The Blog

Exploration Of Thought

Thoughts on autonomy, self direction, digital business and life.

• Why Windows Task Manager Sucks

  Windows Task Manager can't tell you what's hammering your disk when svchost spikes. AnVir Task Manager Free actually shows you why.

  Donn Felker – September 17, 2008

• Little Sophia

  A rare non-technical post here: my daughter Sophia arrived September 10, 2008, a healthy 7lbs 8oz, via natural water birth. Mom and baby are great.

  Donn Felker – September 12, 2008

• My Blog was down, Like Whoa.

  My old host accidentally deleted my account and the blog only survived by luck, not my backup plan. Moved hosts and learned the lesson the hard way.

  Donn Felker – September 9, 2008

• Mozilla Ubiquity

  Hands-on with Mozilla Ubiquity, the Firefox add-on that lets you type natural-language commands for weather, Wikipedia, translation, and email.

  Donn Felker – August 29, 2008

• You Received an Error. So what. Deal with it.

  A ThoughtWorks forum's ugly crash page is a reminder: always give users a friendly error message and a way to contact support, or you're losing them.

  Donn Felker – August 29, 2008

• Twin Cities Code Camp – Oct 11

  I'm speaking at the 5th Twin Cities Code Camp on Oct 11 about using the Workflow Rules Engine inside a WCF service for flexible rules.

  Donn Felker – August 27, 2008

• Unnecessary Abstractions

  A code review facepalm: someone hand-rolled IP address parsing logic that .NET's built-in IPAddress class already handles perfectly.

  Donn Felker – August 27, 2008

• Twin Cities Give Camp Update

  An update on the Twin Cities Give Camp website, some ongoing hosting hiccups, and how to sign up to volunteer or sponsor the event.

  Donn Felker – August 23, 2008

• Insane Flight Prices

  A quick rant about flight prices -- a short hop from Minneapolis to Des Moines quoted at over $700, cheaper to just make the 3.5-hour drive.

  Donn Felker – August 22, 2008

• The Twin Cities Give Camp

  Launching Twin Cities Give Camp: a weekend where developers, designers, and DBAs build free custom software for local non-profits.

  Donn Felker – August 13, 2008

• DiscountASP vs. Me

  A rant about DiscountASP.NET recycling its app pool every few minutes because of Community Server 2007's memory footprint, logging everyone out mid-post.

  Donn Felker – August 8, 2008

• Is Premature Optimization Really Evil?

  A real story about an order system that broke under a sales spike, used to argue premature optimization is only evil when you optimize the wrong thing.

  Donn Felker – July 24, 2008