I'm reading Where Wizards Stay Up Late which is a book about the people that invented the internet. It's the story of ARPA and BBN and the creation of essentially the first computer network. I ran across an interesting quote from one of the programmers...

By now you're all probably stuffed full of food and staring at a pile presents not to mention wrapping paper, ribbons, bows, and boxes. I hope you all had a great day. Enjoy your time away from the regular routine for a while. Take the time to do something...

Every year my group of friends undertakes a Secret Santa gift exchange. When we started we each drew names from a hat and bought a gift for the names we drew. Being budding programmers, we soon dispensed with the hat and wrote a program to do the work...

That's the subtext on the "Meetings" inspirational poster from Despair.com . What it means to me is that you'll never get a great design out of a committee. When designing a piece of software, you want to get input from many people but how do you keep...

One of the things I own at Microsoft is test development for audio in Windows. For Vista we did a lot of work to rewrite the audio system and make it more stable and enable more features. Just recently ExtremeTech published an article on the State of...

This is a bit dated but it's worth mentioning anyway now that Vista is officially launched for businesses. Each major release of Windows comes with a startup sound. Vista is no different. It has a sound created by Robert Fripp. I was lucky enough to be...

Several months back I wrote about unit testing. Following that I received a question from a reader about how to actually carry out writing unit tests. What should be tested? How much is enough? There is no single answer to these questions but I can give...