The Holiday Amazon Box Problem
By the time Christmas comes around, our house is usually awash with boxes from Amazon. It gets a bit tricky at that point, because I'm never sure if the box is something I ordered to give to my family, or something someone else sent me as a gift. In the …
I want my webOS
It's become fairly clear that HP is not webOS' savior. It's also unlikely that webOS can come back from the dead for the second time. But it makes me sad, since webOS and its devices hit a sweet spot that no one managed to exploit.
The currently winning smartphone platforms …
Batch File Libraries
I've always considered batch files as kind of ghetto. Anything too complex devolves into a morass of gotos and labels. But I recently put together some install batch scripts that I was actually pleased with, including a clean mechanism for sharing common code.
A while back, I used WiX to …
Sprint Makes Me Laugh
I got this flyer from Sprint. I wonder if they wrote that "protecting more than ever before" with a straight face or what.
OK, Maybe TurboTax Is Worth It
I was a bit of a masochist this year. I actually did my federal taxes twice, trying to figure out if there is a cheaper alternative to using TurboTax. But TurboTax, in spite of costing more, ended up being the cheaper option by a long shot.
The whole United States …
Suppressing CA1062 with a Helper Function
I think Visual Studio's static analysis warning for checking parameters for null before they are used is generally a good idea, but the code to check the parameters can get really tedious.
Before addressing the tedium, though, why does it even matter whether you check for null arguments and throw …
Evernote vs. OneNote
I've used both Evernote and Microsoft OneNote for several years. While there are lots of extensive comparisons of the applications around, I think the difference between them comes down to just a few broad issues.
Evernote has these things going for it:
OneNote's list is shorter:
Migrating from TFS to SVN
I've just spent the past few days migrating a Team Foundation Server source repository to Subversion. It took longer and was more difficult than I expected it to be.
Of course, the easy way is to just get the latest from the TFS repository and add all of the files …
Speaking of Mice... Good vs. Evil
I finally had to throw the shiny white excuse for a mouse into the drawer and pull out a trusty VX Nano. The Apple mouse suffers from the form over function malady: it is apparently too damaging to the aesthetic to actually have separate left and right buttons. Instead the …
Why a Mouse is Faster than the Keyboard?
I remember reading an article by Bruce Tognazzini (AKA “Tog”) many years ago about how extensive research at Apple indicated that using the mouse is faster than using shortcut keys on the keyboard. This always seemed wrong to me, but after using a Mac somewhat regularly for the past few …