asp.net
Inspiration for Stack Overflow occasionally comes from the unlikeliest places. Have you ever heard of the dating website, Plenty of Fish? Markus Frind built the Plenty of Fish Web site in 2003 as nothing more than an exercise to help teach himself a new programming language, ASP.NET. The site
hacker
Although I’ve never been more than a bush league hacker (at best), I was always fascinated with the tales from the infamous hacker zine 2600. I’d occasionally discover scanned issues in BBS ASCII archives, like this one, and spend hours puzzling over the techniques and information it contained.
blu-ray
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 been almost
logging
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 method * Any
software development
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 software
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 fault. There are forces at
remote work
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 asks a
bug tracking
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 bugs. But
software development concepts
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 took months to
computer science
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 solve the problem using any
stop words
If you’ve ever searched for anything, you’ve probably run into 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 terms, the search engine will ignore that word (if
graphics cards
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’t start until