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
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
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
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
cpu cores
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
variables
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. When is a property not a property? When it’s a glorified public variable. Why waste everyone’s time
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.