Indoor enthusiast. Co-founder of Stack Overflow, Discourse, and staygold.us. Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about. Let's be kind to each other. Find me
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
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The always entertaining Dan linked to something I hadn’t seen before – an archived page of the Google server hardware circa 1999: Here it is in all its, uh, glory.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