SteveX Compiled

Bandwidth is both expensive and cheap. It’s cheap at a lot of hosts and for a lot of consumers, because providers expect we’re not going to use what we’re allocated, and yet expensive when purchased in bulk, where the assumption must be that it will all be used.
Every time I hear about how expensive [...]

There’s a service called Disqus that provides hosted commenting for your blog or website.
My Ottawa Events site was recently hit by a deluge of spam - so much so that I had to disable commenting completely. I discovered Discus through Dave Winer’s blog, and it seems like it’s worth a shot, so I’ve enabled [...]

Joel posted a short article: Don’t Hide or Disable Menu Items. I think it’s bad advice.
Consider Paste or Undo. If you click the Edit menu, you can tell from the enabled state of the Paste item whether or not there’s something on the clipboard that can be pasted. Same with Undo. [...]

I just submitted a little job to RentACoder (converting an ASP.NET site to PHP for easier hosting - I’m not much of a PHP developer) and part of their new wizard has a bit about estimates. You can supply a deadline, or you can ask the bidders to estimate how long the job will [...]

Here’s a blog post by Jim Springfield at Microsoft about IntelliSense in Visual Studio 10. 
I like to hear that IntelliSense is going to be fixed, but I’ve been hearing that for many versions of Visual Studio now, and I have a hard time believing it.  IntelliSense for C++ code has always been unreliable in [...]

I just finished reading Steve Krug’s book Don’t Make Me Think!: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability on Safari.  The first edition was written in 2000, but it’s amazing how much of it still applies.  And not just to web usability.
The book is about web design, and how to create sites that users can [...]

It’s cool that Microsoft has announced that IE8 passes the Acid2 test (in “IE8 Standards Mode” - I sure hope that mode is enabled by default.
But what I found interesting is how they announced it: By showing the check-in mail that signified the committing of the code that implemented the fix into the main [...]

It’s great to see a serious update to MFC coming.  Check out this video with Pat Brenner where he describes some of the new stuff happening, with demos.
I’m really torn on C++ these days.  Some people believe it should basically be retired, in favour of one of the better alternatives like C# or Java, but [...]

Every release Microsoft promises something that’s going to make it so now you can really positively absolutely kill processes that you want to kill.
With Vista, the feature that would help was I/O Cancellation, the ability to cancel an I/O request without having to wait, in case it was hung in the kernel. 
And yet..
C:\Users\stibbett>taskkill [...]

Intrinsics in C++ are places where the compiler knows how to generate code for common C++ operations, including function calls, and does so inline rather than generating a call.
For example, a simple copy of a string from one buffer to another looks like this:
strcpy(dest, src);
00419123 lea [...]