Jeff Atwood

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

Bay Area, CA
Jeff Atwood

It looks like you're writing a for loop!

Even the best programmers make shitty software, with bugs. But some programmers are naturally proficient at creating this special kind of software, as illustrated by a Croatian developer known as Stinky: The anecdote that best reveals how little Stinky knew about programming started when he asked Bojan to help him

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The Nigerian Spammer Anthem

A recent Los Angeles Times article reveals that the 419 scam spammers have their very own anthem: a song titled I Go Chop Your Dollars by Nigerian recording artist Osofia: "419 is just a game, you are the losers, we are the winners. White people are greedy, I can

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Running XP with the pagefile disabled

If you have 2 gigabytes (or more) of memory in your PC, have you considered turning off your pagefile? Here's how to do it: 1. Control Panel, System 2. Advanced tab 3. Performance group, Settings button 4. Advanced tab 5. Virtual Memory group, Change button 6. Select "

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If You're Reading This, You Are a Low-Value Demographic

Jakob Neilsen may not be today's hip and trendy Web 2.0 fixture, but he's still dispensing solid advice. Check out his Top Ten Blog Design Mistakes: 1. No Author Biographies 2. No Author Photo 3. Nondescript Posting Titles 4. Links Don't Say Where

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Unit Testing vs. Beta Testing

Why does Wil Shipley, the author of Delicious Library, hate unit testing so much? I've certainly known companies that do "unit testing" and other crap they've read in books. Now, you can argue this point if you'd like, because I don'

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Code Snippets in VS.NET 2005

One of the most enjoyable new features in Visual Studio .NET 2005 is Code Snippets [http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnvs05/html/codesnippets.asp] . This animated GIF illustrates how it works: I'm demonstrating three types of snippets here: * simple expansion * template expansion (with

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Media Center 2005 adds Non-Linear Stretch

As Omar recently pointed out, Update Rollup 2 for Windows XP Media Center 2005 adds one essential new feature that makes it a "must have" upgrade -- non-linear stretch! I took a few screenshots on my HTPC to illustrate. This is typical 4:3 television content: On a

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Pimp My IDE

I just updated my Programming Fonts entry. It now includes a much larger code sample in each font, and a few new fonts including the "gee, did I really just pay $100 for a single font" Pragmata. Be sure to check it out. It's a shame

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Microchip Easter Eggs

Software engineers aren't the only ones planting secret easter eggs in their products [http://www.eeggs.com/tree/153.html]. Here's a fun article on thehidden art etched into microchips [http://news.com.com/What+art+is+hiding+on+your+microchip/2100-1006_3-5893374.html] . There are

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Wrangling ASP.NET Viewstate

Inspired by Scott Hanselman's recent post on ASP.NET viewstate wrangling [http://www.hanselman.com/blog/MovingViewStateToTheBottomOfThePage.aspx], here's a roundup of tips for dealing with that ornery viewstate stuff. The first rule of thumb, of course, is to turn it off whenever you can. But

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The Best of Creative Computing

In the process of researching a few recent blog entries, I found the amazing Atari Archives [http://www.atariarchives.org/]. The title is a little misleading; it isn't completely Atari specific. The archives contain incredible page-by-page high resolution images of many classic computer books, including The Best of

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Why Do Login Dialogs Have a "User" Field?

In The Humane Interface, the late Jef Raskin asks an intriguing question: why do login dialogs have a "User" field? Shouldn't login dialogs look more like this? And you know what? He's right. Your password alone should be enough information for the computer to

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