programming languages
In Software Training Sucks: Why We Need to Roll it Back 1,000 Years, Rob Walling makes a compelling argument for abandoning traditional training classes in favor of apprenticeships: Why not use the time-tested approach of trades that have been doing it for years? Let’s take an electrical apprenticeship
music
Did you know that the Windows 95 startup sound was composed by avant-garde electronic musician Brian Eno? I had no idea until I saw it referenced on music thing. Eno describes the process in a 1996 San Francisco Chronicle interview: Q: How did you come to compose “The Microsoft Sound?
programming languages
I’ve seen this kind of code a lot recently: try { int i = 0; int x = 0; Console.WriteLine(i / x); } catch (Exception ex) { Console.WriteLine(ex.Message); } This results in the following output: Attempted to divide by zero. Unless there’s some compelling reason you need an ultra-terse version
programming languages
I’ve always been fascinated with road signs. And evidently so is Donald Knuth: During our summer vacation in 2003, my wife and I amused ourselves by taking leisurely drives in Ohio and photographing every diamond-shaped highway sign that we saw along the roadsides. (Well, not every sign; only the
programming languages
As I mentioned in Formatting HTML code snippets with Ten Ton Wrecking Balls, copying code to your clipboard in Visual Studio is often an exercise in futility if you want anything more than plain vanilla text. VS copies code to the clipboard with bizarro-world RTF formatting instead of the sane,
programming languages
Charles Petzold is widely known as the guy who put the h in hWnd. He’s the author of the seminal 1988 book Programming Windows, now in its fifth edition. And he can prove it, too. He has an honest-to-God Windows tattoo on his arm: This is explained in his
programming languages
I just updated my Programming Fonts entry. It now includes a much larger code sample in each font, and a few new fonts including the “gee, did I really just pay $100 for a single font” Pragmata. Be sure to check it out. It’s a shame that there’s
programming languages
In the process of researching a few recent blog entries, I found the amazing Atari Archives. The title is a little misleading; it isn’t completely Atari specific. The archives contain incredible page-by-page high resolution images of many classic computer books, including The Best of Creative Computing, volume 1 (1976)
programming languages
I finally had time to improve my Visual Studio .NET keyboard shortcut summary macro. Instead of writing HTML to the console,* it now creates a HTML file in your user documents folder, and navigates the IDE to the created file: Download the Keyboard Shortcut Summary Macro (2kb ZIP) The advantage
programming languages
On one of our e-commerce web sites, we needed a unique transaction ID to pass to a third party reporting tool on the checkout pages. We already had a GUID on the page for internal use. And you know how much we love GUIDs! 22da5537-de54-459d-9b33-f40f2101143b A GUID is 128 bits,
programming languages
One of the oldest computer games is Artillery. It’s all about going mano a mano with nothing but wind, angle, and power on your side: The origins of artillery games are unclear, but the first such games were probably played on mainframe computers in the 60s. The programmers of
programming languages
Looking for something fun to do on family night? How about a friendly game of c-jump, the programming board game: Although the prospect of a computer programming board game sounds positively stultifying, there is a rich history of computer games based on programming. It’s not a programming game per