I was about to write this article anyway when XKCD posted this comic which reinforces my point.  People act differently in email than they do in person.  Everyone knows this to be the case, but they often don't act like it.  Usually when...

.vimrc is the config file for Vim. It can be stored in the Vim directory or in your user directory. With greater protection of the Program Files directory on Vista, I've gotten into the habit of keeping it in my user directory (c:\users\steverowe on most...

By popular demand (seriously), here is an update of the netcasts I'm listening to on a regular basis. Audio: This Week In Tech - Round table discussion of technology topics. Sometimes should be known as This Week in Twitter. This Week In Media - Round...

At long last, there is a preliminary fix for the corruption issue that has dogged WHS since its release. The WHS team released the fix with its Power Pack 1 beta. See their blog post for details and a link to download it. In addition to the corruption...

Two things I discovered about searching: * will search forward for the word under the cursor. No longer do I have to type /WordUnderTheCursor. # does the same thing, but goes backwards. It's like ?WordUnderTheCursor. g* will search for any...

The Manager Tools podcast has an interesting series on better writing. This isn't a management-specific topic. Rather it is something everyone can benefit from. In a day and age where so much communication is via e-mail, having the ability to communicate...

We recently went through a round of test spec reviews on my team. Having read a good number of test specs in a short period of time, I came to a realization. It is imperative to know the failure condition in order to write a good test case. This is at...

A friend of mine just posted an interesting anecdote about the difference in the world we grew up in and the one our kids are growing up in. In his case, his son didn't know what a stereo was. He'd never seen one. Music in his world comes from an iPod...

Jeremy Miller gives his reasons for refactoring . He gives two over-arching reasons. The first is "To remedy a deficiency in code, design, or architectural quality" and the second, "To make a forthcoming change to the code easier." I'm very much in agreement...