Charles Petzold was kind enough to send me a copy of his new book, The Annotated Turing: A Guided Tour Through Alan Turing's Historic Paper on Computability and the Turing Machine [http://www.amazon.com/dp/0470229055/?tag=codihorr-20]. [http://www.amazon.com/dp/0470229055/?tag=codihorr-20] One
Bruce Schneier is something of a legend in the computer security community. He's the author of the classic, oft-cited 1994 book Applied Cryptography, as well as several well-known cryptography algorithms. The cheeky Norris-esque design above is a reference to the actor names commonly used in examples of shared
I love regular expressions. No, I'm not sure you understand: I really love regular expressions. You may find it a little odd that a hack who grew up using a language with the ain't keyword would fall so head over heels in love with something as
I may not be smart enough to join Mensa [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mensa_International], but I am smart enough not to build websites like the American Mensa website. [https://www.us.mensa.org/AM/Template.cfm?Section=Calendar&Template=Security/NoPassword.cfm] Do you see the mistake?
Occasionally I'll write about things that I find sort of mildly, vaguely thought provoking, and somehow that writing turns out to be ragingly controversial once posted here. Case in point, XML: The Angle Bracket Tax. I'm still encountering people online who almost literally hate my guts
As I was paging through Steve Yegge's voluminous body of work recently, I was struck by a 2005 entry on practicing programming: Contrary to what you might believe, merely doing your job every day doesn't qualify as real practice. Going to meetings isn't practicing
I sometimes (often, actually) regress a few years mentally and forget to take advantage of new features afforded by the tools I'm using. In this case, we're using the latest and greatest version of C#, which offers implicitly typed local variables. While working on Stack Overflow,
Today's rumination is not for the weak of heart. It's from the venerable C2 Wiki page Code For The Maintainer: Always code as if the person who ends up maintaining your code is a violent psychopath who knows where you live. Perhaps a little over the
I've always been fascinated by physics-based gameplay. Even going back to the primeval days of classic arcade gaming, I found vector-based games, with their vastly simplified 2D approximations of physics and motion, more compelling than their raster brethren. I'm thinking of games like Asteroids, Battlezone, and
Ben Collins-Sussman on programmer insecurity [http://blog.red-bean.com/sussman/?p=96]: > What do you do when somebody shows up to an open source project with a gigantic new feature that took months to write? Who has the time to review thousands of lines of code? What if there
As programmers, we deal with a lot of unusual keyboard characters that typical users rarely need to type, much less think about: $ # % {} * [] ~ & <> Even the characters that are fairly regularly used in everyday writing -- such as the humble dash, parens, period, and question mark -- have radically
In Finally, a Definition of Programming I Can Actually Understand I marvelled at particularly strange and wonderful comment left on this blog. Some commenters wondered if that comment was generated through Markov chains. I considered that, but I had a hard time imagining a text corpus input that could possibly