career development
I distinctly remember the tribulations my father went through in his career. He worked hard to achieve an MBA from a prestigious business school. The degree opened up many opportunities for him, but I don't think he ever found exactly what he was looking for. We moved throughout
torrent client
uTorrent is my favorite torrent client. It's such a joy to use – a tiny, native application that offers a best-of-breed implementation of the BitTorrent protocol. Everybody loves BitTorrent, and I love it too. I'm not the only one. By some estimates, torrent data may account for
hardware
Let me be completely honest with you. I have a full-blown mouse fetish. I've owned every single major mouse model from Microsoft and Logitech since the bad old days of the original Microsoft "Dove bar" mouse, and the Logitech MouseMan. I remember quite clearly bringing home
sql
I thought Ligaya Turmelle’s post on SQL joins was a great primer for novice developers. Since SQL joins appear to be set-based, the use of Venn diagrams to explain them seems, at first blush, to be a natural fit. However, like the commenters to her post, I found that
usability
I was struck, the other day, by how much I had to think when attempting to heat up my sandwich in the microwave. There are so many controls: a clock, a set of food-specific buttons, defrost and timer controls, and of course a full numeric keypad. Quick! What do you
fitness
Software developers aren't typically known for their superior levels of physical fitness. I'm not overweight, exactly, but I don't think I'll be pursuing that dream career in male modelling anytime soon. I charitably call myself an indoor enthusiast. At the risk of
video streaming
I'm a big YouTube fan. We can thank YouTube for cutting the gordian knot of video codecs. Instead of futzing around with codecs and media players, YouTube's universal, Flash-based web video "just works". After all this time, it turns out the killer app for
.net
A few friends and I just wrote a book together: The ASP.NET 2.0 Anthology: 101 Essential Tips, Tricks & Hacks. I met K. Scott Allen, Jon Galloway, and Phil Haack through their excellent blogs. That online friendship carried over into real life. We always thought it'd
fonts
I've experimented with programming fonts and IDE color schemes plenty in the past. But now that I've given in to the inevitability of ClearType on large LCDs, I've basically settled on Consolas. It's hard to beat Consolas. It's darn close
software development
Source control is the very bedrock of software development. Without some sort of version control system in place, you can't reasonably call yourself a software engineer. If you're using a source control system of any kind, you're versioning files almost by definition. The concept
operating system limits
Raymond Chen notes that if you have to ask where the operating system limits are, you're probably doing something wrong: If you're nesting windows more than 50 levels deep or nesting menus more than 25 levels deep or creating a dialog box with more than 65535
monitor calibration
If you've invested in a quality monitor for your computer, you owe it to yourself-- and your eyes-- to spend 15 minutes setting it up properly for your viewing environment. I'm not talking about a high-end color calibration [http://www.dansdata.com/spyder.htm], although you