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Monday, March 17, 2008 9:00 AM

Arguing by-example vs. by-principle

You can argue by providing examples supporting your case. Alternatively, you can argue by appealing to more general principles. For example, in arguing that "exposing public fields is bad," you could say: By-principle: "It breaks abstraction and encapsulation."
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Friday, January 04, 2008 8:00 AM

Zune's killer feature

Zune' s killer feature (according to my 2 year old daughter) is the box. For the 4gb/8gb, the box is sturdily built and has 2 parts that slide together. Truly a product for the whole family.
Posted by jmstall | 3 Comments
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Saturday, December 29, 2007 1:24 PM

It never works

Last night, right before falling asleep, I recall having some great idea for a blog entry. I was too tired to write it down, but I said the 2 word summary aloud and was absolutely sure I'd remember in the morning. Now all I remember was that the 2nd word
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Tuesday, December 25, 2007 11:28 AM

Merry Christmas!

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Wednesday, December 19, 2007 2:30 AM

Grocery stores and cyclical dependency graphs

Here's a silly conversation that demonstrates a problem in resolving cyclical dependency graphs that my wife + I had at the grocery store: Me: [looking for purchases to get in the Christmas mood] "Let's get some walnuts " Wife: [predisposed against the
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Thursday, November 29, 2007 11:08 PM

Stateless card dealing

How many times have you had somebody deal a hand of cards and then say "um, everybody count your cards". A common reason for this to happen is that the dealer loses count of how many cards are dealt. For example, dealing cards to 4 players may look like:
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Thursday, September 20, 2007 10:41 PM

(A==B)==(X==Y)

I used to hate the expression: (A==B)==(X==Y), but I've grown very fond of it. My prior feelings of contempt stem from my desire to avoid obscure language features. But I figure when properly parenthesized, this isn't so obscure and can be pretty useful
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Wednesday, September 05, 2007 1:04 AM

Feature Parity vs. Scenario Parity

It can be easy to miss the forest through the trees. Sometimes there are emergent properties from the individual feature items, which in turn provide some new "implicit" feature to the end-user. Such features can lead to very useful end-user scenarios,
Posted by jmstall | 2 Comments
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Friday, August 24, 2007 7:46 AM

Tennis ambiguity

My wife and I were playing Tennis. We're both pretty new to it and knew we were supposed to hit the ball back and forth but couldn't remember the finer details of scoring. I thought that it was best of 5 sets. She thought it was best of 3 sets. We learned
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Tuesday, August 14, 2007 10:15 AM

Indirection is funny

In code, unnecessary layers of indirection can be confusing and lead to bug. Do you really need to write code like: ***p = ****q. However, in natural language, technically correct usages of indirection can be funny and sound sophisticated. "We need a
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Friday, July 27, 2007 2:53 PM

68+ "Visual Studio 2008 beta 2 is released" blog entries in 24 hours.

I just counted 68 blog entries on http://blogs.msdn.com posted within the last 24 hours with a title like "Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 is released". I doubt I have anything new to add beyond Soma's post and what the other 68 already said. Brian Harry has
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Wednesday, July 11, 2007 12:10 PM

A 30x speed improvement

Going from 8 minutes down to 15 seconds. Not bad. What's the secret? Synchronizing the traffic lights. I'm talking about my evening commute home. There are a set of 4 traffic lights I hit to get out of my Microsoft building and onto the closest highway
Posted by jmstall | 5 Comments
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Sunday, July 08, 2007 8:00 AM

JScript vs. Nintendo DS

You've probably seen (C# + Silverlight 1.1) clobbering JScript at Chess in the Silverlight Chess demo . The Nintendo DS has a chess program, Clubhouse Games , which isn't very good, as I mentioned earlier here . So then I wondered who would win at chess:
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Thursday, June 21, 2007 3:08 PM

Test what you Ship, Debug what you Test

Test what you ship . This should be obvious. Debug what you test . When you test, you'll find failures, and you'll need to debug those failures. So you need to be able to debug what you test. Therefore you're going to need to be able to Debug what you
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Wednesday, June 13, 2007 2:08 PM

Answer to Number puzzle

Here are answers + commentary to the number puzzle I posted yesterday, which was, fill in the digits: ABC + DEF GHI OR prove it's impossible. I originally moderated the answers but have now gone back and published them all. My conclusion is that the folks
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