Krzysztof Kowalczyk weblog

The way to avoid deeply nesting is to do early exit as soon as possible. The trivial example could be rewritten as:

<br />if (!foo) return;      <br />if (!bar) return;      <br />if (!anotherVariable) return;      <br />… and this is the logic<br />

I violently disagree with this solution to the unreadability of deeply nested if’s. IMO, you are just trading one problem (poor readability) for another problem (really hard to debug). If you have deeply nested if’s, then you probably need to apply the state machine design pattern to your code.

Coding Horror: Source Control: Anything But SourceSafe

The top 9 responses are reprinted here. I’m disheartened to see that Visual SourceSafe is still at the top of the list. If you are serious about the practice of software development, you should avoid SourceSafe.

I don’t know how many times this has to be said before developers start paying attention, but let’s try it one more time. Never, never, use SourceSafe.

I keep seeing this sort of stuff from new applications, or new builds of old applications. These developers are unclear on the concept of what a “universal” binary actually is. If you really have a “universal” binary, there is no need for a PowerPC binary. And if you need the “PowerPC” part, then you probably don’t have a “universal” binary, you probably have an “Intel” binary.


Attachment Scanner Plugin for Mail.app

Installing the Plugin

1. Download the plugin: PowerPC [ source ]

A J2EE Moment of Zen – Miguel de Icaza

Microsoft’s Avalon is the J2EE of GUI APIs

Interesting. Even more interesting is the plea for the “Rails of GUI”. Now that’s what I’m talking about. Rails is gaining popularity because it is “opinionated” software which favors convention over configuration. What this means for the programmer, is that the plumbing is just assumed to be there, and it works.

Why not a “Rails of GUI”? How hard could it be?

I couldn’t resist posting this screenshot from Microsoft Windows Live Mail Beta.

The only reason I ever got a Hotmail account was to get a “passport”, so I could access my MSDN account online. Now, Microsoft is telling me that an MSDN email, sent from the microsoft.com domain, is failing the SenderID check. How embarrassing…

The burning question I have is this… when it is delivered to my parents PC, who have been using Firefox for a couple of years now, will it obnoxiously take over as the default browser? Because if it does, they are going to go nuts.

Microsoft tags IE 7 ‘high priority’ update | CNET News.com

IE 7 will be delivered in the fourth quarter as a “high priority” update via Automatic Updates in Windows XP

Any tech guru who doesn’t know how to back up or archive his data is no tech guru.  What an idiot.

Tech Gurus Say They’ll ‘Switch from Mac’

Pilgrim says he was bitten by this. He wrote that the databases behind Apple’s iPhoto and iTunes became corrupted, resulting in the loss of much of his data.

Google Browser Sync

Google Browser Sync for Firefox is an extension that continuously synchronizes your browser settings – including bookmarks, history, persistent cookies, and saved passwords – across your computers. It also allows you to restore open tabs and windows across different machines and browser sessions.

I just installed this on Firefox on my iMac at work, and on my personal Powerbook. All I can say is… Cooolll!!!!!

One of the features that I almost overlooked was the syncing of “history”. How many times have you hunted through your browser history to find an elusive link, that you know you just looked at, only to remember that you actually looked at it at home, and now you are at work?

If you use Firefox on multiple computers, I think this plugin is going to be a must-have.