expletive inserted

I’ve been a longtime subversion user and before that Visual SourceSafe (ew gross), but at the new jobby job, it’s all git all the time. Being very used to the pretty awesome TortoiseSVN and ZigVersion gui clients for svn, I’ve been a bit hesitant to really dive into git, not really knowing what to expect [...]

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Well, it’s been a few weeks of working fulltime with Ruby, Rails, on OS X and I must say, I know so much less than I thought I did about OS X, Ruby, and Unix-like systems than I could have imagined. I have taken for granted that in the last seven years of experience I [...]

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When you are working in XP, and you need to view a calendar to see what day of the week a particular date falls on, how do you do it? Well, if you are like 95% of non-corporate windows users (not getting your time from a domain controller or time server), you probably double click [...]

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I really like these two examples of designing web UI elements that blend right into the browser’s chrome.
First we’ve got Google’s Firefox start page, which has probably been my default page for the last n years or so. The simplicity of this trick is great, basically just color matching with a little gradient, but it [...]

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I’m not sure why, I just sort of seem to have this knack for fixing computers when stuff goes wrong. To the person I’m helping it always seems like magic, but not really having a penchant for wearing robes, I try to assure people it’s just experience that’s built up for the last 12 years [...]

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Don’t use an UPDATE or DELETE statement on a live, critical database from a query browser. Inevitably, you will forget to highlight the WHERE clause. The more time passes that you haven’t screwed this up, the more likely and damaging it will be when you do.
Don’t use email addresses in test data that resolve to [...]

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Zac([kh]|hary)$
As Afshin says, it’s pronounced “Zack Dollar”.

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Joel writes about disabled/hidden menu items. I don’t completely agree. I think it’s very useful to quickly visually identify what actions are not allowed in any given context. One compromise might be to make the menu item look disabled, but when clicked it gives an explanation of why the selected action cannot be taken. Of [...]

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Adobe makes flash searchable. 1/2 ain’t bad.

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AKA string formatting, AKA Putting values of variables into strings, AKA that thing you do with the funny symbols to get the values of variables inside strings.
At the most basic level, most programmers find that at some point they need to insert the values of a whole bunch of variables into a string. The naive [...]

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