A couple of years ago, I wrote a set of three essays on Resource Management: The Semantics of Garbage Collection, More Thoughts on Resource Recovery, and Other Resource Recovery Approaches. In summary, my argument in these articles was that the standard mark-and-sweep garbage collection falls down for two major reasons, it doesn’t deal with any… Read More »
I’ve recently finished reading Joel Spolsky’s Joel on Software in book form. In the book, I read the essay Human Task Switches Considered Harmful. As someone who has had a lot of experience with multitasking myself, and a fair amount with computer multi-tasking, I found this claim to be pretty amazing. I have looked at… Read More »
Over the last few years, I’ve been frustrated with the Software Engineering industry. I was actually trained as an engineer, and much of what I see passed off as software engineering is not engineering. I’ve been mulling this over for some time without being able to put my finger on the part that bothers me.… Read More »
The Logic of Failure Dietrich Döner Perseus Books, 1996 This is a spectacular book on why people make mistakes. This book gives wonderful insight into design and troubleshooting that you won’t get from any traditional book on programming. A large portion of the book describes how very intelligent people make what seem like blindingly stupid… Read More »
One of the fundamental laws of the universe could be called the Law of Unintended Consequences. This law is as universal as Murphy’s Law, but not as well recognized. To me, the gut-level understanding of this law is one of the things that shows the difference between a really good programmer and someone who just… Read More »
The Design of Everyday Things Donald A. Norman Doubleday, 1988 I know this isn’t a book on programming, but it is a very good book on design. Norman shows design mistakes in everyday items like door handles and stoves, as well as nuclear power plants and trains. He also introduces design principles that you can… Read More »
In most of the SVG I’ve seen people either prefer to use the style attribute or set the individual style attributes. I don’t see much use of CSS classes and I wonder why. Most of the criticisms I’ve seen of the use of CSS fall into four categories: It’s not XML. It’s too verbose to… Read More »