Engineering in the white spaces
____________________________________
Follow the bouncing malware 1-5
In the beginning, there was Joe Average. And Joe didst buy himself a computer and connecteth it to the Internet. And with his computer, Joe did surfeth, and readeth email, and playeth many games. And Joe looked upon the Internet, and it was Good.
Then one day, Joe didst unknowingly go to a Bad Place, and much Evil befell his shiny new computer.
How Evil? Very, VERY Evil.
Read more29-Sep-2005 23:59
____________________________________
Interesting blog by an English paramedic - some of it rather scary. Read more
29-Sep-2005 00:30
____________________________________
Len Holgate comes up with the greatest line of the assertion debate so far: "exploding comments". Read more
28-Sep-2005 21:20
____________________________________
Another salvo in the ongoing debate about assertions. Read more
26-Sep-2005 21:30
____________________________________
Microsoft changes how it builds software
An interesting Wall Street Journal article claims that Jim Allchin pushed past the doubts of Bill Gates and many Vista engineers to change the way that Vista is being developed. The article is rather short on details, but the basic concept is that Vista now has a central core upon which other services can be added (or pulled) without disrupting the entire system. Read more
25-Sep-2005 15:40
____________________________________
The intarweb is awash with debate about the best way to interview software developers. Even I pontificated about this subject a few months ago. That article of mine was somewhat short of solid advice, but it's hard to solve somebody else's recruitment problems. With the caveat that I'm talking about recruitment for in-house software, not shrink-wrap, here's the current list of questions that I use. Read more
20-Sep-2005 00:30
____________________________________
"Saying that Java is nice because it works on every OS is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on every gender." Read more
19-Sep-2005 20:55
____________________________________
There's been a lot of buzz recently about how Microsoft is becoming more transparent, with CTPs coming out of our ears, Rotor, hundreds of employee blogs, Robert Scoble apparently having blogging as his main job description, and the thriving mini-Microsoft blog. Read more
18-Sep-2005 14:00
____________________________________
The Earth was built to last. It is a 4,550,000,000-year-old, 5,973,600,000,000,000,000,000-tonne ball of iron. It has taken more devastating asteroid hits in its lifetime than you've had hot dinners, and lo, it still orbits merrily. So my first piece of advice to you, dear would-be Earth-destroyer, is: do NOT think this will be easy. Read more
17-Sep-2005 22:15
____________________________________
Len Holgate recently wrote an article with the headline "Assert is evil". In fact the article itself is rather more moderate than its headline, but I still found stuff with which I could disagree. Of course, I need to be careful about too much disagreement as we're actually geographical neighbours - I think he lives just down the road, although we've never met. Read more
17-Sep-2005 21:30
____________________________________
While playing around in SQL Server 2000 yesterday, I came across a couple of tips that might be useful to somebody out there in SQL land. Read more
15-Sep-2005 22:10
____________________________________
Improving Just-In-Time debugging
Just-In-Time (JIT) debugging is what happens when your .NET application has an unhandled exception that bubbles up to the top of the stack and causes a crash (the default behaviour). When a crash occurs, and depending on registry settings, the CLR presents you with a list of debuggers and asks you to choose which one you want to use to investigate the crash. Read more
15-Sep-2005 21:25
