I hate software licenses. When I read a software license, what I see is a bunch of officious, mind-numbing lawyerly doublespeak. Blah, blah, blah.. kill me now. If I had my way, everything would be released under the WTFPL. Over time, I've begrudgingly come to the conclusion that,
Despite my heavy computer use, I rarely experience hand or wrist pain. I consider myself fortunate. However, my mouse hand has been aching a bit lately. In light of my this, I decided it was time to change things up on the mouse front. I currently use the Logitech MX518
If you accept the premise that software development is a cooperative game, then you might wonder: what kind of game is it? Alistair Cockburn believes the closest analog to a software project is the cooperative game of rock climbing: * Technical. The novice can only approach simple climbs. With practice, the
Update 4/2/2007: In case it wasn't clear, the topic of this post is part an April fool's joke [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_Fools'_Day]. Yes, those are our cats, and I love them to death, but I hope cat blogging is
Alistair Cockburn maintains that software development is a cooperative game: If software development was really a science, you could apply the scientific method to it. If it was really engineering, then you could apply known engineering techniques. If software development was a matter of producing models, then you could spend
I occasionally get emails from people asking how to prepare for a career in software development. Some are students wondering what classes they should take; others have been bitten by the programming bug and are considering their next steps. I always answer with the same advice. There's no
One of the quickest ways to increase your productivity on the computer is to go commando: stop using the mouse. When you stop relying on the mouse for everything, you're forced to learn the keyboard shortcuts. Jeremy Miller calls this the first step to coding faster. I agree.
Alex Papadimoulis originally invited me to be a guest editor at The Daily WTF nearly six months ago. I was honored and accepted immediately. Since then, The Daily WTF has been rechristened Worse Than Failure. I'm a big fan of Alex and WTF; his blog is fantastic, and
A few recent articles have highlighted the disproportionate contribution Playstation 3 consoles are making to the Folding@Home effort. The OS statistics page for Folding@Home tells the tale: TFLOPSActive CPUsTotal CPUs Windows152160,1731,626,609 Mac/PPC78,77695,435 Mac/Intel92,8647,400 Linux4325,239216,067 GPU437332,228 PS365926,
Presented, in no particular order, for your reading pleasure: my top 6 list of programming top 10 lists. To keep this entry concise, I've only quoted a brief summary of each item. If any of these sound interesting to you, I encourage you to click through and read
I've seen a lot of painfully bad IT web comics in my day, but I'm happy to say that Bug Bash, by Hans Bjordahl, is not one of them. This particular strip is one of my favorites because it hits so close to home. Software developers
The One Laptop Per Child [http://www.laptop.org/] operating system features a new security model-- Bitfrost [http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_Bitfrost]. It's an interesting departure from the traditional UNIX and LINUX security model. > The 1971 version of UNIX supported the following security permissions on