programming

A religious war is a very passionate conflict or argument in which each side is absolutely convinced of the objective truth of his own position on a matter of personal preferen...

Joomla - An Open Source CMS worth looking at. Joomla is an open source CMS system (CMS stands for Content Management System). I'm currently using Joomla to develop a numbe...

Many developers, especially those fresh out of college (though older developers are just as prone), fall into the trap of believing in an absolute concept of “the perfect...

This is a guide to setting up a new WHM/cPanel Server to be used for web hosting accounts. It is intended for web hosting company administrators and dedicated server owners. Fo...

One common objection I hear to TDD and writing unit tests is that it creates a lot of extra work to develop software. And this is true, but it does not give a complete picture....

One trap that developers need to be wary of is the mentality of the Hammer Truism . This states that When the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail...

When searching for source code in a particular language, what do the words being searched on tell you about that language? Koders.com publishes an interesting Open Source Ze...

Now I like to take shots at myself for producing drivel now and then, but today, I’m going to take a shot at someone else’s drivel. I really should be working right...

As a kid, one of my favorite tools I had was a shiny red cased Victorinox swiss army knife. I’d carry that sucker around with me everywhere, using the main blade to tackl...

“There are very few true artists in computer programming, most are just house painters.” - Tim Bryce’s Law Management consultant Tim Bryce doesn’...

Most of the time when I’m testing my code, I only test it using the en-US culture since, ...well..., I speak English and I live in the U.S. Isn’t the U.S. the only ...

I don’t know about you, but every company I’ve ever worked at had a Fort Knox like system in place for deploying code to the production server. Typically, deploymen...

Have you ever wanted to take a look at the internals of the .NET Framework? Sure you can (and should) fire up Reflector and see the Base Class Libraries, but what about the f...

UPDATE: Whoops! I linked to the wrong versions of putty and pageant. I corrected the links. UPDATE: June 1, 2006 Sourceforge has changed the CVSROOT in use for each proje...

Disclaimer As is customary when a non-lawyer attempts to discuss the finer points of the law, I must start with a disclaimer. I know some fine lawyers, but I, sir, am not ...

Jeff Atwood writes a great post on how to become a better programmer by not programming . For the most part, I totally agree with his premise that to become a better programm...

A recent confrontational thread within the Subtext forums that I shared with Rob Conery got us into a discussion about the challenges of dealing with difficult members of a...

Been a short break from blogging, but I’m ready to get back to writing about Cody , I mean code! My philosophy towards Open Source Software is that the more shari...

Abstract Ruby on Rails ("Rails") is the dominant web programming framework for Ruby and, even outside the Ruby community, is considered the epitome of th...

There’s an interesting discussion in the comments on the Coding Horror blog in which Jeff suggests that Your password alone should be enough information for the ...

Specifications are for the weak and timid! This machine is a piece of GAGH! I need dual Pentium processors if I am to do battle with this code! You cannot really apprecia...

Patrick Cauldwell points out that the challenge of coding a business app isn’t in writing the code, that’s easy. The challenge is in understanding business require...

A while ago I wrote that a client often often does not know what he wants until he sees it. I was referring to software development, but this is common across many profession...

UPDATE: Added a followup part 2 to this post on the topic of granular control. We have all experienced the trouble caused by plugins that break when an application that ...

We often hear that the current state of software development is still dysfunctional. Scott Rosenberg recently wrote a book to that effect called Dreaming In Code . He takes ...

The local newspaper sports a comic strip that enjoys every opportunity to mock the modern university’s emphasis on diversity. The strip holds diversity accountable for lo...

The Registry is one of those Patterns where once you understand it, it seems so incredibly useful. Think of it as a basket; using a Registry you can add data (both values and...

Are you wondering how adding a forum or guestbook to your website might help you attract and/or keep visitors? Here are a few things you might want to think about. Gu...

What are Google Sitelinks? Last year Google started experimenting with an enhanced listing in their natural search results that can increase a site's visibility...

“…looking at a company’s homepage is like reading its palm…” This truism appeared in a recent Business Week article about Yahoo. The aut...