Leila GharaniI had written this article for the “Spreadsheets” edition (#84, published September last year) of my magazine De Programmatica Ipsum, before opting to pen another (much more appropriate methinks) about Felienne Hermans; but I still like this one, so here it goes in its entirety.
Filling the Timesheet with HTAsIf you are currently employed or have worked in the past in a Swiss company, you know how important the all-powerful timesheet is to your employer. Every company comes up with their own version of it, particularly those who are cheap enough not to pay a monthly SaaS subscription to one of those gazillion timesheet services online. Most of those home-made contraptions use Excel, because why not.
Retrocomputing Emulators on Your BrowserIn the past I’ve been explaining how to use various emulators to run old operating systems on your Linux box; today, we’re going to use a much simpler approach: just click on a link, and run them on your browser!
Word 5.5 on DOSBoxContinuing with my exploration of old versions of Word in various platforms, I wanted to experience one of the last versions of Microsoft Word for DOS, Word 5.5. Here are the instructions to run it on any platform that supports DOSBox Staging.
Word 5.1a and Excel 4 for Mac on Basilisk III’ve been using some famous versions of Microsoft apps lately, of the “pre-Office” era: Word 5.1a and Excel 4, which were both running on the Macs available to students at the high school I attended in Geneva around 1993. This article provides the instructions for you to do the same with Basilisk II.
Notepad Log Files on Visual Studio CodeDid you know that you can use Windows Notepad to create log files? It’s a feature that has been available on Windows since at least version 3.1… and I know it because, well, I’m old enough to have used such a feature to keep my own journal around 1992.
Fading Into IrrelevanceAs technology waves come and go, the names of iconic companies follow the movements, first reaching the pinnacle of their glories, and later fading into irrelevance.
Opening Microsoft Access Databases on LinuxIn the past few months I’ve been writing about my software archeology experiments, including how to convert old HTML code from 1999 to run in today’s browsers, how to run Macromedia Flash movies with Ruffle, or even how to run Java applets now that they aren’t supported anymore.
FOSS in Developing CountriesThe other day, I had friends in Bolivia asking me if they could install Windows on a laptop they got through an NGO that initially came bundled with Linux.
Stockholm Syndrome in SoftwareDevelopers working for a particular vendor tend to develop a bizarre version of Stockholm syndrome. It’s something I’ve witnessed at least twice in my career.
Killer AppsThe D programming language lacked a “killer app” to break through. Another brilliant language suffered from this situation, objectively deserving a much better fate than the one it had; Smalltalk.
Internet Explorer 4The news recently splashed the demise, disappearance, and final “good riddance” of Internet Explorer. I remembered the first time I encountered the beast. In 1997, Internet Explorer 4.0 was soooooo good compared to anything else, it was hard to believe.
The New MicrosoftMicrosoft is a big, big, big name in our industry. No matter what they do, everybody notices. Whether it’s good or bad, useful or ridiculous, big or small, it never goes by unnoticed.
Cardfile.exeI started using Windows 11 recently. It’s changed a lot since the last time I used Windows professionally (those were the times of Windows XP, almost 20 years ago). Also, Chocolatey makes it really easy to install software on it.
A Linker for JoelIn January 2004 Joel Spolsky wrote a blog post titled “Please Sir May I Have a Linker?, where he described his tribulations trying to install a small .NET app in computers not bundled with the original .NET framework.
BASIC StandardsI’ve learnt lately that there are many standards for the BASIC programming language. Who woulda thunk?
Things That Define Big Software CompaniesLooking at the software industry, it appears that most big companies usually share more traits than they would like to admit. Take for example their products: at any given time, big software companies all had at least one product of various similar categories, roughly grouped in three big areas.
Memories of Centralized SCMsIt might sound incredible to younger developers out there, but there was a time when Git did not exist. In retrospect, the fact that Git has reigned supreme in its category for over 15 years was previously unheard of. SCM systems came and went in a steady succession since the early 1980s.
Lots of VSCode ExtensionsThe recent release by Microsoft of vscode.dev, the online version of Visual Studio Code, made me think of all the different things I do with VSCode, including this blog. And of course, being productive in VSCode means, to a large extent, finding gems across a seemingly infinite number of extensions.
Steve Jobs vs Bill Gates on StageI have had the chance to attend keynotes by Bill Gates and Steve Jobs in person; their styles couldn’t have been more different. Here’s some memories from both. Of course I did not meet or talk to them; this is just my experience as another attendee in the room.
