ESMITHY.NET

Sprint Makes Me Laugh

By Eric — Mon 23 May 2011

I got this flyer from Sprint. I wonder if they wrote that "protecting more than ever before" with a straight face or what.

Protecting more than ever before

$New program? \$1 more!$

OK, Maybe TurboTax Is Worth It

By Eric — Mon 28 March 2011 — 2 minute read

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

By Eric — Tue 15 March 2011 — 4 minute read

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

By Eric — Sat 05 March 2011 — 2 minute read

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:

Ubiquity
Price (free)

OneNote's list is shorter:

It's …

Migrating from TFS to SVN

By Eric — Tue 01 February 2011 — 7 minute read

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

By Eric — Thu 16 December 2010

Logitech vs. Apple mouse

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?

By Eric — Tue 26 October 2010 — 1 minute read

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 …

Cipher Suite for webOS

By Eric — Thu 30 September 2010 — 3 minute read

My son turns 14 this month, but we still have bedtime stories. Currently, the bedtime story is Simon Singh's The Code Book. While reading the description of the Vigenére cipher, I started to think about how I'd code up an implementation, and that led to my first webOS application. Cipher …

Cipher Suite - Classic ciphers for webOS

By Eric — Mon 06 September 2010

Cipher Suite is now available in the official Palm App Catalog.

IIS Configuration with WiX and Appcmd

By Eric — Fri 02 July 2010 — 2 minute read

I recently spent some time building an install package for a web application using WiX. There are some nice IIS extensions for WiX to help with that, but they're missing the ability to set some advanced properties, like an Application Pool's "Enable 32 Bit Applications" property.

Matt Honeycutt has a …