led technology
I recently purchased the DGL-4300 wireless router, mainly because it includes gigabit ethernet, which is still quite rare in routers. It certainly looks cool, as routers go, with its sleek rubbery design and all-blue LEDs. But those blue LEDs – particularly a bank of them, all blinking away – are
software development
Wil Shipley, the entity behind Delicious Library, has a hilarious (and informative) talk on why he develops software for the Mac – and also netted $54,000 from Delicious Library on the first day with zero advertising. How to Succeed Writing Mac Software (176kb PDF) One of the funniest and most
hardware
I’ve seen a number of hardware-oriented developers talk about setting up striped RAID arrays on their personal desktops. It does seem like a reasonable idea, given the current strong trend towards “doubling up” on hardware to leverage performance benefits from parallelism in various forms – dual core CPUs, dual
windows xp
Windows XP isn’t known for its powerful command line interface. Still, one of the first things I do on any fresh Windows install is set up the “Open Command Window Here” right click menu. And hoary old cmd.exe does have a few tricks up its sleeve that you
xml
I have no problem with XML. It’s a fine way to store hierarchical data in a relatively simple, mostly human-readable format. But I’ve always disliked its companion technology, XSLT. While useful in theory – “using a simple XSLT transform, XML can be converted into anything!”– in practice, it
programming languages
I’m currently working on a project where almost every function has its own region. At first I found this convention onerous, but as I used it, I saw why it was necessary. The default Visual Studio .NET outlining support leaves a lot to be desired. Take your typical commented
email security
I use POPFile Bayesian filtering to keep email spam at bay. With a little training, this works amazingly well – I’m at 99.8% accuracy, and that’s with a little over a month of “training” precipitated by a recent server migration. But Bayesian filtering has one big weakness that
software development concepts
The anonymous mini-Microsoft blog has a fascinating entry on the pitfalls of Microsoft’s curve rating system: I totally accept that we need to have a rating system, especially to reward our kick-butt super-contributors who end up doing most the hard work around here. I have not,
iis
Scott Mitchell says the best new ASP.NET feature in VS.NET 2005 is the integrated webserver. I agree. No more ditzing around with annoying IIS dependencies and install issues: aspnet_regiis, anyone? Tight coupling of VS.NET to IIS is also number three in K Scott Allen’s worst
fonts
You may be familiar with the font Comic Sans MS: Over the last 5 years, my wife and I noticed that this annoying font is inordinately popular “in the wild” – we’ve seen it in the strangest places. Enough so that it has become a running joke whenever we see
software development concepts
In a previous entry, I touched on the broken window theory. You might be familiar with the Pragmatic Progammers’ take on this: Don’t leave “broken windows” (bad designs, wrong decisions, or poor code) unrepaired. Fix each one as soon as it is discovered. If there is insufficient time to
usability
Some users commenting on the poor pre-game user interface in EA’s Battlefield 2: Poster #1: They need to stop hiring angry little men and romantically spurned women to design user interfaces. Poster #2: But doesn’t that describe most programmers? Poster #3: No, that describes all programmers. It’