01 01 Dec

Mazel Tov to the elder Spolsky on his latest book Language Policy. No, not computer languages.

Craftsmanship

Writing code is not production, it's not always craftsmanship (though it can be), it's design. Design is that nebulous area where you can add value faster than you add cost. The New York Times magazine has been raving about the iPod and how Apple is one of the few companies that knows how to use good design to add value. But I've talked enough about design, I want to talk about craftsmanship for a minute: what it is and how you recognize it.

Summer Internships

Are you a college student looking for a summer internship in software development? Fog Creek Software is the place for you! Details...

15 15 Dec

This month's Book of the Month is an excuse for me to write a long treatise about how modern software development is a world mostly divided into two large ideological cultures: The Culture of Unix Programming and The Culture of Windows Programming.

22 22 Dec

I've been sanity-checking FogBUGZ for Unix by installing various OSes under VMware.

Easiest Linux to install: RedHat 9. Mandrake is not bad but still uses some jargon that makes it not quite ready for prime time, for example, you would not be able to get through setup without knowing what "root" means. SuSE went to a lot of trouble to create a good setup, then they go out of their way to make it difficult and slow to install if you don't pay them for disks... my SuSE setup is still not done after several days of work. FreeBSD is pretty difficult to setup. Debian is very close to impossible, even for geeks.

The reason I need all these setups is because there are so many different ways to distribute software on Unix: we had to produce a .rpm, a .deb, a .tar.gz, and a .dmg for OS X.

(FogBUGZ for Unix system requirements: Unix, PHP 4, MySQL, Apache. It will ship in a few days).

31 31 Dec

I'll be DJing at the party tonight.

What you see here:

• Pioneer DJM-600 Professional DJ Mixer
• Two Pioneer CDJ-800 Digital Vinyl Turntables (acts like a turntable but plays CDs)
• Trusty Shure SM-58, mentioned earlier on this site
• Sony MDR-V700DJ Studio Monitor Series DJ Headphones
• Rotel RA-1060 Stereo integrated amplifier
• B&W speaker system
• Two IBM Thinkpad Laptops (one for visual effects and 2004 countdown; the other for playing MP3s)
• Harman Kardon DVD 25 Progressive Scan DVD Player
• (Offscreen) Pioneer 43" HDTV Plasma Monitor showing visual effects generated from the audio track using G-Force Gold

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