Buggin' My Life Away

I had thought this was a rather well-known trick, but, after reacquanting myself with Alexandrescu's Modern C++ Design , I've come to believe that it's not at as well-known as I thought. So, I thought I'd share it here for posterity. It's common to...

I've had a number of people, both in comments and in private e-mail, ask me about continuing development on Mac Messenger. Until now, I could only give cryptic answers to those questions. No longer. Mac Messenger 5.0 was released to the web today. ...

...through Hyde Park. Way cool!   Rick Currently playing in iTunes: Shine On You Crazy Diamond (Parts I-V) by Pink Floyd

Today's theme seems to be names. Dave Winer and Kosso are wondering about Robert Scoble's middle initial . Sorry, Robert, but I've already staked a claim to having all the relevant initials . On almost related note of vanity, having a last name that...

Well, APress is advertising it , and Amazon is taking orders for it , so I suppose I can now publicly revel in the fact that Joel Spolsky selected my essay on Mac Word 6 for his collection of essays, The Best Software Writing I, Selected and Introduced...

Dave Winer is looking for a Mac developer with knowledge of Frontier and MacBird to work on his latest project: an OPML editor. According to Dave, the Mac version is stalled. If I didn't just get a load of work heaped on me, I'd be sorely tempted...

Dave Winer provided this link to an article posted by Dave Luebbert. Dave Luebbert was the development manager for Mac Word 5.0, and was my first boss at Microsoft. Dave (L) is an incredible guy. He's a musician, and a very big fan of Jazz. He's...

I've seen quite a few people comment in blogs that the endian issue I mentioned yesterday won't turn out to be much of an issue. Well, you can't say I didn't warn you about drinking the Kool-Aid, but it you still have some lingering doubts that there...

So the rumors have been true. Apple is moving to Intel processors, which, in some ways, makes sense. At least it does from Apple's point of view. The Kool-Aid has never really affected their ability to figure out what's right for Apple regardless of the...

Scoble dropped the hint , and Mary Jo Foley spilled the beans . C|New has also jumped the gun on this . There's a piece on Channel 9 over here , and it won't be long before the official press release is here . (I waited more than 10 minutes past the deadline...

C++ provides us with a number of ways we can shoot ourselves in the foot. If you work as a developer on any sizeable software project, there is quite likely a set of rules about limitations as to the C++ language features you’re allowed to use: no...

OK, so I have a smart play list that I call "Random LRP". Basically, it's like the party shuffle, except that it limits itself to songs that I haven't heard in the past two weeks. My library is large enough, that the list is always full at 100 songs....

Those of you who've been around a bit know that Kenny Wolf used to work in Mac BU. His last gig here was as development manager (my boss' boss). At one point, Metrowerks' CodeWarrior page had a quote from Kenny, but they've since changed their site to...

It wouldn't surprise me for people to wonder how it’s possible for reasonably competent programmers to introduce bugs by making seemingly innocuous changes to some program’s code. The short answer is that we’re often too clever for our...

Over the past couple of days, I've received some e-mail messages purporting to be from PayPal. Each message claims that I've added an e-mail address (a different e-mail address in each message) to my account, and gives a link that I can follow to verify...

The MSDN blogs have moved to new digs. We're no longer running on .Text. We're now running on Community Server 1.0 . Special kudos go to Betsy Aoki , Scott Watermasysk and their minions. I know you're singin' the got dot net blues, Betsy, but I think...

I think Roz got tired of doing the twice-weekly commute between San Jose and Redmond. In any case, I am not moving to California! Know anyone who's willing to hire an over-the-hill Mac geek? Rick Currently playing in iTunes: Wherever You Go by Pat Metheny...

Those of us who've been programming the Mac for a few years have some fond memories of the old Macintosh Programmer's Workbench (MPW). It was very much like the Terminal Window on OS X, but had a few quirks of its own. Among those quirks were the error...

When I first started this blog, I said I'd talk about music from time to time. I've been searching for the right opportunity to do so, but, until now, none have presented themselves. This morning, however, NPR's Morning Edition had a piece on Wes Montgomery...

The University of Maryland, Baltimore County has an online usability survey of GNOME. The timing is rather serendipitous in light of my earlier remarks on user feedback and GNOME . It's entirely likely that more than a few people who commented on that...

Todd Bishop’s story in yesterday's Seattle Post-Intelligencer about Professor Sandeep Krishnamurthy’s fisking of Word’s grammar checker is making the rounds. It even got a blurb on NPR’s Morning Edition today. Word’s grammar checker is a by-product of...

Martin Sevior wonders how one talks to me . Well, you come over to my blog, and you leave a comment. I'd have answered Martin's question by leaving a comment there, but his blog doesn't have comments turned on.   Rick Currently playing in iTunes: Whipping...

Due to a combination of server issues and a wetware problem on my part, a couple of my posts from early Friday got deleted. Unfortunately, any comments people made on those posts got deleted too. If you had anything to say about OSS and Deaf Developers...

I'm absolutely certain that something like this has happened to you. I was putting together some quick and dirty play lists in iTunes based on a random shuffle smart playlist I'd created (basically, a random list of 100 songs that I hadn't listed to in...

I came across this rant about feature requests in Gnome. I have to confess a sense of siding with the OSS developers on this one. The author of the editorial doesn't get into full swing until she quotes the following statement from the Gnome web site...