I’ve done the unthinkable: I tried to communicate the value of aesthetics to a group of developers. Read on for an explanation, or jump into the slides…

21+ Beautiful Ajax CSS Tables with different sorting and filtering techniques, using different libraries including mootools, jQuery ,etc...

In my C++ college course, we’ll be covering file streams in the next few weeks and I had this funny thought, why not try and code the workshop/lab assignment in the programming language D? It would be a good exercise and demonstrate why D is more sane to use than C++.

Discussing different pitfalls and traps of using code generators

A couple months ago, Allan Odgaard, creator of the OS X text editor TextMate, mentioned on his blog that he was going to be traveling to the US and passing through New York. I emailed him to see if he would be interested in doing an interview while he was in town, and he kindly accepted.

Here are my top 11 tips and tricks for getting things done faster with the Visual Studio 2005 IDE (without using third-party add-ins or upgrading hardware… that’s another article). Yes, some of these tips and tricks may fall into the “obvious” category, but I think they are worth repeating. I continue to see too many .NET developers not taking advantage of even the basic time-saving techniques.

I recently read an article on meta-programming where the author writes a Ruby script that uses the eval function to generate Ruby and Java code for a class definition from a file. This is very useful but the way that the author does this is not meta enough for me.

In the classical object oriented model, an object encapsulates local state (instance variables) and contains a pointer to the shared procedures. These procedures are the methods, which operate on the encapsulated state, that forms the environment of the object. Each method can declare local variables as well as look up for additional state information from the shared environment based on lexical scoping rules. So we have the object as the combination of the environment and the set of methods that operate on the environment. Class based languages like Java and C++ provide another abstraction - the class, which instantiates objects by initializing the environment and setting up appropriate pointers to the shared procedures.