programming languages
The Choose Your Own Adventure book series was one of my favorites as a young reader. The Choose Your Own adventure books are still around; modern versions can be found at your local bookstore. I bought one today at a local Barnes & Noble to refresh my memory, and although
Like many programmers, my first exposure to ray tracing was on my venerable Commodore Amiga. It’s an iconic system demo every Amiga user has seen at some point: behold the robot juggling silver spheres! Thus begins the article in the May/June 1987 AmigaWorld in which Eric Graham explains
privacy
From the ACM Code of Ethics: As an ACM member I will 1. Contribute to society and human well-being. 2. Avoid harm to others. 3. Be honest and trustworthy. 4. Be fair and take action not to discriminate. 5. Honor property rights including copyrights and patent. 6. Give proper
user experience
I miss Kathy Sierra. Kathy was the primary author of the Creating Passionate Users blog, which she started in December 2004. Her writing was of sufficient quality to propel her blog into the Technorati top 100 within a year and a half. That’s almost unheard of, particularly for a
microsoft
Well, you won’t technically see me at MIX08 this year. But you will see some very cool top-secret stuff Vertigo created in the keynote. MIX is by far my favorite Microsoft conference after attending the ’06 and ’07 iterations. And not just because this year they have a
security
In November 2007 I called these three CAPTCHA implementations “unbreakable”: Google (unbreakable)Hotmail (unbreakable)Yahoo (unbreakable) 2008 is shaping up to be a very bad year indeed for CAPTCHAs: * Jan 17: InformationWeek reports Yahoo CAPTCHA broken * Feb 6: Websense reports Hotmail CAPTCHA broken * Feb 22: Websense reports Google CAPTCHA broken
performance
If you’ve used Windows Vista, you’ve probably noticed that Vista’s file copy performance is noticeably worse than Windows XP. I know it’s one of the first things I noticed. Here’s the irony – Vista’s file copy is based on an improved algorithm and actually performs
software development
Ted Dennison left this astute comment in response to Do Not Listen to Your Users: Generally when I go talk to users, it is to educate myself enough to become a user like them. Then I can see what needs doing, what needs streamlining, reorganizing, rearranging, etc. This brought to
operating systems
David Heinemeier Hansson has a problem with Windows as a programming platform. While I can certainly understand the reasons why some people go with Linux, I have run all but dry of understanding for programmers that willfully pick Windows as their platform of choice. I know a few that are
software development concepts
Paul Buchheit on listening to users: I wrote the first version of Gmail in one day. It was not very impressive. All I did was stuff my own email into the Google Groups (Usenet) indexing engine. I sent it out to a few people for feedback, and they said that
communication
I’m a big fan of Twitter. The service itself is nothing revolutionary; it’s essentially public instant messaging. But don’t underestimate the power of taking a previously siloed, private one-to-one communication medium and making it public. Why talk to one person when you could talk to
programming languages
I was thrilled to see the book Beautiful Code: Leading Programmers Explain How They Think show up in my Amazon recommendations. It seems like exactly the type of book I would enjoy. So of course I bought a copy. Unfortunately, Beautiful Code wasn’t nearly as enjoyable of a read