Jeff Atwood

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

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Jeff Atwood

The Pontiac Aztek and the Perils of Design by Committee

In a recent interview [http://www.jnd.org/RecentPressCoverage.html], Don Norman warns of the perils of design by committee: > You don't do good software design by committee. You do it best by having a dictator. From the user's point of view, you must have

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Where Are The .NET Blogging Solutions?

Owen Winkler put together an overview of all self-installable blogging software [http://www.asymptomatic.net/blogbreakdown.htm], circa mid-2004. After surveying his options, he notes one clear trend: > Even more disheartening… .Text is the only blogware that anyone suggested for the Windows platform. I asked and asked

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Formatting HTML code snippets with Ten Ton Wrecking Balls

If you've ever tried to cut and paste code from the VS.NET IDE, you may have noticed that the code generally comes across looking like crap. The root of this problem is that VS.NET copies code into your clipboard in the accursed Rich Text Format. If

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Phantom DOS files in my root

Maybe it's just my OCD kicking in again [http://www.ocfoundation.org/], but it's incredibly annoying how these phantom, zero-byte IO.SYS [http://searchwin2000.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid1_gci214057,00.html] and MSDOS.SYS [http://www.annoyances.org/exec/show/article07-021] files keep showing up

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Visual Studio .NET 2003 and 2005 Keyboard Shortcuts

I've been trying to improve my use of keyboard shortcuts in Visual Studio .NET. Here are the ones I use most often, what I consider my "core" keyboard shortcuts: Go to declaration F12 Debug: step over F10 Debug: run to cursor ctrl + F10 Debug: step into

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Flickr Hacks

There's so much buzz around Flickr right now it's practically deafening. Or maybe I should say blinding, because Flickr is a collaborative photo sharing service. I was perplexed why Yet Another Photo Sharing Website was so hot until I started browsing the myriad hacks and tools

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Compression and Cliffs

I set up a number of Windows XP SP2 Virtual PC base images today. A WinXP SP2 clean install, after visiting Windows Update, is 1.70 gigabytes. Building up a few baseline images like this can chew up a substantial amount of disk space and network bandwidth. So, taking a

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x86 Uber Alles

I guess John Gruber isn't as savvy [http://daringfireball.net/2005/06/intel_apple_odds_and_ends] as he thought he was [http://daringfireball.net/2005/05/intelmania]: Apple Announces Switch to Intel Chips [http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/apple_chips;_ylt=Amq8XRa8MRu3eIbCRFbpHlADW7oF;_ylu=X3oDMTBiMW04NW9mBHNlYwMlJVRPUCUl] After seeing

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The Game Controller Family Tree

Remember when anything you could possibly imagine could be controlled with a single stick and a single button [http://www.thinkgeek.com/cubegoodies/toys/5d39/]? Trace the evolution of human interaction in video gaming from 1980 to the present through this remarkable visual game controller family tree [http://www.axess.

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Alternative Keyboarding

The standard computer keyboard is the quintessential human input device. Although it's amazingly adaptable, a recent Tom's Hardware review of the Ergodex DX1 underscores the limitations of the keyboard as an input device-- and also highlights some of the crazier keyboard alternatives out there: So far,

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Are Design Patterns How Languages Evolve?

Paul Graham's essay Revenge of the Nerds is a nearly pornographic love letter to Lisp [http://www.paulgraham.com/icad.html]. If you can manage to read all the way to the end, there's an interesting footnote buried at the bottom: > Peter Norvig [http://norvig.

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Recursive Page.FindControl

I'm currently writing my first ASP.NET 2.0 website. VS.NET 2005 is worlds better than VS.NET 2003, but I was mildly surprised to find that Microsoft still hasn't added a recursive overload for Page.FindControl. So, courtesy of Oddur Magnusson [http://weblogs.asp.

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