As I've mentioned previously, Windows Vista has significantly improved user access control, so at long last you don't need to run as an Administrator all the time. Instead any operations that require administrative privileges prompt for a password before allowing...
I got a new machine for work about a month ago now. My last machine is now over three years old, and had numerous problems. The soundcard failed over a year ago, the hard drive failed back in May (replaced),...
Joseph Cooney has proposed a much simpler certification program than the hassles you have to go through for Vista certification. Just follow the four easy steps. Compile your application code. Getting the latest version of any recent code changes from...
From The Old New Thing today: A customer asked the following question (paraphrased): Does the Windows XP Add/Remove Programs control panel expose a scriptable object model? We want our program to open the Add/Remove Programs control panel and uninstall the...
Continue reading "Uninstalling your competitors' software..." »
Oli at The PC Spy has done some interesting research into how software slows Windows down. Here's an extract from the results: Sofware% Boot Delay% CPU Delay% Disk Delay Norton Internet Security 200646202369 McAfee VirusScan Enterprise 8 7 20 2246...
From The Daily WTF today about the web portal of a certain (unnamed) government agency: Whomever set up the servers must have had a hard time figuring out how to get the web server open to the “outside” while still...
I've finally got around to upgrading to Suse Linux 10.2, and I must say it was much less painful than I thought. While I've recompiled Linux kernels before, and upgraded many individual packages, I've never done a full OS upgrade....
At long last this has been announced officially. Rhapsody (my product) has been selected by the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) in Atlanta to share information between all the state hospitals and the CDC itself. Rhapsody will convert...
Currently we are migrating from Exchange to GroupWise for our e-mail and calendar services. The main reason for this appears to be the significantly reduced cost - from what I gather, the licensing model for GroupWise is based on the...
NTFS is the Windows high performance file system, initially designed for Windows NT to get around a lot of the problems of FAT. It has, however, a poor reputation for becoming very fragmented and then running very slowly. Well, it...
So we've been setting up a new subversion server recently and eventually got it live yesterday, and things seemed to go smoothly. That is until some commits started failing randomly. Subversion has the concept of commit hooks, and in particular,...
Source control is critical for any software project lasting more than about one day. It is where you store all of your source code, and provides a complete history of all changes to the source code over time. This is...
We don't have any bugs, just undocumented features... If you've ever used software before then of course you've run into software bugs. Some are major, some are minor, and some are a real pain in the arse. I've been thinking...
I was looking for a sample URL to use in one of our Rhapsody tutorials, and then I remembered this interesting post from Raymond Chen some time ago: When writing documentation, one often has need to come up with a...
I've got a Dell Inpsiron 6000 laptop which is generally pretty good (except for the support). However, the built-in microphone doesn't seem to work at all, and apparently doesn't work on quite a few of their laptops. So I got...
Does anyone else find that the New Zealand Herald website eats up a lot of CPU time? I find that if a leave it open, it frequently ends up consuminng around 20% CPU indefinitely (well, at least till I notice...
Sorry for the lack of blogging over the last few days. I've been busy using my normal blogging time setting up Linux on my laptop. I haven't run Linux on my computer for quite a few years (I've used it...
Here's some very useful error messages... And while installing Windows Live Messenger... Hat Tip: The Daily WTF...
From today's Daily WTF: At my previous job, I worked on a team that built automated scanning systems. The software controlled a motor that moved the scanning head over the piece of material, took data points in a grid pattern,...
Well, we at last managed to release Rhapsody 2.3 and Symphonia 3.8.4 last Tuesday after about 4 months hard work. It was touch and go towards the end but we managed to get there on schedule - I set the...
As usual, The Daily WTF has some interesting perversions of IT. Here's a sample of their error messages today:...
Paul Graham has a very interesting article on patents, specifically on whether software patents are a good thing or not (Are Software Patents Evil?). He argues that software patents are not really any different from other forms of patents -...
There an intersting technical discussion going on at The Old New Thing about a specific backwards compatibility problem with Windows Vista. Raymond Chen, the author of that blog, has been one of the core Windows developers for many years (since...
Jason Fried writes briefly about the development process for Basecamp. He claims that functional specifications are pointless as they simply lead to an illusion of agreement. He says instead that you should simply build the interface. If necessary, write a...
There's a funny thread on the Joel on Software discussion group about Java web frameworks.Let's pretend I've decided to build a spice rack.I've done small woodworking projects before, and I think I have a pretty good idea of what I...
Stuff has an interesting article today about the important of communications skills in the IT industry. I have to agree with it - communications skills are essesntial in the IT industry. As part of my job I perform a large...
Continue reading "Communications skills important in IT industry" »
As I have mentioned previously, I use Awasu as my feedreader of choice, to read RSS feeds from now around 30 sites. This saves me a lot of time as I don't need to go and visit each of those...
The Daily WTF has a post containing a number of really weird and funny error messages from various applications. I quite like this one:...
VMware has announced that their new VMware Server edition will be free. For those who haven't used VMware before, it is a great tool for creating virtual machines. This is extremely useful for software development where it is necessary to...
Ben Goodger (an almost New Zealander - he spent most of his life in Auckland) is the lead engineer for Firefox. He describes the history of the development of Firefox for those few that may be interested in such things.For...
Stuff reports that Yahoo and America Online plan to start charging an optional fee (1c) to e-mail senders to allow them to send e-mail directly to a user's inbox, without it going through any junkmail filters.Junkmail filters can frequently be...
This site, like many other blogs has an RSS feed available. RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a method of allowing people to be notified when a website is changed, without the need to manually check the site itself regularly. It...
Joel Spolsky wrote an article recently called "The Perils of Java Schools" where he expresses his concern about Java as a teaching language (reserving his opinion of its value as an implementation language for a future article). His premise seems...
Continue reading "Joel Spolsky on the Perils of Java Schools" »
My name is Dave Bryant, the author and sometimes philosopher of this website. I've been writing about theology and apologetics for the last few years and recently starting rambling a bit about politics and software development as well. More about me or contact me.
There is a complete archive of all articles I have written going back to 2000, and links to the most popular articles are available directly in this sidebar. New articles and other ramblings will first appear on the main page, and through the RSS feed (what is RSS?).
Copyright © 2000-2009 to David Bryant.
