programming
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 Strunk
conceptual design
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 millions
hci
I like to take one or two books with me when I travel, and one of the books I chose for this trip is HCI Remixed. Sometimes the books I choose are a bust. Fortunately that didn’t happen this time. HCI Remixed covers all the major milestones in the
regex
URLs are simple things. Or so you’d think. Let’s say you wanted to detect an URL in a block of text and convert it into a bona fide hyperlink. No problem, right? Visit my website at http://www.example.com, it’s awesome! To locate the URL in
netbook
I’ve been reading a lot of good things about the emerging “netbook” category of subnotebooks: The term netbook refers to a category of small to medium sized, light-weight, low-cost, energy-efficient, Internet-centric laptops, generally optimized for Web surfing and e-mailing. Like any self-respecting nerd, I already own a laptop, of
programming languages
Have you ever noticed that blogs are full of misinformation and lies? In particular, I’m referring to this blog. The one you’re reading right now. For example, yesterday’s post was so bad that it is conclusive proof that I’ve jumped the shark. Again. Apparently, according to
marketing
I’m a huge Steve Yegge fan, so It was a great honor to have Steve Yegge on a recent Stack Overflow podcast. One thing I couldn’t have predicted, however, was one particular theme of Steve’s experience at Google and Amazon that kept coming up time and time
programming languages
I’m not a huge fan of The Daily WTF for reasons I’ve previously outlined. There is, however, the occasional gem – such as this one posted by ezrec: Browsing through a web archive of some old computer club conversations, I ran across this sentence: “Apple made the clbuttic mistake
programming languages
A few months ago, Dare Obasanjo noticed a brief exchange my friend Jon Galloway and I had on Twitter. Unfortunately, Twitter makes it unusually difficult to follow conversations, but Dare outlines the gist of it in Developers, Using Libraries is not a Sign of Weakness: The problem Jeff was trying
security
In Cross-Site Request Forgeries and You I urged developers to take a close look at possible CSRF / XSRF vulnerabilities on their own websites. They’re the worst kind of vulnerability – very easy to exploit by attackers, yet not so intuitively easy to understand for software developers, at least until you’
seo
So I’ve been busy with this Stack Overflow thing over the last two weeks. By way of apology, I’ll share a little statistic you might find interesting: the percentage of traffic from search engines at stackoverflow.com. Sept 16th one day after public launch10%October 11th less than
security
As the web becomes more and more pervasive, so do web-based security vulnerabilities. I talked a little bit about the most common web vulnerability, cross-site scripting, in Protecting Your Cookies: HttpOnly. Although XSS is incredibly dangerous, it’s a fairly straightforward exploit to understand. Do not allow users to insert