Dev Blogs
Yes, maybe you're one of those crazy people who camps out in front of a store so you can be the first person in line to get this year's hot toy, or so you can snag one of the doorbuster deals. But be judicious in your rush, because the police are out there too, and they're shopping for something else.
Last year, I sent some email to the people who run our team's check-in validation tool asking how I could add a new rule to the validation tests. One of the members wrote back, "You do it just like this guy," and sent me a reference to another check-in that added a validation rule. That other check-in was made by me. But wait, it gets better. ...
How many of them are there?
Back in the late 1990's one of my colleagues (who is now in Office Labs—check it out, they've got some pretty cool stuff) filed an expense report for a hair dryer, and it was accepted. But what valid business purpose would there be for a tester to buy a hair dryer? At the time, my colleague worked as a tester for Windows power management. ...
When you're walking around a city, you usually forget to look up. It takes a landmark building to prompt you to admire anything above the ground floor. For those in the Seattle area, the Seattle Times included a brief walking tour of Seattle architecture. The article doesn't mention one of my favorites: The roll-on deodorant building on the co...
Commenter Anonymous asked why navigating to a drive with no media displays a dialog instead of showing the error message in the view. This is an unfortunate consequence of Explorer's browser/view model. The shell browser binds to the and asks for the view by calling . The view window calls to figure out what to show in the view—and here ...
Rachmaninov's Prelude in C# minor, Op. 3, No. 2, performed as it is written, by classical music comedy duo Igudesman & Joo. I tried to learn that piece once. I didn't last long.
The phenomenon I call priority inflation has spread to product planning documents as well. Back in the old days, there were three priority levels: Over the past few years, I've seen a shift in the labelling of priorities in planning documents. A new priority has been introduced: Priority Zero. Nobody has explained to me what Priority 0 m...
Last time, I mentioned that eventually everything is top priority. A similar topic is what I'm calling priority inflation, which takes more than one form. Today's priority inflation is the introduction of new "top priority" items. (Chris Becker has some thoughts on this topic as well.) "XYZ is very important to our project. Please make it you...
Actually, this is pretty cool. A phone that sets your head on fire. Most people charge extra for that. These lithium-ion polymer batteries can overheat due to an internal short circuit in the batteries, which can pose a fire hazard. The battery has only been used in the GN9120 wireless headset. Go ahead, make up your own joke.