programming languages
I arrived at work today to find this package. It's from one "C. Petzold", whoever the heck that is. Inside was a copy of the book 3D Programming for Windows: Three-Dimensional Graphics Programming for the Windows Presentation Foundation. It's even inscribed: This is, of
software development concepts
It takes discipline for development teams to benefit from modern software engineering conventions. If your team doesn't have the right kind of engineering discipline, the tools and processes you use are almost irrelevant. I advocated as much in Discipline Makes Strong Developers. But some commenters were understandably apprehensive
blogging
I started out in early 2004 as a blog skeptic. But over the last four years, I've become a born-again believer. In that time, I've written almost a thousand blog entries, and I've read thousands upon thousands of blog entries. As a result, I&
performance
I first saw Yahoo's 13 Simple Rules for Speeding Up Your Web Site referenced in a post on Rich Skrenta's blog in May. It looks like there were originally 14 rules; one must have fallen off the list somewhere along the way. 1. Make Fewer HTTP
software development
Scott Koon recently wrote about the importance of discipline as a developer trait: Every month a new programming language or methodology appears, followed by devotees singing its praises from every corner of the Internet. All promising increases in productivity and quality. But there is one quality that all successful developers
typography
If you think of fonts as a bit of design esoterica, consider this New York Times article on the new Clearview typeface that will appear on all new highway road signs here in the United States: The problem sounded modest enough: Add more information to the state's road
security
Scott Wasson at The Tech Report notes that two of his family members fell victim to the eCard email exploit that has been making the rounds lately: I just dropped off a package containing my dad's laptop at the FedEx depot this afternoon. I spent parts of several
laptop
Although I wasn't unhappy with my ASUS W3J laptop, which I've owned for a little over a year now, it was never quite the ultraportable to match my beloved, dearly departed three pound Dell Inspiron 300M. That's why I recently purchased a Dell XPS
user experience
As displays increase in size and prices drop, more and more users will end up with relatively large displays by default. Nobody buys 15 or 17 inch displays any more; soon, it won't make financial sense to buy a display smaller than 20 inches. Eventually, if this trend
data visualization
In the spirit of Jennifer Tidwell's excellent Designing Interfaces book, there are a few great catalogs of data visualization emerging online. Start with the oft-cited Periodic Table of Visualization Methods. There's another excellent collection at Data Visualization: Modern Approaches. If you're looking for visualization
programming languages
A standard part of my development kit is Microsoft's Visual Studio [http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/]. Here's what I have to install to get a current, complete version of Visual Studio 2005 on a new PC: 1. Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite Edition 2. Visual Studio
software development concepts
Here's an interesting thought question from Mike Stall: what's worse than crashing? Mike provides the following list of crash scenarios, in order from best to worst: 1. Application works as expected and never crashes. 2. Application crashes due to rare bugs that nobody notices or cares