Jeff Atwood blogged about the free online book Almost Perfect earlier this week. Author Pete Peterson was part of WordPerfect for 12 years and opens a window into development process, marketing, competition, and highs and lows of the company, from a small starter to a big corporation. I think the broader themes in this book are still applicable today - the enthusiastic team learning on its feet, finding creative ways to compete, dealing with customers and incorporating feedback, handling "feature creep" and release schedules, and the culture of an organisation (in this case, run by programmers). Pete doesn't come across as...

Although it's easy enough to paste code samples into a PRE tag in a blog post, I reckon it's worth using one of the many tools available for formatting or "prettifying" code so the code is more readable - as long as it's not too much effort. My number one criteria for any tool that "prettifies" code to HTML for posting to a blog is that the tool is free. Secondly, that it's easy to use - I can do without hundreds of options. As for the output HTML, my current preference is for inline styles as it makes posting code...

My mother-in-law Marijke gave me a special surprise the other day: a hand-me-down copy of the 1984 tome "Choosing and Using Your Home Computer: An Introductory Course". Marijke had bought it some time ago to learn about computers. The book is a classic, from the time when PC's were called "microcomputers". It covers the latest hardware available at the time, the BASIC language, accessories like printers, plotters and the new-fangled "mouse", sprite graphics, games and the business case for computers. What makes this book more poignant is that I was into computers in 1984. I had a Commodore 64, and one of...