Contents tagged with General Software Development
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Working around a Powershell Call Depth Disaster With Trampolines
I just posted about an update to my NuGet package downloader script which included a few fixes, including a fix to handle paging. That sounds boring, but wait until you hear about the trampolines.
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MSDN Low Bandwidth Bookmarklet
There’s a semi-hidden feature in the MSDN Library website: Low Bandwidth view. We’ll talk about how to use it, why I like it, and some tips for switching it on and off. We’ll end up with an MSDN Low Band bookmarklet I whipped up to make it even easier.
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Jon's News Wrapup - June 25, 2008 Edition
Here's the grab bag of tools, development toolkits, etc.
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Jon's News Wrapup - May 8, 2008 Edition
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January 2008 Recap
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Why CodingHorror is horribly wrong about Blacklists and Virus Scanners
Jeff and I had an interesting debate on virus scanners a few weeks ago. He posted his take on the conversation yesterday, and (surprise!) we both think we won the argument. I believe the difference of opinion really comes down to a few different assumptions about the problem we're trying to solve:
- Different classes of Anti-Virus Software (Quality AV Software vs. Bundleware)
- Antivirus Effectiveness (Is it really just 33% effective?)
- The Goal of Virus Protection (Risk Management vs. Invincibility)
- Modeling the Threat (Known malware vs. New malware)
- Approach to Security (Practical vs. Theoretical)
- Productivity Tradeoffs (Virus Scanning vs. Running As Administrator)
So, let's go through the list:
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We should be virtualizing Applications, not Machines
One of the benefits of my new job at Vertigo Software is that I have more frequent opportunities to talk with my co-worker, Jeff Atwood. If everything goes right, we argue... because if we agree, neither of us is going to learn anything. Recently, we argued about virtual machines. I think machine virtualization is hugely oversold. We let the technical elegance (gee whiz, a program that lets me pretend to run another computer as another program!) distract us from the fact that virtual machines are a sleazy, inelegant hack.
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The value of "good enough" technology
Twitter drives all my tech-savvy friends crazy. We all agree that the idea - a simple mix of blog, chat, and IM - is a good one. However the site does very little, and what it does it does poorly - slow response, frequent outages, etc. Most developers figure they could write a "better Twitter" in a lazy afternoon, and some already have. Good idea, poor execution, and yet... it's good enough. -
Why Microsoft can't ship open source code
I've suggested a few times that Microsoft could go beyond just cooperating with the open source community and actually ship open source code. For instance, Paint.NET is a great alternative to MS Paint, so not just bundle it? Tonight I had a very long conversation with someone who is in a position to really understand both Microsoft and open source. Now I understand why my suggestion - though well intentioned - was hopelessly naive.
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Freeing up drive space on Windows XP
I just cleaned up my computer in preparation for an upgrade to Vista. Here's how I did it: