Does anyone else out there long for the simpler days where you needed to move a jumper in the jumper block to set your modem card to use IRQ7 so it would not conflict with the interrupts used by other boards in your PC and your modem card came with a 78 page manual telling you everything you would need to know to write your own driver for the board ......

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Most of my blog posts sound way too whiny. I'm not that guy. (Am I?) I've been using SUSE-flavored Linux for personal projects since 2002 (SUSE Linux 8.1). This past weekend, I made the heart-wrenching decision to abandon openSUSE (version 12.1) in favor of Linux Mint (version Maya). OpenSUSE had just become too burdensome. Packages that installed easily ......

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It bugs me when some commecial site gloms onto a perfectly good technology name and shoves irrelevant information down my browser's throat. Clearly www.Ja\/ascript.com (misspelled intentionally so that the assholes that own the domain name won't get a free reference from my blog) are only interested in making money from click throughs. Anyway, I attended ......

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Microsoft disgusts me. Out-of-the-box Asp.NET assumes that Google Chrome and Apple Safari are not "modern" browsers. In order to make use of some of the Asp.NET web controls with those browsers, you need to modify your web application (or the machine.config and GAC on every server in your web farm). This is simply inexcusable. This could have easily ......

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So, I got a good laugh today when I found one of my colleagues from my own ancient history who listed as himself as a "Principle Software Engineer". Ha, ha. I wonder what principles he adheres to in his day-to-day work. Chuckle. It reminded me of that weird sect that buys radio advertising time to discuss the "high calling of our daily work." But, then ......

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Selenium rocks. My most recent task has been to create an end-to-end system test for our QA environment. There are a lot of moving parts in QA. A lot of things can and do go wrong. The end-to-end test will play the role of a canary in a coal mine. I'm certain that it will go belly-up frequently, but at least we will now have something that detects that ......

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I currently work in a very small shop on the right-hand side of the USA. The startup that I work for has three people in the IT department: the CTO, the Head of Development, and me, the programmer guy. 9 people in the company and I'm three people away from the top spot -- not a good sign. So it goes. Look to this column for hints on how to set up a ......

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