Today's Question:  What does your personal desk look like?        GIVE A SHOUT

SEARCH KEYWORD -- Fire

  The business of software

Inspired by a talk I gave yesterday at the BOS conference. This is long, feel free to skip!My first real job was leading a team that created five massive computer games for the Commodore 64. The games were so big they needed four floppy disks each, and the project was so complex (and the hardware systems so sketchy) that on more than one occasion, smoke started coming out of the drives.Success was a product that didn't crash, start a fire or lead to a nervous breakdown.Writing software...

   Software,Design,Business,Software design     2011-10-29 07:22:09

  I hate cut-and-paste

Me, I blame the IDE's.Coding used to be hard. Not because programming itself was overly hard, but mostly because editors absolutely sucked. How much the typical development environment in the 70's and 80's sucked is hard to convey (except for a very lucky few, and those would have likely been using DEC and WANG gear). I got in on the tail end of the punch card era. Punching your own program is lots of fun. Once. And if you drop a deck you get to play with the sorter, which is also lots of fun (o...

   IDE,Editor,Cut and paste,Shortcut,Blame     2011-10-24 11:33:46

  How Computers Boot Up

The previous post described motherboards and the memory map in Intel computers to set the scene for the initial phases of boot. Booting is an involved, hacky, multi-stage affair – fun stuff. Here’s an outline of the process: An outline of the boot sequence Things start rolling when you press the power button on the computer (no! do tell!). Once the motherboard is powered up it initializes its own firmware – the chipset and other tidbits – and tries to ...

   Computer,Boot-up,Rationale     2012-04-11 13:43:02

  Social networks are becoming your personal operating system

Today’s biggest trends — the mobile web, social media, gamification, real-time — are changing the landscape for business. Consumers are connecting with one another, and in the process they’re becoming increasingly empowered and influential.How these connected consumers discover, share, and communicate is different than the way they used to. This change requires businesses to rethink their approach. Organizations need to examine the impact of technology on consumer beh...

   Facebook,Operating System,Social network,Feature,Facebook me     2011-10-28 10:02:55

  What’s Your Start-up’s “Bus Count”? 7 Myths of Entrepreneurship and Programming

Software development is a rapidly evolving field that got off to a very rocky start. Conventional wisdom for many years was that software engineering should be like other types of engineering: design carefully, specify precisely, and then just build it – exactly to spec. Just like building a bridge, right? The problem with this approach is that software is just that. Soft. It’s endlessly malleable. You can change software pretty much any time you want, and people do. A...

   Start-up,technical,company,tips     2011-07-04 07:44:54

  SQL Server: Removing Deprecated Code and Future Proofing your Queries

New features are added with every release of SQL Server and as a result, some features get removed or deprecated. Deprecated features are features that are still operational (for backward compatibility) but will be removed in a future version. Deprecated features can be of two types: those that will be deprecated in a future version and those that will be deprecated in the next version.In this article, we will explore how to track deprecated code and correct it. I will also share our observation...

   SQL Server,Microsoft,MS SOL,Proof query,Remove redundancy     2011-10-17 11:14:49

  Preprocessor magic:Default Arguments in C

This post is for programmers who like C or for one reason or another can't use anything else but C in one of their projects. The advantages of having default arguments is not something that needs convincing. It's just very nice and convenient to have them. C++ offers the ability to define them but C under the C99 standard has no way to allow it. In this post I will detail two ways I know of implementing default arguments in C. If a reader happens to know additional ways please share in ...

   C,Preprocessor,Default arguments     2012-02-19 06:17:04

  Deep inside ARM's new Intel killer

ARM has swung a one-two punch at Intel's plans to muscle in on the smartphone and tablet space that's currently dominated by the plucky chip designers from Cambridge.At press soirées in London and San Francisco on Wednesday, ARM announced both a design for a tiny new chip, the Cortex-A7 MPCore, and a system-on-chip scheme that will marry the new A7 with the much more robust Cortex-A15 MPCore, which was announcedlast September and which should see the light of day next...

   ARM,Killer,Intel,Chipzilla,Performance     2011-10-22 12:55:23

  Touching and Gesturing on iPhone, Android, and More

One of the most important parts of creating an effective and intuitive user interface on touch-enabled smartphones has nothing to do with visual appearance—instead, it has to do with creating an interface that properly responds to user input based on touch. For Web applications, this means replacing mouse events with touch events. In Dojo 1.7, new touch APIs help make this process easy. This is an updated version of the post Touching and Gesturing on the iPhone, published in 2008. I...

   Touch,Gesture,iPhone,Android     2012-04-12 11:21:42

  Handling Plugins In PHP

A common problem that developers face when building applications is how to allow the application to be "plug-able" at runtime.  Meaning, to allow non-core code to modify the way an application is processed at runtime.  There are a lot of different ways that this can be done, and lots of examples of it in real life.  Over a year ago, I wrote a StackOverflow Answer on this topic.  However, I think it deserves another look.  So let's look at some patterns and common im...

   PHP,Plugin,Handling     2012-03-11 13:18:39

RECENT