design
In Never design what you can steal, I praised this amusing guerilla redesign of Jakob Neilsen’s useit.com – which is widely derided by the design community for its radically bare-bones layout. Well, the design guerillas are at it again. This time, they’ve set their design eye on
software development concepts
James Bach responded to my recent post, Are You Following the Instructions on the Paint Can?, with Studying Jeff Atwood’s Paint Can. Being under Bach’8596s intensive analytical microscope feels a lot like an interview with Hannibal Lecter. It’s flattering, but it’s also a little scary. You
software development concepts
Scott Hanselman thinks signing your name with a bunch of certifications is gauche: If it’s silly to suggest putting my SATs on my resume, why is… Scott Hanselman, MCSD, MCT, MCP, MC*.* … reasonable? Having a cert means you have a capacity to hold lots of technical stuff in your
software development
Jon Raynor added this comment to my previous post about keeping up with the pace of change in software development: The IT field is basically a quagmire. It’s better to accept that fact right away or move on to a different field. I guess someday I wish for Utopia
programming languages
Do you ever feel like you’re buried under umpteen zillion backlogged emails, feeds, books, articles, journals, magazines, and printouts? Do you ever feel that you’re hopelessly behind, with so much new stuff created every day that you can never possibly hope to keep up? Well, you’re not
spaces
I try to avoid using spaces in filenames and URLs. They’re great for human readability, but they’re remarkably inconvenient in computer resource locators: Any spaces in URLs are converted to the encoded space character by the web browser: XCOPY "c:\test files\reference data.doc" d:
blogging
James Bach responded to my recent post, Are You Following the Instructions on the Paint Can?, with Studying Jeff Atwood’s Paint Can. I didn’t realize how many assumptions I made in that post until I read Mr. Bach's pointed response. The most amusing assumption I made
server
One of the key differences between the original dot-com bubble and the Web 2.0 bubble we’re entering now is that our servers are a lot cheaper and a lot more powerful. Moore’s Law in action isn’t exactly news, but the new web is definitely powered
usability
I was lucky enough to attend a week-long Human Factors International session on usability a few years ago.* As a developer with a long term interest in getting to the human root cause of so many programming problems, I loved it. One of the freebies from the course was
programming
I recently found a link to a series of Larry Gonick’s mathematical cartoons that were originally published in Discover magazine: * Beauty and the Beasts (neural nets) * Prime Time (cryptography) * Proof Positive? (probabilistic proofs) * Lumps, with Mother Nature (chaotic mixing) * Speed (relativity) * The Solution (traveling salesman's problem) * Filler
security
Paul Thurrott’s scathing article Where Vista Fails highlights my biggest concern with Windows Vista: Modern operating systems like Linux and Mac OS X operate under a security model where even administrative users don’t get full access to certain features unless they provide an in-place logon before performing
remote desktop
I’m with K. Scott Allen: the pervasiveness of Remote Desktop functionality in Windows has fundamentally changed the way I work. The fact that it shipped in the Windows XP box – and as a default component of all the server operating systems since Windows 2000 – has done wonders for its