December, 2003

Over at IBM, there's a series on secure programming . It's mainly focused on Linux, but you can apply most things to Windows as well. Thanks to Slashdot for that one. I just discovered (yeah, I'm slow) they also have an RSS feed . Yahoo!

Have a look at the home page for Mac OS X . Now have a look at the home page for Windows XP Home . Which would you rather buy? The Mac home page has beautiful graphics, some product descriptions (in fairly colloquial English -- “scads of...

Another quickie. Raymond has a comment that illustrates a common theme in the IT industry: it's one rule for Microsoft, one rule for everyone else. And some people would say that's fair, because we have a monopoly on desktop operating systems (and...

Raymond has had a few blogs about privacy policies lately. It has motivated me to write a little bit about a bad experience I am currently having through no fault of my own, although unlike Raymond I don't feel comfortable naming the particular company...

A quick post this time (I promise!) Pop Quiz, hotshot. What's more secure: (i) a wet paper bag holding a couple of stale tic-tacs (site requires Flash); or (ii) an industrial-strength safe holding $1M in diamonds? Is security a property...

My apologies for not writing much lately; there are a few things I would like to talk about from some recent usability studies we did, but I first need to find out if I can talk about them or not. I'm not worried about getting permission to give away...

Nary a day goes by when Rober t Scoble doesn't have something on his blog about RSS versus ATOM or some such thing. Personally, I haven't really looked into either format much; I just use Newsgator to read a handful of blogs in Outlook. But I am now working...

I'm posting this with a hacked-up version of WordBlogX that has been trivially modified to talk to the .Text web service instead. Hopefully it will all go well, in which case I can continue using Word to write my posts, and sooner or later Rob will figure...

This is a quick test of the .Text web service. Please ignore!

New home at http://weblogs.asp.net/ptorr/...

This is just a quick post to say I've moved to weblogs.asp.net and after this week won't be posting on gotdotnet any more. Now it looks like I'll have to figure out how to patch up WordBlogX to work with .Text; assuming it has a web service interface...

Just playing...

Taking a leaf out of Eric 's book, I'm going to re-post a question I received in mail here. The question was (essentially): How do you re-define a function in JScript, and keep the parameters intact? Simple! There are (at least...

British English tends to have more irregular forms than American English (learnt vs learned, spelt vs. spelled, etc.) so why don't we say "ust" instead of "used"?

A book about the decline of language in America...

A link on Slashdot points to a rant about why one developer thinks that administrators are the scum of the earth. There are some good counter arguments on the comments page. It's interesting because we spend quite a bit of time at work trying to...

Eric recently had a post that generated a lot of comments about how the spelling of various words in the English language has changed over the years. One thing that drives me batty is the number of people who don't know (or, perhaps more accurately, can...

There are at least nine different meanings of "save" in an average application; the computer doesn't really know what you mean when you hit that little floppy-disk icon on the toolbar....

VSTO blog at http://weblogs.asp.net/vsto/...