technology trends

Just Say No

productivity

Just Say No

Derek Sivers relates an interesting Steve Jobs anecdote: In June of 2003, Steve Jobs gave a small private presentation about the iTunes Music Store to some independent record label people. My favorite line of the day was when people kept raising their hand saying, “Does it do (x)?”, “Do you

By Jeff Atwood ·
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Are your exceptions silent?

security

Are your exceptions silent?

This Slate article highlights an interesting statistic: A few years ago, Microsoft set up the Windows Error Reporting Service to help find out where crashes come from. After a Windows application – or your whole PC – shuts down, a box pops up asking you to send a confidential error report. Using

By Jeff Atwood ·
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programming languages

Media Center goes retail

I had no idea this was happening, but it is fantastic news: according to this GamePC article, the latest 2005 version of Windows XP Media Center Edition will be released as a retail product within a few weeks: Windows XP Media Center Edition was originally launched roughly two years ago,

By Jeff Atwood ·
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software development concepts

The Rise and Fall of Homo Logicus

Of all the professional hubris I’ve observed in software developers, perhaps the greatest sin of all is that we consider ourselves typical users. We use the computer obsessively, we know a lot about how it works, we even give advice to friends and relatives. We are experts. Who could

By Jeff Atwood ·
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java

Weeding out the Weak Developers with J2EE

I got into an interesting discussion today about that recently published report, Comparing Microsoft .NET and IBM WebSphere/J2EE. If you haven’t read it, there’s a summary at eWeek, but I definitely recommend downloading the full report for the details. If you’re too busy to do either

By Jeff Atwood ·
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spam filtering

POPFile vs. POPFile

In my previous blog entry on some plan(s) for spam, I mentioned that I didn’t care for challenge/response “human-only” whitelists. I couldn’t put my finger on exactly why I felt that way... until I happened upon this John Graham-Cumming PowerPoint presentation: I don’t “do” Challenge/

By Jeff Atwood ·
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machine learning

Some Plan(s) for Spam

After struggling with spam e-mail for years the old fashioned way – highlight, DEL – I finally succumbed and installed POPFile on my server. POPFile uses a Bayesian Filter technique and it is amazingly effective. Within a day I had 95% accuracy; within a week I had 97% accuracy. Two months later,

By Jeff Atwood ·
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software development

Development is Inherently Wicked

Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber defined a “wicked” problem as one that could be clearly defined only by solving it, or by solving part of it. This paradox implies, essentially, that you have to “solve” the problem once in order to clearly define it and then solve it again to

By Jeff Atwood ·
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gui design patterns

GUI patterns

With all this talk of high-falutin’ coding design patterns, I’m surprised we haven’t seen more sites that cover GUI design patterns, like welie.com*. What a great site! Consider the iPod: it’s a 2.5″ hard drive, strapped to a battery and a LCD, that plays MP3

By Jeff Atwood ·
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Pragmatic Programming

programming languages

Pragmatic Programming

I mentioned in a previous post that I recommended Andrew Hunt of pragmatic programmer fame to speak at our group offsite. He happens to live in the area, which makes it very cost effective. I have to admit I didn’t know much about these guys until I ran across

By Jeff Atwood ·
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Task Manager Extension

task manager

Task Manager Extension

Shamelessly stolen from Scott Hanselman’s most excellent Ultimate Developer Tools List, Task Manager Extension is one of my favorite new addins. Like Notepad, Task Manager is something I use on a daily basis: it’s an essential part of my toolkit. I took a look at some replacements, but

By Jeff Atwood ·
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.net

DEVELOPERS^3

There’s an interesting article documenting the dramatic uptake of .NET: Want more proof .Net is taking off? Consider the following: In May, Forrester Research released a report that found 56 percent of developers polled consider .Net their primary development environment for 2004, compared with 44 percent for J2EE. In

By Jeff Atwood ·
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