psychology
The seminal 1956 George Miller paper The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information is a true classic. In it, Miller observed that the results of a number of 1950s era experiments in short-term memory had something in common: most people could
hardware
One of our best servers at work was inherited from a previous engagement for x64 testing: it’s a dual Opteron 250 with 8 gigabytes of RAM. Even after a year of service, those are still decent specs. And it has a nice upgrade path, too: the Tyan Thunder K8W
c#
If you need to store a little bit of state-- in your configuration file, or on disk-- nothing is faster than some quick and dirty serialization. Or as I like to call it, stringization. In late 2004, I wrote about The Last Configuration Section Handler, which does exactly this for
human-computer interaction
Fitts’ Law is arguably the most important formula in the field of human-computer interaction. It’s... Time = a + b log2 ( D / S + 1 ) ... where D is the distance from the starting point of the cursor, and S is the width of the target. This is all considered on a 2D
multicore processors
Dual core CPUs were a desktop novelty in the first half of 2005. Now, with the introduction of the Mac Pro (see one unboxed), dual core is officially pass. Quad core – at least in the form of two dual-core CPUs – is where it’s at for desktop systems. And sometime
properties
I occasionally see code with properties like this: private int name; public int Name { get { return name; } set { name = value; } } As I see it, there are three things to consider here. 1. When is a property not a property? When it's a glorified public variable. Why waste everyone&
file systems
Although I always use CDDB metadata in my self-ripped MP3 files, the quality of the ID3 tags in my MP3 files lags far behind the quality of the file and folder names. File and folder naming is immediately visible and easy to change. C:MusicBeatlesThe White AlbumDisc 11 - Back
programming languages
I’ve written before about the dubious value of functional specifications. If you want to experience the dubious value of specifications first hand, try writing a tool to read and write ID3 tags. ID3 tags describe the metadata for an MP3 file, such as Artist, Album, Track, and so forth.
font rendering
I’ve been vacillating a bit on ClearType recently. I love ClearType in theory. A threefold improvement in horizontal resolution on LCDs is an incredible step forward for computer displays. Internet Explorer 7 forces the issue a bit by always defaulting to ClearType for web content, even if you haven’
regular expressions
We're working on a little shell utility that displays paths in a menu. Some of these paths can get rather long, so I cooked up this little regular expression to shorten them. It's a replacement, so you call it like this: static string PathShortener(string path)
open source
Here’s Scott Hanselman on the death of nDoc: We are blessed. This Open Source stuff is free. But it’s free like a puppy. It takes years of care and feeding. You don’t get to criticize a free puppy that you bring in to your home. Free like
programming languages
Stiff recently asked a few programmers a series of open-ended questions: * How did you learn programming? Were schools of any use? * What’s the most important skill every programmer should have? * Are math and physics important skills for a programmer? * What will be the next big thing in computer programming?