machine learning
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,
software development
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
gui design 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
programming languages
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
task manager
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
.net
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.
programming languages
There's an interesting interview with Miguel de Icaza. Miguel is the primary developer behind the open-source port of the .NET runtime known as the Mono Project. This project was recently purchased by Novell, ostensibly to bolster the development tools available on Linux. Miguel seems refreshingly free of the
virtual machine
This won't be news to a lot of you, but I was playing around with Microsoft Virtual PC 2004 today: And it's very cool. I know, I know, I'm probably the last developer on the planet to get wise to the benefits of virtual
software development concepts
On Rory's effusive recommendation, I purchased a copy of the book, Coding Slave, by Bob Reselman. I have mixed feelings about Coding Slave. It's got a great title, it definitely kept my interest, and it's a quick read. I can also pretty much guarantee
programming languages
The term "computer science" is a borderline oxymoron. Very little of what we do in software development is science: Many historians suggest that modern science began around 1600 in the time and with the efforts of Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), and Francis Bacon (1561-1626). Their era
software development concepts
As I was driving home, I found myself thinking about a favorite section of the book Accidental Empires, by longtime computer journalist Robert X. Cringely. Originally published in 1993, it's getting a little long in the tooth, but it still contains a lot of great insights about the
software development concepts
Ten years out, in terms of actual hardware costs you can almost think of hardware as being free. - Bill Gates We've all been reaping the benefits of Moore's Law for the last 20 years, but there is one unintended consequence of this rule: as hardware