Tonight I wasted several hours troubleshooting hardware/driver issues with my development box - a fully loaded Dell OptiPlex GX620. I've been fighting with this particular machine since the day I got it. Recently it's been freezing up, the USB controllers malfunction at random times, it hangs during boot (before the OS even starts loading), and all kinds of other fun stuff. I've already upgraded the BIOS to the latest available version, released back in December 2006, and applied all relevant firmware and chipset driver updates. Oh, and I'm running Vista Ultimate 32-bit... though I had the same hardware issues...

After reading Jeff's post about advertising on your blog and why it's so deliciously evil I thought I'd look into a few of the ad services he mentioned. Hey, I'll take a few extra bucks if you want to shill your stuff on my blog... and then I'll knock your product anyhow. I'm a huge fan of spite! But I digress. I was checking out some of Text Link Ads' free tools and I came across the Blog Juice Calculator. As best I can tell this is nothing more than a tool, and I use that term loosely, to judge the...

Jeff Coding Horror Atwood recently posted an interesting and enlightening article about how he is reducing his site’s bandwidth usage. As Jeff hints, these changes were prompted by the high bandwidth demands of his recent Why Can’t Programmers... Program? post (a.k.a. - The FizzBuzz Test). At it’s peak that post kicked his bandwidth usage up to 9GB in a single day. In looking at his pretty bandwidth usage graph I also noticed his typical daily bandwidth is around 2.5GB. Now, I’m not nearly as popular a blogger as Mr. Horror, so I don’t expect that my daily bandwidth usage is...

This rant started as a comment to Jeff 'Coding Horror' Atwood's recent posted entitled "What's In a Version Number, Anyway?" In his post Jeff take a look at some of the What, Why, and How software gets its version numbers and how those influence the product's name. The topic is particularly interesting to me as not too long ago Phil and I were discussing a possible change in the naming scheme used for Subtext. Anyone who has been following Subtext development (and releases) lately has probably noticed the flurry of version numbers that are leaking into the product...