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Great software development is a creative discipline that requires skillful individuals, effective organization and undying passion from all who are involved. There are many theories about developer productivity, engineering management and company organization, but few that make an honest attempt to reconcile all of these factors and present an approach that both builds from proven [...]

Somehow it still isn’t understood that programmers don’t produce their best work during any specific set of hours or only when they are in the office. Programming is an activity cognitively closer to philosophizing than it is to elementary math or physics. The best work doesn’t get done between 9am and lunch, with Sue from [...]

So I woke up today to MySQL barfing all over my site:
WordPress database error: [Incorrect key file for table './mydb/wp_posts.MYI'; try to repair it]
Googling the error pushed me toward the myisamchk tool. So I went into MySQL’s data dir on my server as root and tried to run a repair on my files:
myisamchk *.MYI
But I [...]

This is a brief follow-up to Faulty Firing (see that post for the description of the tests) with updated results in the latest browsers.
Firefox 2.0.0.7 (Mozilla 1.8.1.7) & Firefox 3.0a9 (“Minefield”)

mousedown, focus, mouseup, click, change
focus, click, change
blur, focus, click

Internet Explorer 7

mousedown, focus, mouseup, click
click, focus
change, blur, click, focus

Safari 3.0.3 Beta

mousedown, mouseup, change, click
change, click
click

Opera 9.5 [...]

The society which scorns excellence in plumbing as a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy: neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.

-John W. Gardner

Quality is important in plumbing, philosophy, and coding all the same…

Bank of America requires that your password be only alphanumeric.

Wait. Let me get this straight. You want me to supply a password that consists of only letters and numbers, thereby increasing the likelihood of simple dictionary attacks? And this is “to make sure [my] passcode is sufficiently secure”? Apparently there are “invalid symbols” that I [...]

For some reason I find it highly improbable that I’m the only one to ever experience this breakage with the Bazaar VCS:
$ bzr
Traceback (most recent call last):
File “/opt/local/bin/bzr”, line 76, in ?
import bzrlib.breakin
ImportError: No module named breakin
I installed it from MacPorts a long time ago and ran into this [...]

If Python 3.0 ships before Perl 6, I’m going to cry.

John Gruber, Daring Fireball
Of course it will. And I’m going to laugh. Heartily.

My favorite programming language, JavaScript, is quite possibly one of the worst named. It really has nothing to do with Java. I promise. Now that the ECMA is working on the next version, code named ES4, JavaScript needs a new brand. Steve Yegge agrees.
So what makes a good brand? Well I’m no branding specialist, but [...]

How would you get the current user’s name in your programming language of choice? Furthermore, how does this exercise reflect on the design of that language?
C#
string user = Environment.UserName;
Perl
my $user = getpwuid($<);
PHP
$user = $_ENV['user'];
Python
import os
user = os.environ['USER']
Ruby
user = ENV['USER']
Now that I’ve iterated through a few of these I’m wondering if the methods are equivalent. In [...]