Archive for 2008

The Future of IntelliSense

Sunday, March 2nd, 2008

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 […]

Don’t Make Me Think

Thursday, February 28th, 2008

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 […]

Politics, Part 2

Tuesday, February 26th, 2008

In part one, our hero was left feeling like neither the liberal party nor the conservative party (instances of these being the Republicans and the Democrats in the United States, or the Liberals and the Conservatives in Canada) was truly his (or her) party. Stephanie commented on Part 1 and noted that it’s not just […]

Look at me still talking when there’s Science to be done.

Sunday, February 24th, 2008

I finally finished Portal.  This game deserves every award it’s won.  If you haven’t finished it yet, go do it now. Aperture Science.  We do what we must, because we can.

Microsoft and Blu-Ray

Monday, February 18th, 2008

HD DVD has been having a rough time lately, and now that Wal-Mart has pulled HD DVD, it’s pretty much over. Microsoft needs to respond. Here’s the situation that millions of Xbox 360 owners are in: We want HD movies. Nobody’s going to buy an HD DVD drive for the 360 now, and HD movie […]

Happy Family Day!

Monday, February 18th, 2008

Today is Family Day, a new holiday created in Ontario because there wasn’t a holiday in February and our government thought it would be a good idea. So put up your family tree, watch some old episodes of Family Ties, and spend some time with your family. That is, if you’re not one of the […]

Politics, Part One

Thursday, February 14th, 2008

Well, a title like Politics is far more likely to scare people away than invite them to read, but politics has been on my mind lately and I wanted to do a bit of a brain dump while I’m thinking about this stuff. I’m a Canadian but I like watching CNN and Fox, and these […]

California

Saturday, February 9th, 2008

I’ve been in California for the last week and one effect that I’ve noticed is that a lot of web sites are more responsive down here than in Ottawa. Of course this makes some sense – Ottawa is a long way from California, so the number of hops from me to, say, google.com, is much […]

Please Stop Reorganizing MSDN

Wednesday, January 30th, 2008

Oh look, another Google search result that leads to an MSDN page that’s gone missing (the 2nd link on the results page, at least as of right now). This happens far too often.  There’s really no excuse for Microsoft not realizing by now that search engines index their site, and that users use search engines […]

Government vs Nuclear Safety

Sunday, January 20th, 2008

The Ottawa Citizen has a short article that gives a good summary of what’s going on with this current issue of the government voting to re-open a nuclear reactor that the folks responsible for nuclear safety in Canada shut down (for safety reasons). The gist of it is that this is a small reactor whose […]