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 …
Cipher Suite for webOS
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
Cipher Suite is now available in the official Palm App Catalog.
IIS Configuration with WiX and Appcmd
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 …
The NSA Questions My Lifestyle
The National Security Agency (NSA) has a video about their polygraph testing, which was critiqued by AntiPolygraph.org, and recently reported about on Slashdot. In 1991, while still a college student, I applied for a summer internship with the NSA, so I got to take one of these tests myself …