I saw this today and found it very interesting: Hg Init: a Mercurial tutorial by Joel Spolsky.
Author Archives: ksb
“Writing Solid Code” Plus 17
My house-move is coming up soon, and after a review of my technical books, I decided that some books simply had to be re-read. “Writing Solid Code – Microsoft’s Techniques for Developing Bug-Free C Programs” by Steve Maguire fell into this category. Originally published in 1993, it was a book I had strongly positive memories about.
DIY, Paint-Drips, and Code Refactoring
I’m moving soon! So, for various reasons, I am doing a whole load of painting-and-decorating to prepare to rent out my current flat. Today I was putting the final coat of enamel onto a radiator, and while doing this I was really noticing the remnants of old paint-drips that I had not quite sanded away in my preparation. Now, overall, I know the radiator will look a lot better tomorrow than it did a couple of days ago… but I still find those historic drips bothersome!
Moving to Windows 7 x64 for Developers
I recently purchased and installed a new boot SSD, and rather than worry about copying my installation, I decided to get Windows 7; and further; to move to 64 bit. I had actually previously purchased a 64 bit version of Vista, but been baffled by an issue with lack of support for VPN 64-bit software by Cisco, so I ended up overwriting it with a 32 bit install.
More Keys is More Secure. Right?
Last week, we had a heated discussion at work about encryption. We want to encrypt some data in our database, and I proposed that we go with a single private-key encryption mechanism (ignore which exact one for the moment), and my colleagues were pretty-much unanimously suggesting a ‘key per row’ approach. In this post I am going to attempt to explain the rough background, and why I felt their mechanism might not be best.
Data Model Changes and Replication
Just a little reminder note today on the simplest way to make data-model changes in SQL Server 2005 when the database is replicated via transactional replication. This is from my own personal experience of replication and very-much muddling my way through learning how to use it effectively. Otherwise, this posts presumes you are familiar with Replication Monitor and so on.
Boolean Expressions
The C# code-base I work on has hundreds of places where I have felt a boolean expression could have been used to simplify the code substantially.
Achieving Faster ADSL Speeds…
…or “How to improve your appalling ADSL speeds to what they told you you’d get speeds”
…or “How I split my ADSL and telephone signals and shoved them down a Cat5e cable”.
Phantom Code
I’ve just worked on a little support problem that was quite interesting – although not in a good way – as unfortunately it demonstrates failures at so many stages of the specification and development process that I am quite disappointed to be associated with it. Associated, but not the cause of it, to be clear 🙂
Why’s Ruby Guide Update
I’ve just updated Why’s Ruby Guide pdf to include Chapter 7’s images; go to the specific page with updates. Thanks to Andy Matuschak for pointing this out to me, and giving me a link to where the documents are still available on the internet 🙂