Have you ever opened a simple little ASCII text file to see it inexplicably displayed as onegiantunbrokenline? Opening the file in a different, smarter text editor results in the file displayed properly in multiple paragraphs. The answer to this puzzle lies in our old friend, invisible characters that we can't see but that are totally not out to get us. Well, except when they are. The invisible problem characters in this case are newlines. Did you ever wonder what was ...

As a long time reader of Joey DeVilla's excellent blog, Global Nerdy, I take exception to his post Fast Food, Apple Pies, and Why Netbooks Suck: he end result, to my mind, is a device that occupies an uncomfortable, middle ground between laptops and smartphones that tries to please everyone and pleases no one. Consider the factors: Size: A bit too large to go into your pocket; a bit too small for regular day-to-day work. Power: Slightly more capable than ...

You may notice that commenting is currently disabled, and many old Coding Horror posts are missing images. That's because, sometime early on Friday, the server this blog is hosted on suffered catastrophic data loss. Here's what happened: The server experienced routine hard drive failure. Because of the hard drive failure, the virtual machine image hosting this blog was corrupted. Because the blog was hosted in a virtual machine, the standard daily backup procedures at the host were unable to ever ...

I've been unhappy with every single piece of software I've ever released. Partly because, like many software developers, I'm a perfectionist. And then, there are inevitably problems: The schedule was too aggressive and too short. We need more time! We ran into unforeseen technical problems that forced us to make compromises we are uncomfortable with. We had the wrong design, and needed to change it in the middle of development. Our team experienced internal friction between team members that we ...

Let's face it: we all write bad code. But not every programmer does something about the bad code they're polluting the world with, day in and day out. There's a whole universe of possibilities: Follow the instructions on the paint can Become a software apprentice Get a coding buddy Practice the fundamentals A program of effortful study Participate in the community to sharpen your saw But that's a lot of work. Really freaking hard work! Wouldn't it be nice if ...