I've been monitoring the progress of high-definition video playback on the PC for quite a while now: * Next-Gen DVD: Are Those Additional Pixels Worth Your Money? * High-Definition Video on the PC * Is Your PC Capable of Hi-Def? * Will Your Next Computer Monitor Be a HDTV? It's
A recent Stack Overflow post described one programmer's logging style. Here's what he logs: INFO Level * The start and end of the method * The start and end of any major loops * The start of any major case/switch statements DEBUG Level * Any parameters passed into the
Software: do you write it like a book, grow it like a plant, accrete it like a pearl, or construct it like a building? As Steve McConnell notes in Code Complete 2, there's no shortage of software development metaphors: A confusing abundance of metaphors has grown up around
While I've always practiced reasonable email hygiene, for the last 6 months I've been in near-constant email bankruptcy mode. This concerns me. Yes, it's partly my fault for being a world champion procrastinator, but I'm not sure it's entirely my
I've been a fan of Dan Appleman for about as long as I've been a professional programmer. He is one of my heroes. Unfortunately, Dan only blogs rarely, so I was heartened to see a spate of recent blog updates from him. One of the entries
For as long as I've been a software developer and used bug tracking systems, we have struggled with the same fundamental problem in every single project we've worked on: how do you tell bugs from feature requests? Sure, there are some obvious crashes that are clearly
Remember last week when I said coding was just writing? I was wrong. As one commenter noted, it's even simpler than that. [This] reminds me of a true "Dilbert moment" a few years ago, when my (obviously non-technical) boss commented that he never understood why it
Have you ever heard a software engineer refer to a problem as "NP-complete"? That's fancy computer science jargon shorthand for "incredibly hard": The most notable characteristic of NP-complete problems is that no fast solution to them is known; that is, the time required to
If you've ever searched for anything, you've probably run into stop words [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_words]. Stop words are words so common they are typically ignored for search purposes. That is, if you type in a stop word as one of your search
Hello, my name is Jeff Atwood, and I'm an addict. I'm addicted... to video cards. In fact, I've been addicted since 1996. Well, maybe a few years earlier than that if you count some of the classic 2D accelerators. But the true fascination didn&
In The Programming Aphorisms of Strunk and White, James Devlin does a typically excellent job of examining something I've been noticing myself over the last five years: The unexpected relationship between writing code and writing. There is perhaps no greater single reference on the topic of writing than
My recent post on netbooks reminded me of Alan Kay's original 1972 Dynabook concept (pdf). We now have some reasons for wanting the DynaBook to exist. Can it be fabricated from currently invented technology in quantities large enough to bring a selling (or renting) price within reach of