Chris Duckett dispenses with "trends", "magic quadrants" and other salesbot speak to investigate what is really the foundation of IT: source code.
Chris started his journalistic adventure in 2006 as the Editor of Builder AU after originally joining CBS as a programmer. After a Canadian sojourn, he returned in 2011 as the Editor of TechRepublic Australia.
Ask designers which mail program is the bane of their existence, and you'll find that Outlook tops the list. The reason why the most popular email reader is also the most painful is simple: it uses Word to render HTML emails.
Microsoft's current Internet Explorer 8 marketing push continues to leave a bad lingering aftertaste.
Few things can spark more religious fervour amongst programmers than the mention of a goto statement.
The next iteration of Adobe's Flash tools have reached beta status and provide some concrete evidence of what Adobe was going on about with its prognostications of Thermo and changing workflow over the past year.
Turns out that the "developer preview" of Google's latest creation, Google Wave, is not as open as one would expect, with the preview only being open to attendees of Google's I/O conference — but there is another way to see it in action. And forget wanting to use IE6 with it.
The choice and use of the new video tag in HTML 5 is one of the more explosive sticking points in the evolving standard. Which codecs should browsers use? Why even have a video tag at all when Flash works well currently? Will anyone use it even if it becomes a standard?
It's a long-standing policy that if you contribute to a conference, you receive free entry. The easiest way to contribute is to do a talk, and until the end of June you can set that up by responding to OSDC 2009's call for papers.
In the past week, the security environment around Adobe's Reader and Acrobat products has imploded, with yet more JavaScript vulnerabilities appearing. Adobe needs to look no further than Microsoft for a lesson in how to deal with these situations.
If you love to live on the edge of browser development, one consistent ache with each new Firefox beta is that all your extensions stop working. The solution to this problem happens to be head-slappingly simple.
I wish motherboard manufacturers wouldn't consign parallel ATA (PATA) hard drives and the IDE ports they require to the dustbin of history just yet.