threads
Programmers* love to futz around with thread priorities. As if programming with threads wasn’t already dangerous enough, we’ve got to get in there and tweak thread priorities to make things run... er... "better.” Let’s fire up Task Manager and take a quick survey of process priorities.
cutlery
Why does the sporkfe fascinate me so? It’s a spoon. It’s a fork. It’s a knife. Some call it a splade – sold commercially in Australia for the last 50 years under the Splayds brand name – but I prefer sporkfe. Really, when was the last time you ate
software development concepts
I was browsing around the CouchDb wiki yesterday when I saw Damien Katz’ hilarious description of how technical documentation really gets written. You know, in the real world: Welcome to the world of technical documentation! The situation you are in is no different from any other tech writer. The technical
software development
It’s unbelievable to me that a company would pay a developer $60-$100k in salary, yet cripple them with terrible working conditions and crusty hand-me-down hardware. This makes no business sense whatsoever. And yet I see it all the time. It’s shocking how many companies still don’t
statistics
The free stickers were all mailed Monday. Here’s a quick statistical breakdown, courtesy of my wife: United States320Canada49 38 of the 50 states were represented. The states with zero sticker requests were: HI, KS, LA, MS, MT, ND, NM, RI, SD, VT, WV and WY. Here are the top
hardware
When the first version of Windows Media Center [http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/mediacenter/default.mspx] was released in summer 2003, I decided it was time to build my first home theater PC. After I placed it in the living room, I realized I had made a terrible mistake: I
social media
As of August 9th, 2006, MySpace has 100 million members. For reference, the population of California is approximately 36 million, and the population of the United States is approximately 300 million. I have a hard time believing that 1 in 3 Americans could conceivably be MySpace users. I’m not
directx
Has anyone noticed that Microsoft defines “version” a little loosely when it comes to DirectX 9.0c? Here’s a screenshot of the DirectX 9.0c download page on FileHippo: DirectX 9.0c was originally released in August 2004, according to the DirectX Wikipedia entry. But Microsoft has surreptitiously been
hardware
With the release of Intel’s Core Duo and Core Duo 2 chips, it’s finally happened– mainstream video card GPUs are about to overtake CPUs as the largest consumers of power inside your PC. Witness this chart, derived from XBit labs’latest roundup, of video card power consumption in
javascript
The 1996 JavaWorld article Is JavaScript here to stay? is almost amusing in retrospect. John Lam recently observed that JavaScript is the world’s most ubiquitous computing runtime. I think the answer is an emphatic yes. JavaScript is currently undergoing a renaissance through AJAX. Sure, the AJAX-ified clones of Word
source control
Everyone agrees that source control is fundamental to the practice of modern software development. However, there are dozens of source control options to choose from. VSoft, the makers of FinalBuilder, just published the results of their annual customer survey. One of the questions it asked was which version control systems
software development concepts
As I alluded to in the T-Shirt post, Coding Horror stickers have arrived: These are custom, two color die-cut vinyl stickers based on the high resolution vector art so graciously provided by our kind benefactor, Steve McConnell. To give you an idea of scale, the coin in the picture is