programming languages
MIT’s Technology Review recently interviewed Bjarne Stroustrup in a two-part article (part one, part two). You may know Bjarne as the inventor of the C++ programming language. Indeed, he even maintains a comprehensive C++ FAQ that answers every imaginable C++ question. Here are a few select quotes from the
search engine optimization
Rich Skrenta, who may have written the first microcomputer virus, calls Google the start page for the Internet: The net isn’t a directed graph. It’s not a tree. It’s a single point labeled G connected to 10 billion destination pages. If the Internet were a monolithic product,
user experience
In Typing Trumps Pointing, I extolled the virtues of the full-text search included in Vista’s new Start Menu. As many commenters pointed out, the feature itself is nothing new: I love keyboard searching, but basically you say you are installing Vista, an entire operating system, just so you don’
search
Windows Vista gets criticized a lot in the press, mostly for not being OS X. Some of the criticisms are valid. It is terribly late. And the feature list has grown less and less impressive as the development process has worn on over the years. But Vista has one killer
mock
Ned recently pointed out Martin Fowler’s article Mocks Aren’t Stubs. The vocabulary for talking about [pretend objects] soon gets messy – all sorts of words are used: stub, mock, fake, dummy. For this article I’m going to follow the vocabulary of Gerard Meszaros’s upcoming book. It’s
networking
Everyone loves ping. It’s simple. It’s utilitarian. And it does exactly what the sonar inspired name implies. Ping tells you if a remote computer is responding to network requests. The ping utility was written by Mike Muuss, a senior scientist at the U.S. Army Research Laboratory. Mike
user experience
I’ve largely been ignoring Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child initiative. I appreciate the nobility of the gesture, but how interesting can sub-$100 hardware running Linux really be? Well, that was before I read about the novel user interface they’re building into those small green and
software development concepts
I happened upon Russ Walter’s Secret Guide to Computers around 1993. By then it was already up to the 18th edition. The first version of The Secret Guide was published in 1972 as a self-typed 17 page pamphlet. The latest edition is a hulking 607-page monster, a rambling, zine-like
timekeeping
I have something of a clock fetish. My latest acquisition is a nixie tube clock from my wife, as a Christmas gift. My computers aren’t just giant calculators, they’re also clocks. Unfortunately, my nixie clock is a much more reliable timekeeper than any of my PCs are. There’
content moderation
This Gawker post on blog clichés hits very close to home. It’s an “annotated list of words, phrases, and terms that have long overstayed their welcome in the media-blogosphere.” I’d have to agree. I’m guilty of a few of these, too. * Best. [ultimate thing or experience.] Ever/
software development concepts
As I recently discovered, playback of high definition video is very demanding. You’ll need a beefy PC to achieve the holy grail of maximum 1080p (1920x1080) resolution playback. Here are the minimum system requirements according to Cyberlink: * Very fast single core CPU (3.2+ GHz Pentium 4, 2.0+
monitors
Instead of one giant monitor, I’d rather have multiple moderately large monitors. I’m a card-carrying member of the prestigious three monitor club. But giant monitors have their charms, too; there is something to be said for an enormous, contiguous display area. But large monitors tend to be inordinately,