history
I read Robert X Cringley’s book Accidental Empires shortly after it was published in 1992. It’s a gripping worm’s eye view of Silicon Valley’s formative years. It’s also Doc Searls’ favorite book about the computer industry. Highly recommended. I didn’t realize that the book
arcade gaming
The first video game to introduce a high score table was Asteroids, and after that they were a key fixture in virtually every arcade game from the 80s and 90s. One of my favorite high score tables was in Gaplus, the little known sequel to the mega-popular Galaga, which was
programming languages
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 software developer.
security
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
virtualization
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
software development
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 warning when your
security
If you’ve used the internet at all in the last few years, I’m sure you’ve seen your share of CAPTCHAs: Of course, nobody wants to use CAPTCHAs. They’re a necessary evil, just like the locks on the doors to your home and your car. CAPTCHAs are
programming concepts
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 premise of
programming languages
Ian Landsman’s 10 tips for moving from programmer to entrepreneur is excellent advice. Even if you have no intention of becoming an entrepreneur. One of the biggest issues I see is developers getting caught up in the code. Spending countless hours making a function perfect or building features which
software development concepts
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 of Microsoft’s
software development
In classic project management parlance , 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 how much money we can spend doing it. These three factors
cooling
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