Indoor enthusiast. Co-founder of Stack Overflow and Discourse. Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about. Find me:
programming languages
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
design by committee
In a recent interview, 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 a coherent design philosophy, and I don’t see
.net
Owen Winkler put together an overview of all self-installable blogging software, 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 about it because I wanted to give Windows a
html
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 you
security
Maybe it’s just my OCD kicking in again, but it’s incredibly annoying how these phantom, zero-byte IO.SYS and MSDOS.SYS files keep showing up in the root of my c: drive on every computer I own. It’s a gentle reminder of the Bad Old Days. The
programming languages
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 F11 Debug: step
apis
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 available for
compression
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
apple
I guess John Gruber isn’t as savvy as he thought he was: “Apple Announces Switch to Intel Chips” After seeing NT slowly shed its MIPS, Alpha, and PPC versions, you have to wonder: will our children be using architectures that emulate some form of x86? Even with a flash
hardware
Remember when anything you could possibly imagine could be controlled with a single stick and a single button? Trace the evolution of human interaction in video gaming from 1980 to the present through this remarkable visual game controller family tree. This tree isn’t quite as complete as I would
hardware interfaces
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, technology hasn’
programming languages
Paul Graham’s essay, Revenge of the Nerds, is a nearly pornographic love letter to Lisp. If you can manage to read all the way to the end, there’s an interesting footnote buried at the bottom: Peter Norvig found that 16 of the 23 patterns in Design Patterns were