software development
A co-worker and I went over to Scott's house today at around 1pm PST to pick something up for work. Scott just got a new television, so he demoed it for us, flipping through the channels, comparing HD signals to regular signals and so forth. As we were
web development
Every few years, Jakob Nielsen takes websites to task with a Top Ten Web Design Mistakes article. Although things have clearly improved since the original 1996 list, I'm particularly concerned that in the competitive frenzy to get all JavaScripted up for Web 2.0, we may be defeating
file systems
Don Park recently made an interesting observation about how his family uses the computer [http://www.docuverse.com/blog/donpark/EntryViewPage.aspx?guid=27ea0bf8-abda-40f4-aa23-493461c54f26] : > When I observe how my wife and son uses the family computer, I can't help noticing how little use they have for the
software development
For better or worse, I've been a Microsoft fan since Windows 3.1. Microsoft is far from perfect, but the alternatives were always so much worse. Can you imagine a dystopian future where we're all running IBM's OS/2 2004 and Lotus Notes Express?
software development concepts
Philip Chu's Seven Habits of Highly Effective Programmers [http://www.technicat.com/writing/programming.html] is witty, eloquent, and peppered with illustrative real world anecdotes: > Upon joining an early-stage startup called Neomar, I found myself in two months of design meetings for a wireless internet portal that
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]
physics simulation
I love playing videogames, but I have no illusions whatsoever of being talented enough to write videogames. Game developers live a hard life, and not just because the industry is notoriously abusive. Even the most brilliant minds can get bogged down in the morass of complexity that is game development.
software development concepts
In response to My Giant Calculator, Joost commented: I'll jump to the defense of trusty old calc.exe. Even though it's crappy, we know it's on every Windows box we touch. He's got a point. The applets that ship in the box
software development
Have you ever noticed how many people keep a physical calculator next to their computer? The irony is almost palpable. My favorite is the calculator mousepad. Jef Raskin, in The Humane Interface, defends the practice of keeping a pocket calculator next to your PC: It's true. Many of
programming languages
I've always been fascinated with road signs. And evidently so is Donald Knuth [http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/diamondsigns/diam.html ]: > 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
software development
Why is it that fully half of my interactions with GotDotNet are extremely unpleasant? I was telling someone about the Microsoft sponsored IronPython project [http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=c6a7fee3-6495-427f-8b1f-768a2715170c&displaylang=en] today and I foolishly attempted to click through to the GotDotNet workspace [http://www.
clipboard
In this era of 3ghz processors, 1gb memory, and 500gb hard drives, why is the Windows clipboard only capable of holding a single item? Sure, you have fancy multi-level undo and redo in applications like Microsoft Word and Visual Studio. Did you know that the humble Windows textbox supports a