When
· Naughties
· · 2004
· · · June
· · · · 17 (3 entries)
On Custom Schemas · Not so long ago, I wrote a piece about open document formats. Just today there was an interesting (as always) follow-up from Jon Udell, but what I wanted to address here is Dare Obasanjo’s take, which is pretty well the Microsoft party line (not that Dare’s always a party-line guy): the Office software and its document formats are winners because they allow the use of custom schemas for office documents. That’s more important, they say, than the dodgy licensing terms and the missing pieces. I used to believe that custom schemas for office documents were generally a good idea, but I no longer do. Here’s why ...
A Really Satisfying Feeling · Going through a bunch of source-code files and and, one by one, removing the dozens of “print” statements that let you focus in tighter and tighter and tighter on a really obscure problem until you could finally see it. Debuggers are OK, but when the going gets tough, the tough use “print”.
Spolsky Drops the Big One · Joel Spolsky posted an astounding essay a few days ago that I somehow missed. I don’t agree with every paragraph, but every paragraph is worth reading. If I may pick one minor point out for a bit of special highlighting: We’ve had good full-text search technology since the Seventies, and in the last ten years more or less everybody has become a regular user of full-text search. Why isn’t there good built-in full-text desktop search available right now today on both OS X and Windows, out of the box? (Most of the article isn’t about search, most of it’s about why the Windows API is dying on the vine; don’t miss it.)
