Topics pertaining to software and software development, mostly for Microsoft Windows or Linux, and mostly in C or C++.
I started using Ubuntu three years ago, pushed to it by the advent of Windows Vista and Microsoft’s stated intention to force all Windows users to it. It was quite an effort to switch at that point, but it was a lot easier than it had been even a year earlier. And with every new …
Continue reading ‘“Ubuntu Lucid Lynx: free OS that Just Works”’ »
I stand behind this idea 100%. I’ve been using checklists for certain procedures (like software releases) for a number of years now, ever since I discovered that I was forgetting to do one or two things in each release. They were small things, but they made those releases look less professional. I just wish that …
Continue reading ‘“How to Start Using Procedure Checklists for Flawless Task Execution”’ »
Official censorship is bad, but people censoring what they’ll see on their own systems… I can live with that. I love the name too. 😉
We all know them, and politics in the last decade has had some notable representatives of the species. Now you can start to understand why they’re so confident. It’s not just dumb people. Most beginning programmers, for instance, are incredibly confident after only a few months of learning (and yes, I was one of them …
It seems that my frequent bouts of programming may have something to do with my lack of desire to socialize most of the time. From The Dilbert Blog: […] During one period of my life I wrote a number of computer programs that involved intense manipulation of objects in my mind, for hours each day. …
As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, my previous company was purchased by a larger company (I’ll call it BigCo for the rest of this entry) several years ago, and they still keep me on the payroll for consulting and the more intricate development work on Project Badger. BigCo is not a software company, it’s …
Just for balance, after yesterday’s thorough Microsoft-bashing post, here’s an Apple-bashing one that I thoroughly agree with too. I still plan to get a fourth-generation iPod Touch when they come out later this year, to replace my aging first-generation one, because it’s still the best non-cell-phone organizer available at present — but I’ll get it …
“Service pack-free OS life support switched off as few mourn passing”. And good riddance to bad rubbish. Too bad they’ll have to keep supporting Vista SP1 and SP2 for a while longer.
I’ve had to do a lot of work on my Windows 7 virtual machine recently, with my Linux virtual machine running at the same time. It was… painful. Even starting up the Win7 VM while the Linux VM was running meant twenty minutes or more of an essentially unusable machine. Starting up the Win7 VM, …
If you pay any attention to computer security news, you’ve almost certainly heard of the recently-discovered PDF hack that allows an attacker to embed arbitrary commands in a PDF file. Well, it’s worse than you thought — another researcher has a proof-of-concept hack that allows an infected PDF to infect every PDF file on the …
Continue reading ‘“The real dangers of PDF executable trickery”’ »