design patterns
The introduction to Head First Design Patterns exhorts us not to reinvent the wheel: You’re not alone. At any given moment, somewhere in the world someone struggles with the same software design problems you have. You know you don’t want to reinvent the wheel (or worse, a flat
html
In The Sad Tragedy of Micro-Optimization Theater we discussed the performance considerations of building a fragment of HTML. string s = @"<div class=""action-time"">{0}{1}</div> <div class=""gravatar32"">{2}</div>
community collaboration
When you visit Wikipedia’s entry on asphalt, you get some reasonably reliable information about asphalt. What you don’t get, however, is any indication of who the author is. That’s because the author is irrelevant. Wikipedia is a community effort, the result of tiny slices of effort contributed
keyboard
My beloved Microsoft Natural Keyboard 4000 has succumbed to the relentless pounding of my fingers. A moment of silence, please. OK, it still works, technically, but certain keys have become... unreliable. In particular, the semicolon key is now infuriatingly difficult to use. I don’t know if this is God’
strings
I’ll just come right out and say it: I love strings. As far as I’m concerned, there isn’t a problem that I can’t solve with a string and perhaps a regular expression or two. But maybe that’s just my lack of math skills talking. In
microsoft
In software circles, dogfooding refers to the practice of using your own products. It was apparently popularized by Microsoft: The idea originated in television commercials for Alpo brand dog food; actor Lorne Greene would tout the benefits of the dog food, and then would say it’s so good that
programming languages
What’s the difference between a programming language and a scripting language? Is there even a difference at all? Larry Wall’s epic Programming is Hard, Let’s Go Scripting attempts to survey the scripting landscape and identify commonalities. When you go out to so-called primitive tribes and analyze
open source software
Have you ever used those self-service checkout machines at a grocery store or supermarket? What fascinates me about self-service checkout devices is that the store is making you do work they would normally pay their employees to do. Think about this for a minute. You’re playing the
programming languages
In my previous post, a commenter asked this question: So many of the best minds I have met in computing have a love for music. Is it something to do with being able to see beauty in complex numerical systems? I adore music. I have a vast music collection and
programming languages
Alan Kay is one of my computing heroes. All this stuff we do every day as programmers? Kay had a hand in inventing a huge swath of it: Computer scientist Kay was the leader of the group that invented object-oriented programming, the graphical user interface, 3D computer graphics, and
web development
From the dawn of the web – at least since Netscape Navigator 4.x – it has been possible to resize the text on a web page. This is typically done through the View menu. This was fine in the early, primitive days of the web, when page layouts were simple and
c programming
In the C programming language, you’re regularly forced to deal with the painful, dangerous concepts of pointers and explicit memory allocation. b1 = (double *)malloc(m*sizeof(double)); In modern garbage collected programming languages, life is much simpler; you simply new up whatever object or variable you need. Double[] b1