programming languages
I’m not a huge fan of The Daily WTF for reasons I’ve previously outlined. There is, however, the occasional gem – such as this one posted by ezrec: Browsing through a web archive of some old computer club conversations, I ran across this sentence: “Apple made the clbuttic mistake
programming languages
A few months ago, Dare Obasanjo noticed a brief exchange my friend Jon Galloway and I had on Twitter. Unfortunately, Twitter makes it unusually difficult to follow conversations, but Dare outlines the gist of it in Developers, Using Libraries is not a Sign of Weakness: The problem Jeff was trying
programming languages
I don’t usually talk about my personal life here, but I have to make an exception in this case. I debated for days which geeky reference I would use as a synonym for “we’re having a baby.” The title is the best I could do. I’m truly
software development concepts
As we begin the private beta for Stack Overflow later this week, I wondered: where do the software terms alpha and beta come from? And why don’t we ever use gamma? Alpha and Beta are the first two characters of the Greek alphabet. Presumably these characters were chosen because
hardware
I got a call from Rob Conery today asking for advice on building his own computer. Rob works for Microsoft, but lives in Hawaii. I’m not sure how he managed that, but being so far from the mothership apparently means he has the flexibility to spec his own PC.
c#
Although I love strings, sometimes the String class can break your heart. For example, in C#, there is no String.Left() function. Fair enough; we can roll up our sleeves and write our own function lickety-split: public static string Left(string s, int len) { if (len == 0 || s.Length == 0)
software development concepts
Ever find yourself clicking on links to music or videos and getting blasted in the face with this delightful little number? That’s right – links to any sort of music, TV shows, movies, podcasts, audiobooks or anything else available through Apple’s iTunes store requires custom software to be installed
programming languages
As I grow older and wiser even older as a programmer, I’ve found that my personal coding style has trended heavily toward minimalism. I was pleased, then, to find many of the coding conventions I’ve settled on over the last 20 years codified in Spartan programming. No, not
regular expressions
I love regular expressions. No, I’m not sure you understand: I really love regular expressions. You may find it a little odd that a hack who grew up using a language with the ain’t keyword would fall so head over heels in love with something as obtuse and
xml
Occasionally I’ll write about things that I find sort of mildly, vaguely thought provoking, and somehow that writing turns out to be ragingly controversial once posted here. Case in point, XML: The Angle Bracket Tax. I’m still encountering people online who almost literally hate my guts because I
ruby
I have decidedly mixed feelings about the book Beautiful Code, but one of the better chapters is Tim Bray’s “Finding Things.” In it, he outlines the creation of a small Ruby program: counts = {} counts.default = 0 ARGF.each_line do |line| if line =~ %r{GET /ongoing/When/dddx/(dddd/
software development concepts
I believe very strongly that a blog without comments is not a blog. For me, the whole point of this blogging exercise is the many-way communication of the comments – between me and the commenters, and among the commenters themselves. As I said in How To Advertise on Your Blog Without