Indoor enthusiast. Co-founder of Stack Overflow and Discourse. Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about. Find me:
asp.net
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, here it is: private Control
programming languages
I was recently reminded of this Dani Berry quote: Danielle Bunten Berry (February 19, 1949 – July 3, 1998) was an American game designer and programmer from St. Louis, Missouri. Born Dan Bunten, Berry underwent what she always referred to as her “pronoun change” in the early 90s. Some of her
hardware
The always entertaining Dan linked to something I hadn’t seen before – an archived page of the Google server hardware circa 1999: Here it is in all its, uh, glory. I don’t know what’s more impressive, the two dual Pentium II 300 servers, or the 90gb SCSI drive
.net
Here’s some excellent, concise advice on troubleshooting performance in managed code. It all starts with peanut butter, naturally: My last entry was some generic advice about how to do a good performance investigation. I think actually it’s too generic to be really useful – in fact I think it
psychology
A research paper from two psychologists at Cornell offers an interesting insight: For example, consider the ability to write grammatical English. The skills that enable one to construct a grammatical sentence are the same skills necessary to recognize a grammatical sentence, and thus are the same skills necessary to determine
blogging
Like Steve Broback, I spent many of my formative years in computing reading John Dvorak’s magazine column. I started enthusiastically reading John Dvorak’s columns back in 1984, at my first job selling IBM PCs and Mac 128k computers from a storefront in Seattle. I have always enjoyed his
virtualization
My friend Josh Carlisle was kind enough to host this website during my move to California. Josh set me up with a Microsoft Virtual Server slice of Windows 2003 Standard on his Xeon 2.8 server. I’m currently running a WIMP (Windows, IIS, MySql, Perl) configuration which I was
learning
I found this Will Wright quote, from a roundtable at last week’s E3, rather interesting: Will Wright said he’s learned the most from games that seemed appealing on paper, but were failures in the marketplace. “I actually ask people when hiring how many failures they’ve worked on,
performance
Managed code may be fat and slow, but it fares surprisingly well in Rico’s C# port of Raymond Chen’s C++ Chinese/English dictionary reader: Sure, the C++ version eventually outperforms the managed code by a factor of 2x, but what’s interesting to me – and what this graph
software development
Based on the number of times I’ve seen the comparison come up in my career, you might think that bridge building and software development were related in some way: [...] my Dad, who is a “real” engineer, is out visiting for a few days. We got talking tonight about the
blogging
I’ve avoided the incestuous nature of blogging about blogging until now, but the topic does come up occasionally. Not everyone is a believer in the utility of blogs; I was a skeptic only two years ago, and Michael Brundage went out of his way late last year to point
google search
Did you ever get the feeling that the browser address bar is the new command line? I keep forgetting how much functionality Google provides in their search text box; I was reminded when Damien Katz posted a link to a nice little Google search cheat sheet. Google also automatically recognizes