Long-time readers of this blog know that I have an inordinate fondness for GUIDs [https://blog.codinghorror.com/mastering-guids-with-occams-razor/]. Each globally unique ID [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globally_Unique_Identifier] is like a beautiful snowflake: every one a unique item waiting to be born. Perhaps that's why
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
Joseph Cooney had a brilliant idea for a new application certification program [http://jcooney.net/archive/2007/02/01/42999.aspx]. 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 [http://weblogs.
Torrent [http://www.utorrent.com/], 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
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
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
Internationalization of software is incredibly challenging. Consider this Wikipedia sandbox page in Arabic [http://ar.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandbox], which is a right-to-left (RTL) language: Compare that layout with the Wikipedia page on internationalization and localization in English [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationalization_and_localization]. Now consider how you&
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
When it comes to image formats on the internet, it's generally a three-way tie between JPEG [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG], GIF [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIF], and PNG [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PNG]. Deciding which image format to use is relatively straightforward; you choose
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
Over the last three years, this site has become far more popular than I ever could have imagined. Not that I'm complaining, mind you. Finding an audience and opening a dialog with that audience is the whole point of writing a blog in the first place. But on
I'm not a fan of object orientation for the sake of object orientation. Often the proper OO way of doing things ends up being a productivity tax. Sure, objects are the backbone of any modern programming language, but sometimes I can't help feeling that slavish adherence