disk defragmentation
I tend to ignore defragmenting my hard drive until I belatedly realize it probably looks like swiss cheese by now: Wouldn't it be nice if the operating system took care of defragmentation all by itself in the background when I'm not using the computer? Ah, to
software development concepts
The 69 page e-book Client vs. Developer Wars documents one web design company's struggle to formulate a rational development process: Up until the middle of 2000, Newfangled's development process was much like that of every other web development company. The process started with the "planning/
programming languages
Laurent Bourgeois sent in an amusing link to the story of SkiFree [http://ski.ihoc.net/] in the words of Chris Pirih, the original Microsoft programmer who wrote it: > I wrote SkiFree in C on my home computer, entirely for my own education and entertainment. One day while I
audio encoding
I'll probably never buy music from iTunes, or any other online music store, because they all use constant bit rate audio encoding formats. Once I heard the incredible difference in fidelity between variable bit rate (VBR) and constant bit rate (CBR) encoding, I can never go back. And
google book search
Mike Gunderloy recently linked to an editorial [http://www.newsday.com/news/columnists/ny-etcolumn4549299dec12,0,7399981.column?coll=ny-news-columnists] by author Susan Cheever [http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/search-handle-url/index%3Dbooks%26field-author-exact%3DSusan%20Cheever%26rank%3D-relevance] on the legality of Google's Book Search [http://books.google.com/
html
I'm a big fan of showing the user visual feedback as soon as possible, whether you're downloading a web page or rendering a windows form. Images already render progressively in a web browser -- but you can do even better. Simply save your GIF or PNG
ui/ux design
Ever wonder how you could possibly find something in that complex, ten-tabbed options dialog? How about a search function on the options dialog, as featured in Quest's Toad for SQL Server [http://www.quest.com/toad_for_sql_server/index.asp]: Aside from the fact that it'
indexing service
Microsoft's ancient circa-1997 Indexing Service gets no respect. And that's a shame, because it's a surprisingly decent content indexing engine that supports arbitrary metadata. Sure, there may be better choices, but Indexing Service's saving grace is that it's completely free.
user experience
Seth Godin's Incomplete Guide to Building a Web Site that Works [http://www.salted.com/unsalted/files/knockknock.pdf] (6mb PDF) is a great reminder of how to build a popular website without becoming a marketing weasel in the process: > Big Picture #1: A Web site must
image compression
It constantly amazes me how many times I encounter pages where screenshots are inappropriately stored as JPEGs. Not to single Mike Gunderloy out, but there's yet another example in his recent article on configuring an ASP.NET 2.0 website [http://developer.com/net/asp/article.php/3569166]
hardware
I've talked about all the essential environmental things a programmer should have: a good chair [https://blog.codinghorror.com/investing-in-a-quality-programming-chair/], at least two monitors [https://blog.codinghorror.com/does-more-than-one-monitor-improve-productivity/], and a great keyboard [https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-keyboard-cult/]. One thing I haven't talked about, though, is
programming languages
[http://www.clive.nl/detail/24424/] The 1978 BASIC program Animal [http://www.atariarchives.org/basicgames/showpage.php?page=4] is an animal-specific variation of twenty questions [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty_questions]. You think of an animal, and the computer tries to guess what animal you're