software development concepts
Most software projects fail. But that doesn’t mean yours has to. The first question you should ask is a deceptively simple one: how big is it? Steve McConnell explains in Software Estimation: Demystifying the Black Art: [For a software project], size is easily the most significant determinant of effort,
programming languages
Paul Heberli and Bruce Karsh proposed something they call futurist programming in 1994: We believe there is a great opportunity for Futurist principles to be applied to the science of computer programming. We react against the heavy religious atmosphere that surrounds every aspect of computer programming. We believe it is
user experience
Ned Batchelder shares a complaint about the Mac application installation process: Here’s what I did to install the application Foo [on the Mac]: 1. Downloaded FooDownload.dmg.zip to the desktop. 2. StuffIt Expander launched automatically, and gave me a FooDownload.dmg Folder on the desktop. 3. At this
programming languages
Tim Berners-Lee on the Principle of Least Power: Computer Science spent the last forty years making languages which were as powerful as possible. Nowadays we have to appreciate the reasons for picking not the most powerful solution but the least powerful. The less powerful the language, the more you
user experience
One of my great frustrations with the Mac is the way the maximize button on each window fails to maximize the window. In a comment, Alex Chamberlain explained why this isn’t broken, it’s by design: This is a textbook example of how Microsoft’s programmers got the original
blogging
Jakob Nielsen’s “Write Articles, Not Blog Postings” is highly critical of so-called commodity bloggers. As you might imagine, it wasn’t received well by the blog community. Robert Scoble’s stereotypical reaction was perhaps the worst of the bunch. In a legendary display of narcissism, Robert assumes the
technology trends
I may have an unusual affinity for hardware, but Steve Mann is in a class of his own. He lives the hardware. Steve Mann may be the world’s original cyborg. Steve Mann, an engineering professor at the University of Toronto, has lived as a cyborg for more than 20
overclocking
Now that we have Scott Hanselman’s computer completely built up and stable – or at least that’s what our torture tests told us yesterday – it’s time to see how far we can overclock this system. Overclocking a computer sounds complicated, but it really isn’t. We’ll use
hardware
Yesterday, we completed a basic build of Scott Hanselman’s computer. We built the system up enough to boot to the BIOS screen successfully. Today, we’ll complete the build by installing an operating system and burning it in. The first thing we’ll need is hard drives. The Antec
hardware
Over the next few days, I’ll be building Scott Hanselman’s computer. My goal today is more modest: build a minimal system that boots. I’d like to dispel the myth that building computers is risky, or in any way difficult or complicated. If you can put together a
.net
As I mentioned two weeks ago, my plan is to contribute $10,000 to the .NET open source ecosystem. $5,000 from me, and a matching donation of $5,000 from Microsoft. There’s only two ground rules so far: 1. The project must be written in .NET managed code.
image processing
In a previous post, I examined the difference between bilinear and bicubic image resizing techniques. Those are the two options available in most graphics programs for resizing an image. After some experimentation, I came up with these rules of thumb: * When making an image smaller, use bicubic, which has a