Indoor enthusiast. Co-founder of Stack Overflow and Discourse. Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about. Find me here:
In order to speed up my web browsing experience, I disable Flash in Internet Explorer. I've got nothing personal against Flash, mind you, but it's generally chrome. It's visually (and sometimes audibly) distracting, and it adds download time to each page view. An image
I noticed something strange in a Windows ME screenshot embedded in a Joel Spolsky article I linked yesterday [http://www.joelonsoftware.com/uibook/chapters/fog0000000059.html]: Notice the Qantas icons? Those are shortcuts to a now-defunct unix machine at Joel's company, Fog Creek Software. You can find evidence
I've recently been experimenting with a few hand-picked desktop utilities, but I am rapidly reaching the point of diminishing returns: the effort required to run and maintain all these utilities is greater than the productivity benefit. Furthermore, if I learn to rely on a highly custom desktop, I&
Navigating a new codebase can feel like like landing on an alien planet. That's where static code analysis [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Static_code_analysis] tools come in handy; they're akin to software tricorders [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tricorder]. They provide a general snapshot
I'm beginning to wonder if the book Head First Design Patterns would be better titled Ass Backwards Design Patterns. Here are some quotes from pages 594 and 595 of this 629 page book: First of all, when you design, solve things in the simplest way possible. Your goal
I'm sure everyone knows that the Windows key brings up the Start Menu, but there are also a bunch of standard Windows key shortcuts built into Windows: + B Set focus to first tray icon + D Show Desktop + E Windows Explorer + F Find Files or Folders (aka Search) + M
A reader recently pointed out that the second edition of Don't Make Me Think [http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0321344758/codihorr-20] is about to be released. I know I've pimped this book ad nauseam, but I can't help myself-- it's
In this 1996 Alertbox, Jakob Nielsen champions writing for the web in an inverted pyramid style: Journalists have long adhered to the inverse approach: start the article by telling the reader the conclusion ("After long debate, the Assembly voted to increase state taxes by 10 percent"), follow by
If you've ever viewed UNIX documentation, you've probably encountered variables foo and bar at some point. Here's a Ruby example I found in the newsgroups: foo = 0 bar = 0 1.times do foo = 1 foo := 2 bar = foo+1 end puts foo, bar O&
Computer geeks have a long history of gaming the gaming industry. One of the most notable exploits is documented in the book Bringing Down The House: The Inside Story of Six MIT Students Who Took Vegas for Millions [http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0743225708/codihorr-20] (read an excerpt
Philipp Lenssen agrees that inspired laziness is a desirable trait for software developers: .. only lazy programmers will want to write the kind of tools that might replace them in the end. Only a lazy programmer will avoid writing monotonous, repetitive code. The tools and processes inspired by laziness speed up
You may be familiar with the classic Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing [http://www.google.com/search?q=mavis+beacon+teaches+typing]* series of software from Broderbund. Well, Sega's sublime Typing of the Dead [http://www.the-underdogs.org/game.php?id=4973] is like Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing ... if