“It’s official: Adobe Reader is world’s most-exploited app”
Poor Microsoft… they’ve lost yet another crown. 😉 (And yet another good reason to avoid the PDF format entirely.)
Archive of posts filed under the Software and Software Development category.
Topics pertaining to software and software development, mostly for Microsoft Windows or Linux, and mostly in C or C++.
“Software Discovery is Broken”
How do you find good software? Industry veteran John Dvorak (no relation to the keyboard layout of the same name 😉 ) says you can’t, barring personal recommendations from other users. There are too many scammers out there. I’m sorry to say that I have to agree. I haven’t gone looking for much software by …
“How to Teach Yourself Programming”
Tongue-in-cheek, but all too true. Sure, you can learn the syntax of a programming language in twenty-one days, but not how to write readable, maintainable code that isn’t riddled with bugs. That takes experience. It took me the better part of fifteen years to get to a decent level, and it was only in the …
“Distributed Version Control is here to stay, baby”
Hot on the heels of my own version-control post, Joel Spolsky writes one of his own. It’s a good overview of what’s different between a traditional version-control system and the new distributed version-control systems, and how the new ones are better. (It works for me, I use Git myself.) The takeaway quote: If you are …
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“US comp-boffins claim fix for multicore ‘concurrency bugs'”
Many programmers claim that multi-threaded programming is painfully difficult, to the point that when I say otherwise, they claim that it shows “a lack of expert knowledge.” (Obviously, I disagree with that assessment.) 😉 But just because it’s “not difficult” doesn’t mean that it’s easy. And since most people who write programs don’t have my …
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“Everything I need to know I learned from tiny pretend people.”
A kid and his mother playing the Sims 3. It wouldn’t seem like a learning experience, but you might be surprised — there are six lessons listed there, and only one of them is something I’d expect. (Which one is left as an exercise for the reader. 😉 ) I think our generation has pretty …
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A Rant About Computer Books
I really, really wish that computer book authors would pay more attention to their work. I know that I’ve mentioned the Montgomery reduction algorithm here before, and the sad state of nearly all of the few things that describe it. I finally got it to work properly a while back, thanks in part to the …
“Wait, Computer Games That Look Like Office Productivity Apps?”
An interesting concept, at the very least. (I’m categorizing this under Productivity, but “anti-Productivity” might be a better description.)
Windows 7
Last Friday, I discovered that I needed a 64-bit version of Windows for development purposes. I had a 64-bit version of Windows XP on a spare machine, but I haven’t set it up since the recent move, and until we get more stuff organized, I frankly don’t have the room. But it occurred to me …
Version Control: The Big Picture
During my most recent software development project, which I’ve already blogged about extensively, I finally learned to use a version control system (VCS from here on) right. To fully understand this, you have to know where I was coming from. I learned to program in the early-to-mid eighties, and never even heard of a VCS …