I was happy to read today that the VisualStudio team is working on significant performance improvements for VS.NET 2005. One of the things that frustrates me most about working on Fog Creek Copilot is simply that VS.NET can sometimes be so slow that I actually lose my train of thought. Hitting a breakpoint in some of our programs can lock VisualStudio for five to ten seconds. Building the small copilot.com website can take a full minute if the master Aardvark.dll assembly has been modified. It’s...

I was pleasantly surprised today to discover Squeak by Example, an open-source book on writing programs with Squeak Smalltalk. If you want the bleeding-edge version of the book right now, you’ll need Subversion and an up-to-date LaTeX installation, but a four-month-old PDF version is also available if you don’t want to muck with all that. Combined with Stéphane Ducasse’s compilation of free Smalltalk books, I don’t think any Smalltalk neophyte should be wanting for learning material.

My day job is working on Fog Creek Copilot, a powerful, cross-platform remote assistance solution. This week, Tyler and I were talking about how it’s too bad that Copilot didn’t really exist when we were in college, because we always ended up doing tech support for our families over the phone, which always went something like: Me: What do you see now? Family Member: A dialog box. Me: What’s it say? Family Member: It’s got a stop sign with an exclamation mark and says that the server can’t be...

From Slashdot, which is slowly redeeming itself, comes a link to Microsoft admitting that it bribed members of the Swedish ISO committee to vote for OOXML. Unsurprisingly, the Swedish ISO committee just voided its own vote. Due to time crunch, they will not be casting a vote at all in the Open XML ratification process. I find it depressing but predictable that I’m unsurprised.

I think that the Wall Street Journal does a fairly good job covering technology from a consumer’s perspective, but I feel that they struggle whenever they try to cover more industry-focused issues, making outright mistakes and failing to understand what in the debate is actually important, which leads them to follow up (or fail to) on the wrong points. Today was no exception: in an article entitled “‘Office’ Wars,” they attempted to cover the politics revolving around Microsoft’s efforts to get...

In my previous article, I discussed some alternatives to C++ for systems programming. Today, I want to provide an example of why you might care. Tyler and I recently debated rewriting Fog Creek Copilot in Qt, a powerful, high-level, cross-platform C++ framework. The idea came to us when we started discussing the implications of maintaining four helper applications (Windows Helper, Windows Helpee, Mac Helper, Mac Helpee), each of which shares depressingly little code with the others. Because Qt...

As you may or may not know, ANSI is trying to push a new C++ standard out the door called C++0x (which those of you who know C may find amusing, since you can read it “C++ Hex”). C++0x’s primary goal is to take C++'s already horribly convoluted syntax and make it even worse. Looking at a summary of C++0x’s additions, for example, we come across the concept of rvalue references, expressed as int &&x. With this move, C++ now has a bizarre hybrid of pointers and handles that solves a...

This afternoon, on a lark, I installed Conkeror, a Firefox plugin that makes Firefox look and act like Emacs. As far as these things go, I’m actually extremely impressed. A substantial number of Emacs commands are implemented—including the less-common ones, such as C-x h (select all), that most Emacs-style emulators seem to miss. Suddenly, navigating the web entirely by keyboard seems…pretty reasonable. If you’re either an Emacs or a keyboard junkie, check it out. You may really like what you...

I don’t know why, but recently, as my love of really low-level hardware and my desire for low-power, high-performance computing has increased, I’ve been researching all the old, famous CPUs and operating systems. I started over what I swore was going to be a computer-free vacation by delving into programming in assembly for 680x0 Macintoshes (during which time I fell in love with 68k assembly), then explored ARM chips, and finally somehow or another ended up at 4:30 AM on a Sunday working on an...

When I first started bitquabit, I wanted it to be strictly a technology blog. When people wanted to read something about Squeak or db4objects or Copilot, they could come here. When they wanted to read someone writing a meandering essay on farm subsidies and ethanol, they could go somewhere else. That position is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain. On the one hand, technology is inextricably tied to certain political agendas that, I feel, must constantly be discussed—patents and...