The first video game to introduce a high score table was Asteroids [http://www.emuunlim.com/doteaters/play2sta2.htm], and after that they were a key fixture in virtually every arcade game from the 80's and 90's. One of my favorite high score tables was in
Here's an excellent bit of halloween advice from Mike Gunderloy: go read some source code you wrote five years ago for a real scare. It's a good idea to go occasionally back to the well and get a sense of your progress as a so-called professional
I recently got into a spirited discussion about Akismet. What is Akismet? When a new comment, trackback, or pingback comes to your blog it is submitted to the Akismet web service which runs hundreds of tests on the comment and returns a thumbs up or thumbs down. Akismet is awfully
If you use virtual machines at all, you should have the single most important virtual machine performance tip committed to heart by now: always run your virtual machines from a separate physical hard drive: [the] biggest performance win is to put the virtual hard disks on separate disk spindles from
Although I've been dismissive of build servers in the past, I've increasingly come to believe that the build server is critical-- it's the heart monitor of your software project. It can tell you when your project is healthy, and it can give you advance
If you've used the internet at all in the last few years, I'm sure you've seen your share of CAPTCHAs [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captcha]: Of course, nobody wants to use CAPTCHAs. They're a necessary evil, just like the locks on
In Does Writing Code Matter?, I proposed that developers spend less time on the technical stuff, which they're already quite good at, and more time cultivating other non-technical skills that developers tend to lack. One commenter took issue with this approach: I don't agree with the
Ian Landsman's 10 tips for moving from programmer to entrepreneur [https://web.archive.org/web/20070306071950/http://www.userscape.com/blog/index.php/site/comments/10_tips_for_moving_from_programmer_to_entrepreneur/] is excellent advice. Even if you have no intention of becoming an entrepreneur. > One
Does this look familiar? Temporary Post Used For Style Detection (14debf21-5e75-4077-9bf0-88d425739dc7) This is a temporary post that was not deleted. Please delete this manually. (f19173c9-9b1f-4430-8823-bae7c95236a0) Seriously. Enough with this already. I'm gonna hurt somebody. If you're not in on the joke, it's an artifact
In classic project management parlance [http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/assistance/HA010211801033.aspx] , every project is a combination of money, scope and time. 1. Here's what we're going to do 2. Here's how much time we have to do it 3. Here's
One side effect of building quiet PCs is that you tend to develop a giant heatsink fetish. From left to right: * Arctic Cooling Accelero X1 on the ATI 1900XTX video card * Thermalright HR-05 on the Intel 965 northbridge chipset * Scythe Infinity on the Core 2 Duo CPU It pains me
Now that Internet Explorer 7.0 is final, the browser wars can begin again in earnest. It's clear that users should upgrade, because IE6 is so ancient. Security concerns alone compel an upgrade. But should IE6 users upgrade to IE7, or should they choose an alternative? This comment