Indoor enthusiast. Co-founder of Stack Overflow and Discourse. Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about. Find me here:
Windows XP isn't known for its powerful command line interface. Still, one of the first things I do on any fresh Windows install is set up the "Open Command Window Here" right click menu. And hoary old cmd.exe does have a few tricks up its
I have no problem with XML. It's a fine way to store hierarchical data in a relatively simple, mostly human-readable format. But I've always disliked its companion technology, XSLT [http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt]. While useful in theory-- "using a simple XSLT transform, XML
I'm currently working on a project where almost every function has its own region. At first I found this convention onerous, but as I used it, I saw why it was necessary. The default Visual Studio .NET outlining support leaves a lot to be desired. Take your typical
I use POPFile bayesian filtering to keep email spam at bay. With a little training, this works amazingly well-- I'm at 99.8% accuracy, and that's with a little over a month of "training" precipitated by a recent server migration. But bayesian filtering has
The anonymous mini-microsoft blog has a fascinating entry on the pitfalls of Microsoft's curve rating system: I totally accept that we need to have a rating system, especially to reward our kick-butt super-contributors who end up doing most the hard work around here. I have not, however, come
Scott Mitchell says the best new ASP.NET feature in VS.NET 2005 is the integrated webserver [http://scottonwriting.net/sowblog/posts/3447.aspx]. I agree. No more ditzing around with annoying IIS dependencies and install issues: aspnet_regiis, anyone? Tight coupling of VS.NET to IIS is also number
You may be familiar with the font Comic Sans MS [http://www.microsoft.com/typography/web/fonts/comicsns/default.htm]: Over the last 5 years, my wife and I noticed that this annoying font is inordinately popular "in the wild" -- we've seen it in the
In a previous entry [https://blog.codinghorror.com/pragmatic-programming/], I touched on the broken window theory. You might be familiar with the Pragmatic Progammers' take on this [http://www.artima.com/intv/fixit.html]: > Don't leave "broken windows" (bad designs, wrong decisions, or poor
Some users commenting [http://www.shacknews.com/ja.zz?comments=37492] on the poor pre-game user interface in EA's Battlefield 2 [http://www.gamespot.com/pc/action/battlefield2/index.html]: > Poster #1: They need to stop hiring angry little men and romantically spurned women to design user
At the nVidia 7800 launch event [http://blogs.pcworld.com/staffblog/archives/000743.html] today, one of the video rendering technology highlights was high dynamic range lighting [http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/directx9_c/directx/graphics/TutorialsAndSamples/Samples/HDRLighting.asp] . Almost all video cards in
Cory Doctorow is releasing his new novel under a creative commons license. As with my first and second novels, I've posted the entire text of this book online under a Creative Commons license that allows the unlimited, noncommercial redistribution of the text. You can send it around, paste
In who needs talent when you have intensity, I proposed that success has very little to do with talent. This blog entry by Brad Wardell offers even more proof: In 1992, OS/2 came out and I felt I could get a competitive advantage by pre-loading OS/2 onto the