Indoor enthusiast. Co-founder of Stack Overflow and Discourse. Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about. Let's be kind to each other. Find me
file management
What is user space? User space is the location in the filesystem where users put their personal files – their “stuff.” Here’s the user space folder structure in the Windows XP operating system: Documents and SettingsUser Application Data Cookies Desktop Favorites Local Settings My Documents My Music My Pictures My
software development
I’ve often thought that software developers were akin to Magpies, birds notorious for stealing shiny items to decorate their complex nests. Like Magpies, software developers are unusually smart and curious creatures, almost by definition. But we are too easily distracted by shiny new toys and playthings. I no longer
simulation
One advantage of being a geek is that our habits – as such habits go – are not terribly expensive. I’ve written before about my interest in auto racing. Instead of spending $100,000 on a sports car, I’ve built a nifty racing simulation rig that delivers many of the
operating systems
Most operating systems have some method of displaying CPU utilization. In Windows, this is Task Manager. CPU usage is generally represented as a simple percentage of CPU time spent on non-idle tasks. But this is a bit of a simplification. In any modern operating system, the CPU is actually spending
pdfs
Adobe’s Portable Document Format is so advanced it makes you wonder why anyone bothers with primitive HTML. It’s a completely vector-based layout format, both display and resolution independent. With PDF, you sacrifice almost nothing compared to traditional book and magazine layouts except the obvious limitation of resolution. Here’
privacy
Privacy has always been a concern on the internet. But as more and more people let it all hang out on the many social networking websites popping up like weeds all over the web, there’s much more at risk. Every other week, it seems, I’m reading about some
programming languages
Leon recently posted a link to a great blog entry on rediscovering Logo. You know, Logo – the one with the turtle. I remember being exposed to Logo way back in high school. All I recall about Logo is the turtle graphics, and the primitive digital Etch-a-Sketch drawings you could create
programming languages
Steve Yegge’s latest, Code’s Worst Enemy, is like all of his posts: rich, rewarding, and ridiculously freaking long. Steve doesn’t write often, but when he does, it’s a doozy. As I mentioned a year ago, I’ve started a cottage industry mining Steve’s insanely great
security
The most obvious badge of internet security is the “lock” icon. The lock indicates that the website is backed by a digital certificate: 1. This website is the real deal, not a fake set up by criminals to fool you. 2. All data between your browser and that website is
javascript
In The Day Performance Didn’t Matter Any More, I found that the performance of JavaScript improved a hundredfold between 1996 and 2006. If Web 2.0 is built on a backbone of JavaScript, it’s largely possible only because of those crucial Moore’s Law performance improvements. But have
perl
In The Problems of Perl: The Future of Bugzilla, Max Kanat-Alexander* laments the state of the Bugzilla codebase: Once upon a time, Bugzilla was an internal application at Netscape, written in TCL. When it was open-sourced in 1998, Terry (the original programmer), decided to re-write Bugzilla in Perl. My understanding
security
Software is digital through and through, and yet there’s one unavoidable aspect of software installation that remains thoroughly analog: entering the registration key. The aggravation is intentional. Unique registration keys exist only to prevent piracy. Like all piracy solutions – short of completely server hosted applications and games, where piracy