I've kept a PC in my living room for the past three years as my primary home theater interface, and I heartily recommend it. It's shocking how cheap and easy it is to build a home theater PC these days. I've been pondering an
As a person who has spent a significant part of his professional life getting paid to write software, I believe it's important for me to regularly pay for software, too. Our programmer salaries don't come from magical money trees. They come from customers laying down cold,
Lately I've been delving into the WordPress [http://wordpress.org/] ecosystem, as it seems to be the most popular blogging platform around at the moment. I've set up two blogs with it so far. In the process, I've gotten quite comfortable with the setup,
Edsger Dijkstra had this to say about Beginner's All Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code: It is practically impossible to teach good programming style to students that have had prior exposure to BASIC; as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration. I'm sure he was
Dual core CPUs are effectively standard today, and for good reason -- there are substantial, demonstrable performance improvements to be gained from having a second CPU on standby to fulfill requests that the first CPU is too busy to handle. If nothing else, dual-core CPUs protect you from badly written
Last summer I posted a four part series on building your own PC: * Building a PC, Part I: Minimal boot * Building a PC, Part II: Burn in * Building a PC, Part III: Overclocking * Building a PC, Part IV: Now It's Your Turn My personal system is basically identical
A little over a month ago, I announced that I was quitting my job. But there was also something else I didn't fully announce. But I refuse to become a full-time blogger. I think that's a cop-out. If I look at the people I respect most
How many times have you returned to your web browser to be greeted by this unpleasant little notification: > Your session has timed out. Please sign in again. If you're anything like me, the answer is lots. What's worse is that you're usually kicked
Back in 2006, I examined the power usage of my Dell Inspiron 300M laptop. It was the first ultraportable I ever owned, and I fell in love with it. I stuck it out as long as possible on that wonderful little laptop until the true heir to the ultraportable throne
Way back in June of last year, I promised to donate a portion of my advertising revenue back to the community: I will be donating a significant percentage of my ad revenue back to the programming community. The programming community is the reason I started this blog in the first
Whenever the regular expression topic comes up, I unashamedly recommend the best tool on the market for parsing and building regular expressions -- RegexBuddy. But there's one tiny problem. RegexBuddy costs money. I've always encountered vague resistance when recommending commercial tools that I considered best of
I think I spent most of my childhood -- and a large part of my life as a young adult -- desperately wishing I was in a video game arcade. When I finally obtained my driver's license, my first thought wasn't about the girls I would