Indoor enthusiast. Co-founder of Stack Overflow and Discourse. Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about. Find me:
egoless programming
The Ten Commandments of Egoless Programming, as originally established in Jerry Weinberg’s book The Psychology of Computer Programming: 1. Understand and accept that you will make mistakes. The point is to find them early, before they make it into production. Fortunately, except for the few of us developing rocket
formatting tags
So I’m merrily editing my document in Word, or the WYSWYG editor of my choice, and I accidentally delete one of the invisible formatting tags embedded in the document. Carnage ensues. Here’s an example from Outlook: It’s enough to drive me absolutely bonkers. And it happens all
email security
I have modest email needs, so I use the default SMTP and POP3 services in Windows Server 2003. Although I have email relay disabled, spammers are still managing to send spam through my SMTP service – via non-delivery reports! In other words, spammers are intentionally sending email messages to nonexistent email
dialogue
A colleague forwarded this perplexing dialog to me: Quite the catch-22. I guess the only thing to do is try something else: A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?
virtualization
This article on AMD’s upcoming CPU support for hardware virtualization has the best description of virtualization I’ve read to date: In a modern-day virtualization system, a thin layer of software, called the virtual machine manager or hypervisor (both terms are common) runs on the processor. The VMM creates
design
In Never design what you can steal, I praised this amusing guerilla redesign of Jakob Neilsen’s useit.com – which is widely derided by the design community for its radically bare-bones layout. Well, the design guerillas are at it again. This time, they’ve set their design eye on Craigslist:
software development concepts
James Bach responded to my recent post, Are You Following the Instructions on the Paint Can?, with Studying Jeff Atwood’s Paint Can. Being under Bach’8596s intensive analytical microscope feels a lot like an interview with Hannibal Lecter. It’s flattering, but it’s also a little scary. You
software development concepts
Scott Hanselman thinks signing your name with a bunch of certifications is gauche: If it’s silly to suggest putting my SATs on my resume, why is… Scott Hanselman, MCSD, MCT, MCP, MC*.* … reasonable? Having a cert means you have a capacity to hold lots of technical stuff in your
software development
Jon Raynor added this comment to my previous post about keeping up with the pace of change in software development: The IT field is basically a quagmire. It’s better to accept that fact right away or move on to a different field. I guess someday I wish for Utopia
programming languages
Do you ever feel like you’re buried under umpteen zillion backlogged emails, feeds, books, articles, journals, magazines, and printouts? Do you ever feel that you’re hopelessly behind, with so much new stuff created every day that you can never possibly hope to keep up? Well, you’re not
spaces
I try to avoid using spaces in filenames and URLs. They’re great for human readability, but they’re remarkably inconvenient in computer resource locators: Any spaces in URLs are converted to the encoded space character by the web browser: XCOPY "c:\test files\reference data.doc" d:
blogging
James Bach responded to my recent post, Are You Following the Instructions on the Paint Can?, with Studying Jeff Atwood’s Paint Can. I didn’t realize how many assumptions I made in that post until I read Mr. Bach's pointed response. The most amusing assumption I made