November 2009 Archives

In your day to day usage of the computer you might find yourself wishing for that one tool that can help you do this particular task at hand. Chances are that it has already been written and the only reason why you are not using it is that you have not found out about it yet! I find this particularly annoying, since my Google-Fu is not that strong (luckily I work with people with strong Fu). But anyhow, this is a short list of tools that you absolutely have to check out, if not use. I'm going to assume that you are a windows shop and a game programmer for this list to apply...

A lot of times it's very useful to have your users drive whenever you are looking for bugs or problems at their computers. Even though I'm a very inpatient person when I look at somebody else searching for the key 'A' on their keyboard or moving the mouse slowly to cut and paste through the menu, you have to preserve and look at what they are doing since often what they are saying that they are doing and what they are actually doing can be very different. So every now and then I'm standing behind someone watching what they are doing and my jaw drops. Once someone were in the middle of doing things and the application just crashed. Very quickly the user clicked on the dialog box that said it crashed and relaunched the application, ready to continue with whatever we were in the middle of. Without batting an eye! This happens on occasion and I see it more and more. I call it the windows syndrome.