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197 days ago
The time is right to buy an SSD, because they are finally at the price/performance level where it’s just ridiculous to use anything else. Naysayers will claim that it’s still too early to switch, because you can buy a terabyte hard disk for $50 while a decent 60GB SSD costs $200. However, I think this price difference is irrelevant even in the current economy, because the performance difference is enormous and most of us don’t want or need a drive that big. Those that do need more storage (for a PVR?) can use an extra $50 drive in addition to a primary fast drive. SSD technology is improving so rapidly that there are a lot of sub-par products still available. For example, you could buy an OCZ Apex 60GB drive for $145, and it will likely have similar performance to the more expensive new OCZ Vertex drives in some benchmarks. However, it may also suffer from some stuttering problems common to this generation of drives. For more info see the recent SSD articles at ...
360 days ago
481 days ago
It's hard to find good developers. And it's worse than useless to filter candidates by "experience" as included on a resume. Statements like "10 years Java experience" or "15 years SQL experience" are meaningless. The problem is that you can't sum up real experience in a single concise number, and if you could it wouldn't be measured in years. We could try to come up with a formula, but any attempt to do so makes it clear that "Software Developer" encompasses a very wide variety of actual skills. What I'd really like to see on a resume, or in addition to a resume, is a real list summarizing all the things you've actually done, and the lessons you learned while doing them. This includes all of the following… List each book you've read that seems pertinent to software development, and summarize what you learned. Books are your number one resource for accumulating some subset of the experience of others. If you're not the type to read a book, ...
549 days ago
This topic has been brought up numerous times before, but I wanted to take a shot at another solution, because I think there is still room for improvement, and I wanted a simple example to experiment with some new VB9 functionality. Here are a bunch of links to the most recent information on the problem and a bunch of potential solutions. By spelunking through these, you ought to be able to find a solution in any language you like, and every possible combination of algorithms. http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001018.html http://www.davekoelle.com/alphanum.html http://nedbatchelder.com/blog/200712/human_sorting.html http://www.interact-sw.co.uk/iangblog/2007/12/13/natural-sorting http://www.codeproject.com/KB/string/NaturalComparer.aspx Probably the simplest example of sorting above is the following Python program which originally came from a comment posted to Ned Batchelder's blog above… 1: def natural_sort(lst): 2: to_int ...
