A View from Elsewhere

Not street legal, unfortunately.

A long thread on /. .

Quote of the day : I see spastic animated gifs as the standard medium for illustrating stories in the future. I believe that one day everything from children's stories to the Bible will be made whole by a seizure inducing barrage of poorly animated...

Freaky, from 2Spare : "The British actor Anthony Hopkins [who shot to fame as Hannibal Lecter] was delighted to hear that he had landed a leading role in a film based on the book The Girl From Petrovka by George Feifer. A few days after signing...

With all the hullabaloo about HD-DVD standards, we've missed a conversation about one of those " improvements " that people are trying to sell us.

Go into Outlook 2003 and sort by size. Look at the sizes: Tiny, Small, Medium, Large, Very Large, Huge, and Enormous. At what point did enormous become larger than huge? Why not Gigantic? Ginormous? Probably either decided by one bored dev with a deadline...

A quote I remember from about 6 years ago -- the CEO of CafePress, if I remember right, on one of the reasons he was at the time switching from Java to VB on .NET. I don't know why I remembered it just now.

Have you seen Try Ruby ? I want one for BASIC. And maybe for JScript. Except I want the interpreter to be in the browser, not on a server.

Cool . And that's only the documented ones.

As a way to get my head around the whole scenario, I wrote up the entire scenario as a kind of very high-level demo script and tied each action back to an experience in a value proposition. How much of this gets into the product is a matter of costing...

In a post about the role of the personas that for several years have defined developer division's thinking about the VB user (Mort), the C# user (Elvis), and the C++ user (Einstein), Scott Bellware says: Microsoft will probably remain bogged down...

One of my favorite satire sites is bbSpot . It's cool that the site creator managed to quite his day job to run this site and evidently makes enough off advertising to feed his family. In any event, I'm hooked, and his Top Eleven lists (" This One Goes...

The scenario I’m working on is for the “software enthusiast” – think of this person as the person who isn’t a professional programmer but really enjoys coding for recreation. To make this scenario hold together, I needed to invent a couple of placeholder...

Hmm . Maybe advertising in desktop software isn't so far fetched.

A long time ago, I worked at Imagine Publishing in Brisbane California. It's gone through several transformations, but some of the good things it did included launching the Imagine Games Network, or IGN. The fondest memories I have of working there all...

As you may or may not know, for Visual Studio "Orcas" planning we’re using a new process based on the concepts of scenarios, value propositions, experiences, and tasks. This system relies on the idea of a scenario – think of them as a very long, end-to...

Allen Downey has created a good traditional book for how to learn to program. What are the good non-traditional ways?

After my previous posts on language where several commenters pointed out that language is an evolving thing and that I don't get it and I retorted that it's my blog and I'll be a curmudgeon if I want to (Ed Note: not exactly an intellectual conversation...

The definition .

Points for every one of these computers you've worked on. Bonus points if you can name every foodstuff in this one .

MSN Messenger does it. Quicken does it. There’s a fair amount of Windows client software that has advertising – the same kind of banner ads present on most Web sites. But there are challenges to ad-powered client software, ranging from technical (how...

Up until today, all of the Express products (VB Express, VC# Express, VC++ Express, VJ# Express, and VWD) were not free -- I believe they had a value of $49 associated with them. We were doing a promotional discount to "free" but the jury was out on how...

Thanks to Kunal Mukerjee (my coauthor and the guy who wrote the entire first draft), our Thinkweek paper is done and submitted to the internal site. What's interesting about this year is that it's not just a couple of BillG's technical assistants making...

This video on Google makes the " Cog " commercial from Honda seem like a minor hat trick.

When I first thought about Tuscany, this was the first thing that sprang to mind: Hosted Team Foundation Server (TFS). I sensed that developers in small organizations want to have private access to TFS features such as check-in/check-out, defect tracking...