"Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning." -Rich Cook

"No amount of elegant programming or technology will solve a problem if it is improperly specified or understood to begin with." -Milt Bryce

"There is nothing more unproductive than to build something efficiently that should not have been built at all." -Milt Bryce

"The art of programming lies in that nether region between the hopeful wishes of an elegant architecture and the hard grindstone of technical details." -Andrew Hunt and David Thomas

Love Deadlines

"I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by." --Douglas Adams

"When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think only of how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong." --R Buckminster Fuller

"In a room full of top software designers, if any two of them agree, that's a majority." --Bill Curtis

Walking on Water

"Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen." --Edward V Berard

"If debugging is the process of removing bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in?" --Unknown

"If the code and the comments disagree, then both are probably wrong." --Norm Schryer

"Software and cathedrals are much the same - first we build them, then we pray." --Unknown

"Testing can only prove the presence of bugs, not their absence." --Edsger Dijkstra

"Any code of your own that you haven't looked at for six or more months might as well have been written by someone else." --Eagleson's law

Custom Validators for Composite Controls

I have created several custom composite controls (containing multiple input fields) and validators for our website at work.

I needed the SetFocusOnError property to work on my custom validators, but it didn't work by default. 

I started to dig through ASP.NET's JavaScript code and found that if my custom composite control was enclosed in a table tag (instead of the default div tag) that the JavaScript would search the table tag for input controls.

The following code will change the default enclosed tag from a div to a table.

public class LengthEditor : CompositeControl
{
   protected override HtmlTextWriterTag TagKey
   {
      get { return HtmlTextWriterTag.Table; }
   }
}

Safari on Windows

Steve Jobs just announced that Safari 3 has a Public Beta available for the Windows platform. You can grab the beta at Apple's download website.

The Safari 3 Public Beta claims that it is...

"The fastest web browser on any platform, Safari loads pages up to 2 times faster than Internet Explorer 7 and up to 1.6 times faster than Firefox 2.

And it executes JavaScript up to 2.8 times faster than Internet Explorer 7 and up to 1.6 times faster than Firefox 2."

I am interested to see how the population responds to the new Windows Safari 3 browser. I wonder what changes, if any I will need to make to my websites to support Safari 3.

"There are only two industries that refer to their customers as 'users'." --Edward Tufte

"Before software can be reusable it first has to be usable." --Ralph Johnson

"You're bound to be unhappy if you optimize everything." --Donald Knuth

"Without requirements or design programming is the art of adding bugs to an empty text file." --Louis Srygley

"A program is a device used to convert data into error messages." --Unknown

"Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it." --Donald Knuth

"The trouble with programmers is that you can never tell what a programmer is doing until it's too late." --Seymour Cray