Okay this bugs me. Microsoft is changing the way Internet Explorer supports supplying authentication information in URLs. Details are in this Knowledge Base article: “Microsoft plans to release a software update that modifies the default behavior of Internet Explorer for handling user information in HTTP and HTTPS URLs”. The problem is, this behaviour isn’t [...]
Joel Spolsky has an article called Please Sir May I Have a Linker that I half agree with and half disagree with. I agree with him that it would be excellent if I could somehow build a .NET application that didn’t require the runtime. There is actually a product by Remotesoft called Salamander that sort of makes [...]
I’ve been trying to figure out how install and uninstall a .NET service. There is a managed wrapper for the SCM in the form of the ServiceController class, which is very nice for doing things with installed services, but it has no support for installing or uninstalling a service. It doesn’t even support determining whether [...]
From a guy with too much time on his hands, comes a pretty complete list of deviations from the Lord of the Rings by as written, and as portrayed in the movies.
This is a bit of a rant on something that constantly annoys me about using my computer. It’s the lack of predictability regarding latency of simple operations. Here’s an example: Click on the Start menu (assuming you’re running Windows). Did it appear instantly? Or did your computer spend 5 seconds digging around on the hard disk before [...]
The reports I’ve been reading on the state of the Spirit rover is that it simply filled up the filesystem on the flash memory, and that this was causing it to fail when booting. (NASA mentions it briefly, here). This seems like a pretty basic problem to me – something incredibly easy to predict and [...]
Google turns evil..
I wrote a short article on UI responsiveness. This is something that particularly annoys me because I often play EverQuest and want to do other things with my computer while EQ is running. It’s amazing how unresponsive most applications, and Windows itself, becomes, with even one CPU hogging application running.
Some companies just stumble onto a great idea.. I think meetup.com is one of them. I saw a story about them on CNN a while ago and thought it was a cool idea, and now Joel on Software is organizing a meetup through it. This is a perfect use for them – something that Joel could [...]
More data (from listening to a replay of the briefing): The rover has 3 kinds of memory: RAM, Flash, EEPROM. There’s a file system on the flash memory. When in cripple mode, the OS uses a ram disk instead of working with flash. The 9:30am MARS time communications window was not there, meaning the vehicle [...]