Well, after a week of investigation, I’ve settled on a social network for books: Shelfari. It’s attractive, easy-to-use, easy to manipulate many books at once, they have a mobile version, and I have one friend on it (who invited me).  Goodreads.com also looked nice, and it almost won. bookwormr.com, the one I originally found was [...]

In order to kick my unit testing skills up a notch, I’ve been reading a lot about it lately. Today I had the thought: “Unit testing only helps already-good programmers.” My reasoning is that bad programmers are going to write bad tests, or not enough test cases, or bad test cases, or won’t take the [...]

This is really simple and probably common, but it’s a useful tip anyway. Say you need to set a form’s cursor to the wait cursor while you accomplish something. You would do something like this: this.Cursor = Cursors.WaitCursor;   //do something   this.Cursor = Cursors.Default; Of course, what if “do something” throws an exception? Then [...]

I found a great site I wanted to share with everybody: bookwormr. To explain: I’ve got 3 large books on my nightstand at the moment: Scotland: The Story of a Nation – Magnus Magnusson – Much of my heritage is Scottish, and I got intensely interested in Scottish history during our trip to Edinburgh last [...]

Thank you for your increasing interest in my blog, which is apparently slowly gaining in popularity with legitimate readers too! Unfortunately, my dear spammers, you are idiots. 100% of comments on this blog are moderated–99.9% are filtered before I ever see them. The rest are fairly obvious scams. None of your stupid spammy comments will [...]

My wife sent me a link to the Amazon Kindle the other day, and asked, “Have you heard of this? what do you think?” I think she wants one. I have to admit that the thought of such a device is appealing. I have tried reading e-books on my PDA and BlackBerry occasionally, but other [...]

Lutz Roeder’s .Net Reflector has been discussed on many blogs before, but I want to give it an additional plug. I recently had to emulate some C# serial-port code in our C++ app. The .Net SerialPort class is great, easy-to-use, and works well. Unfortunately, we’re using a C++ serial port library that does not support [...]

Alex Shalman has a great post at zenhabits about how to avoid letting your brain decay into apathy and atrophy. It’s a great call to action, to find ways of self-improvement. I think the behaviors listed here dovetail very nicely with the attributes of highly effective programmers. By continuing to do as we always have, [...]

1. Write out all floating point values between 0 and 1. 2. Write tic-tac-toe in Brainf*&$ 3. What is 2128 in decimal? 4. Solve traveling salesman in constant  time (O(1)) 5. How many grains of sand are there in the Sahara (at a given instant, assuming constant, well-defined boundaries)? 6. Implement quicksort on a spherically [...]