December 2005 - Posts
I've been reading Slashdot for the last year and a half or so. I stayed away from it until I downloaded an aggregator that had it preinstalled, and, well, it just kind of stayed there. I don't post comments myself, but I find find those who do interesting. Read More
The following is a review of A Mathematician Plays the Stock Market, by John Allen Paulos.
One of my inaugural tasks at my current job was developing a technical analysis package for market data. I have to admit I rather enjoyed this, for a few Read More
In my javascript debugging post I showed a stack trace and mentioned only that it seemed to be running javascript code. Here it is:0:009> ~0kChildEBP RetAddr WARNING: Stack unwind information not available. Following frames may be wrong.0012f97c 6009db8b Read More
I've been silent (by my standards, anyway) on the Dover design case to date--I suppose this is because anyone that knows me knows that I don't support teaching religion in church, let alone in the public school system. But, I had some thoughts worth sharing Read More
A few posts ago I mentioned that Firefox was maxing out my CPU "when I had more than three tabs open." As is typical with bug reports from users, this one is very poorly worded and essentially useless. It turns out that that was not a good explanation Read More
If you find yourself struggling with the following error message in SQL Server Management Studio 2005:Database diagram support objects cannot be installed because this database does not have a valid owner. To continue, first use the Files page of the Read More
I realized just how much I depend on my laptop these days, and I'm starting to think this is flirting with disaster due to their mayfly lifespans. I was pricing backup appliances at the Mirra site when I realized, hey, image-only websites suck. I'm quite Read More
I had a lot of vacation days left over this year, and not much to do with them. Not much, that is, until I decided to buy ALL of the spicy chili brands in the grocery store and have an EXTREME canned chili cookoff! Hormel Chili - "Hot With Beans" Total Read More
I was writing some C# code the other day and attempted to use a static local variable. This may only be because I've been spending so much time with C++ recently, but I was very surprised to find that it didn't work. "That's a shame," I thought. It's Read More
In my last post I alluded to interview quizzers. These are [straw man alert] egotistical people who assume that any smart person must know the highly-specific information that they themselves have learned in the last month. "I don't know, but I'll google Read More
I'm going to take a page from the Book of Darrel and post some design patterns whenever I realize that I'm using them. I'd like to be careful because I think that there are a few camps when it comes to design patterns:Design patterns are very important, Read More
The on-screen guide for my Direct TV box looks roughly like this:The control on my remote that causes the current channel to move up and down looks like this:If the problem here is obvious to you, you too may have a future in user interface design. If Read More
Attention reader: this website may contain terrible advice and fundamentally flawed code samples. Personally, I don't believe this to be the case, but my advice to you is to read it as if that were true. That you should question everything you read is Read More
I have been getting quite a few google hits for search strings like this:unmanaged memory leaks windbgIt's the second-most-common combination of search terms, trailing "hank goldberg picks" by a hell of a lot. I don't think the searches are coming from Read More
Here are a few roughly-equivalent class declarations using different languages and libraries. I say "roughly equivalent" because the implementation details and performance characteristics may actually be quite different in each case. However, the end Read More
Here is a nice article about lessons learned in designing a website login form. I have my own login abuse sob story to relate to you. Its interesting because what this author is warning against:The username credential is important to remember. When the Read More
Herb Sutter says the concurrency revolution is coming. This guy says, "*** you!! the concurrency revolution is coming!"That is the kind of attitude we need in the industry. We need more in-your-face greeks and fewer genial mustachioed C++ architects. Read More
Let's say you're writing a component that makes a DataSet available to a number of clients. The DataSet is expected to persist in your application for a while, and be used in code written by many different developers.You could carefully craft an email Read More
It's good to see that at least a few usability & design gadflies agree with my conclusion that AJAX is becoming a religious experience in some circles. (I intend religious experience to be taken in the pejorative sense here, as I always do.) This Read More
Here is one football statistic that I never want to hear again:Team X is 40-0 when they have someone rush for 100 yards. The conclusion you are supposed to draw is that Team X should try to run the football. Here's one way you could rephrase the statistic:Team Read More
That's my assessment so far. I realize posting an apostate opinion such as this is a good way to get my site hacked by a sixteen year old, but I'm going to write the rest of this anyway. I'm only doing so because I care about the product.Let me first Read More
I recently put Google Analytics on this site, which does a lot of things I may never understand. One thing it does (which I do understand) is keeping track of search phrases for my site. I already had something like this with my hosting package, but it Read More
Here's the scenario: I had about eight hours of perfmon output, for several hundred counters sampled once per second. I wanted to put this into a database already containing the parsed IIS logs from the same machine, to try to correlate some of the resource Read More
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