: I