software development
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 truly believe,
security
The One Laptop Per Child operating system features a new security model – 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 user files: * non-owner can change file (write) * non-owner can read file * owner can
uuids
Long-time readers of this blog know that I have an inordinate fondness for GUIDs. Each globally unique ID is like a beautiful snowflake: every one a unique item waiting to be born. Perhaps that’s why I read with great interest recent accounts of people switching their database tables from
user experience
We understand what 404 means: Page Not Found. But the average internet user has no idea what 404 means or what to do about it. To them, it’s yet another unintelligible error message from the computer. Most 404 pages are unvarnished geek-speak. Consider the default 404 page under IIS:
software development
Joseph Cooney had a brilliant idea for a new application certification program. But Vista’s bland white-on-gray badge, in my opinion, doesn’t properly communicate the... authoritative... nature of said program. With the help of Jon Galloway, we zazzed things up a bit: You might think attaining such a prestigious,
web development
Torrent, my favorite BitTorrent client, now offers a web UI. See if you can spot the differences between the Web UI and the Windows UI: After spending about a year interacting with Torrent exclusively through Remote Desktop, I was pleasantly surprised to discover how good the web UI is. It
hardware
I recently had the opportunity to rebuild my work PC. It strongly resembles the “Little Bang” D.I.Y. system I outlined in my previous post on the philosophy of building your own computer. See, I do take my own advice. Here’s a quick breakdown of the components and
hardware
If you’re ever in Silicon Valley, I highly recommend checking out the Computer History Museum. Where else can you see a live demonstration of the only known working PDP-1 in existence, and actually get to play the original Spacewar on it? I did. It was incredible. I got chills.
internationalization
Internationalization of software is incredibly challenging. Consider this Wikipedia sandbox page in Arabic, which is a right-to-left (RTL) language: Compare that layout with the Wikipedia page on internationalization and localization in English. Now consider how you’d implement switching between English and Arabic in MediaWiki, the software that powers Wikipedia:
hardware
Due to fallout from a recent computer catastrophe at work, I had the opportunity to salvage 2 GB of memory. I installed the memory in my work box, which brings it up to 4 gigabytes of RAM – 4,096 megabytes in total. But that’s not what I saw in
image formats
When it comes to image formats on the internet, it’s generally a three-way tie between JPEG, GIF, and PNG. Deciding which image format to use is relatively straightforward; you choose lossy JPEG when you’re saving continuous-tone photographic images, and you choose between lossless GIF or lossless PNG when
aws
In Reducing Your Website’s Bandwidth Usage, I concluded that my best outsourced image hosting option was Amazon’s S3 or Simple Storage Service. S3 is a popular choice for startups. For example, SmugMug uses S3 as their primary data storage source. There have been a few minor S3-related bumps