See PC World, "Top 50 Tech Visionaries ."

I spent some quality time reading RFC's once upon a time. It was the mid '90's and a client had a desktop application that depended on embedded FTP client that submitted batch jobs to a mainframe.

[Note. It was the 90's. Desktop computing …

The problem is this: parsing HTML from a variety of sources to create pleasant, easy-to-manipulate spreadsheets. HTML can represent the same data in a variety of ways, even within a single web site. What we have are several layers of parsing; layers which must be linked with increasingly simplified intermediate …

The updates to Building Skills in Object-Oriented Design cover some notes on testing, Agility and rework, two ongoing themes that can't be emphasized enough.

There were two small updates regarding testability.

First, creating Outcome instances — for testing purposes — does involve an ugly hack of repeating the payout odds. Since we're …

The email from a developer starts with a complaint and moves on to a plea: "I am constantly having to look at "IF o_status = 0". Code would be a lot more compact and easy to read if exceptions were used. Request favor: Please consider blogging about using exception handling vs …

Don't ask why. I can't explain it without violating a Non-Disclosure Agreement.

However, check this out. Search for NMEA Checksum VB.

• http://www.experts-exchange.com/Databases/GIS_GPS/Q_21413235.html
• http://www.codepedia.com/1/Calculating+and+Validating+NMEA+Checksums
• http://www.codepedia.com/1/Taking+Out+the+Garbage:+NMEA+Checksums …

This put me over the edge. Go deh! has a deep analysis of in "Duck Typing Done Right is Wrong ". It took a minute to parse, but the article is excellent. (A less obscure title would quote the original posting properly: '"Duck Typing Done Right" is Wrong', but that's less …

Here's some reference information on the "Cone of Uncertainty". JB says that Steve McConnell popularized it. There's an orphaned wikipedia article , a note on Construx.com's site, an article in the IEEE Digital Library, and an image on Microsoft's china site.

It's crap. Why do we use it? Because it …

Let's talk about parallel processing, something I prefer to call concurrent processing. It shows up in many places. Most OS's have concurrent processes. Applications like Apache have concurrent threads within a process for handling web requests. Oracle not only handles concurrent queries from multiple users, but you can define a …

The star schema represents data as a table of facts (measurable values) that are associated with the various dimensions of the fact. Common dimensions include time, geography, organization, product and the like. I'm working with some folks whose facts are a bunch of medical test results, and the dimensions are …

NUT. No Unit Test Cases. Need I say more? If there are not unit tests, this isn't real programming.

MCF and NCF. Minimal/No Use of Collections Framework. The MCF defect occurs when someone uses only the Array or Vector classes. The NCF defect occurs when someone uses only primitive …