Topics pertaining to software and software development, mostly for Microsoft Windows or Linux, and mostly in C or C++.
Joel Spolsky has a new Inc. article online now, about how he was kind of forced into implementing middle management at Fog Creek Software, the company he co-founded and runs. I must admit, I greeted the title of the article with some skepticism. Like him, I have unpleasant memories of middle managers. I worked for …
Continue reading ‘“How Hard Could It Be?: How I Learned to Love Middle Managers”’ »
I like this review, especially the somewhat-snarky paragraph at the end: All in all, IE 8 beta 2 sucks a lot less than one might expect, given IE6 and IE7. It feels like the product is truly catching up to the current state of the browser art, and the fact that my brother-in-law will get …
Continue reading ‘“Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2’s (Familiar) New Features”’ »
The head of Project Badger (at the much larger company that bought it a few years ago) recently moved on to other duties in the company. We talked briefly just before he did, and he said that he’d learned a lot from me. I was startled, but I figured that was just a stock corporate-speak …
At the end of my last iPod Touch entry, I mentioned that I was going to try jailbreaking the Touch so I could load music onto it from Linux, instead of relying on a VMware Windows machine. I did so. Everything seemed to work with no problem, but after I loaded any song into it, …
Continue reading ‘iPod Touch, Part IV: Apple Screws Linux Users Again’ »
If you have any sympathy at all for Microsoft, you’ve gotta wince at this story. It’s not the first time something like that has happened either… on a trip to Toronto a few years ago, I saw an absolutely HUGE electronic billboard — which was showing a gigantic Windows error message-box instead of the ads …
So, having learned that the iPod Touch probably could replace my slowly-dying Palm TX, I’ve picked one up a few days ago. The box said that it required Windows or Mac OS X, which is an irritation but not a problem; I have this system set up to dual-boot between Ubuntu Linux and Windows XP, …
Continue reading ‘iPod Touch, Part III: Adventures in Data-Moving’ »
Lovely. Okay developers, time to get moving — add public-key code-signing stuff, so that your programs can tell whether they’re getting a legitimate update or not. Don’t know how, and don’t have time to learn? Try the GnuPG Made Easy (GPGME) library. I’m happy to say that Ubuntu Linux isn’t affected by this, because it …
Continue reading ‘“Exploit code targets Mac OS X, iTunes, Java, Winzip…”’ »
As mentioned previously, my company sold the rights to one of our previous Windows software products to a much larger company a few years ago. The much larger company keeps my company on retainer to advise them on the product’s continued development. The product (let’s call it Project Badger) was originally written more than ten …
If you run your own website, you might have been following the brouhaha over the new LinkScanner feature of GriSoft’s AVG virus scanner. I can’t find this text on the GriSoft website, but it was quoted in a comment on another blog I was reading today: Following is AVG’s official response to LinkScanner concerns: We’d …
Interesting Terms of Service on Google Gears… not only does it explicitly exclude open-source products from the usual disassembly prohibitions, but it enjoins you (if you develop code that uses it) to “protect the privacy and legal rights of those users” (section 5.5). Not the sort of thing you generally see in a software license, …