Visual J++Once upon a time, there was a programming environment made by Microsoft called Visual J++. It was their attempt to do with Java what they had done with JScript before, and to be honest, it was quite cool. You could compile and run Java code on Windows with a very good IDE - this was 5 years before IntelliJ released IDEA! It generated much faster binaries than what the official Java compiler from Sun produced. Developers could access functionality inside of packages starting with the microsoft. name, but that of course that kind of broke the whole point of Java which is to make cross-platform stuff that you only write once and then you run everywhere.
Server-Side JavaScript in 1997Back in 1997 I was earning some cash writing Active Server Pages in that mutant programming language called VBScript. On the other hand, Microsoft had reverse-engineered the JavaScript compiler inside Netscape Navigator (there was no spec, after all), and they created a dialect of it called JScript (they could not name it JavaScript because lawyers) and made it compatible with their COM+ runtime model.
Migrating from macOS to LinuxThis is the story of how, after being a loyal macOS user for 15 years, I decided to start using Linux full-time.
12 Years of iPhone – A Developer's PerspectiveThis is the talk that I gave in the 4th MCE Conference in Warsaw, Poland, on May 8th, 2017 (conference organized by Polidea) and (with updates) at UIKonf on May 15th, 2018 and at NSConfArg on April 20th, 2019.
About Operating Systems, Abstractions and APIsCharles Petzold, in its book “Code”, states the following: “In theory, application programs are supposed to access the hardware of the computer only through the interfaces provided by the operating system.”
The Old New ThingJe viens de finir de lire The Old New Thing. L’auteur, Raymond Chen, a bosse dans l’equipe de developpement de Windows depuis 1995 (au moins) et il raconte les raisons de certaines decisions prises pendant le design de differentes versions de Windows, depuis 1985 jusqu’a Vista. Le livre est une compil’ des meilleurs articles de son blog.
Migration: the ReturnYup, the Migration continues. More and more developers are leaving Microsoft technologies behind, and exploring new grounds.
MigrationI came across this interesting posting on The .NET Addict’s Blog. It is interesting to read since it comes at a time when “traditional” Microsoft developers get interested in other technologies, such as Ruby on Rails, Cocoa or Linux. And the same can be said about Java, where lots of luminaries like James Duncan Davidson (the creator of Ant and Tomcat) started moving towards other technologies (in his case, this happened at the beginning of this decade even).
About Microsoft "Standards"An excellent article about how to fool everyone to believe that your specification is a… standard:
Avoiding Basic TroubleI remember that, late 2004, I was asked by my employer to evaluate the migration of a huge (huge, did I say huge?) Visual Basic 6 “classic” client-server application to an SOA-based Visual Basic .NET one. The application was a business-critical one for several customers, kind of a government ERP system, built initially in VB 3 or 4, and slowly migrated through the years to new versions of VB. Until VB.NET came out.
Quick Comparison of C# and RubyI have been working as a software developer since 1996, and as such I’ve used a variety of different languages, both compiled and interpreted. But the who languages that I know and use most today, are two somewhat different ones, C# and Ruby. I will begin my presentation with a short explanation of both, providing their major similarities and differences, and then providing some code samples of both.
About Operating Systems and Networks“The true operating system is the net itself”. This phrase, common marketing argument in the late nineties, made me remind that in the eighties, Sun Microsystems’ founder, Scott McNealy, used the slogan “The Network is the Computer” to describe his vision.
A More Boring WorldWhile I was reading this blog post about “Easter eggs” in Microsoft products, I came accross these two (utterly brilliant) comments in the same page:
Get the Facts - I Mean, Get ThemIf you enjoy Microsoft PR material, you may find this “Get the facts” page somewhat interesting. For those of us who really deal with MS and Open Source stuff day by day, please just don’t laugh too loud.
Land of the Forbidden ManeuverAfter four years of .NET, n-tier and service-oriented architectures, object-oriented programming and design patterns, I have been assigned a small… “Classic ASP” project, for Reuters. Yeah, you got it, the good’ol plain vanilla ASP, VBScript and so on.
Unix Expo, Remarks by Bill Gates - October 9, 1996‘And through Windows NT, you can see it throughout the design. In a weak sense, it is a form of Unix.’