Like someone else said, sure, back when I was in college. But do you need to understand it today? There are tools that do sorting and so many other tasks. You can't understand the inner workings of all of them. Hell, when I come back to some of my old "still working, but now needing a mod" code, I sometimes don't understand it. At least not without some studying and reacquaintance with the problem I was solving at the time. The great majority of sorting I need to do is done via indexes in the database tools I use. Using a HeapSort is not really on my radar. Not that it hurts to internalize it and - if you've got that good of a memory - to remember it, but it's certainly not required.

I've been looking at this, too. I want to keep the treadmill in the basement, but use another one for the walking desk. Some people buy used ones off Craig's list or somewhere else. There is a company that sells the Tread treadmill specifically for walking desks. About $800. Might be able to find a used one of those online, too. The desk is the hardest part. Saw one designed for this purpose and it was about $479 or so. Had decent space. But some designed for this - like the ones at the site where the manufacturer sells the Tread - have very little working space. They say you're only supposed to walk 1 mile per hour and typing seems doable, maybe easy, at that pace. But over the course of the day you walk maybe 3 - 4 miles. One guy walked across the country - the equivalent, at least - in about a year. I saw a picture of a guy with a chair on the treadmill for those tasks where you just have to sit. The ultimate: a desk that could be lowered and swiveled so that you could swivel it one way and raise it for walking, then go 180 with it and lower it and use it facing the other way in a chair for longer tasks that might require sitting (or if your feet were aching or you were injured). I haven't seen anything like that and I don't think it would be cheap.

Hey, you're coding in a language that I don't use, but I'm totally with you. This is one of my pet peeves, too. One of my languages is Visual FoxPro, which has the "Immediate IF" ternary function, IIF: IIF(expr, a, b) If expr is true, a is returned, otherwise b is returned. So what I see is people doing this: MyBoolVar = IIF(SomeVar = 2, .t., .f.) Which could be simplified to: MyBoolVar = SomeVar = 2 Much cleaner. Or they expand it into a regular IF statement similar to what you posted. When I see this it does worry me. If programming should result from logical thinking and a programmer has trouble understanding logical values (boolean values), then should we wonder about the rest of their skills?

These days you don't have to go to just one school. MIT, Stanford, and others have courses online. You don't get the degree, but you can get the degree from one school and augment with courses online. You can start here: http://www.apple.com/education/guidedtours/itunesu.html But look directly on the Stanford and MIT sites and do a little Googling and you should be able to turn up their links. Sorry I don't have them, off-hand.

MS Bluetooth Notebook Mouse 5000 - go Bluetooth on your mouse and you'll never go back.

As much as possible, yes. The mistake is when you believe no commenting is necessary because your code is so wonderfully written. Can't tell if you really take it that far, of course.

Glad you mentioned WinZip. Not only are the new versions just not worth it, but they are unresponsive to customer requests. I've switched to 7-Zip and really don't miss WinZip at all.

YouSendIt.com might be an option

I have been thinking clientside validation is the way to go, also. I'm coming in late to this project and we have a deadline looming on 9/1, so that's a consideration when making changes. I only realized we had this problem yesterday, unfortunately. The page is for external users, but the volume will be low (about 1600 users entering one order each over the period of two - three months). As you can see, the amount of traffic is not really an issue, but serverside validation may not be the way to go due to these other issues. Thanks for your reply.

I'm tasked with helping a developer finish up a web page that collects information about an order and populates some SQL Server tables. ASPX with C#. I'm not a C# guy, but my main job here is to keep him on task, interface with the dept. that will need this, and validate the data design. At present, there are some issues with postbacks. He does a good bit of validation, mostly to ensure fields aren't blank, and posts back upon exit of a good many fields. One problem is retaining focus after postback. The user enters a value, presses tab, and a postback occurs. Instead of the focus moving to the next field, there seems to be no field with focus after the postback, which forces the user to click in the next field with the mouse. So instead of being able to tab to fields as expected, the user keeps having to use the mouse to get the focus to the appropriate field. This is not very desireable at all. Another issue is what fields cause a postback. An example would be a field that can be empty (zero), but if it's >0 another field needs to be populated. The postback occurs after the first field and an error message is displayed next to the second field saying it can't be empty, yet the user hasn't even had a chance to enter anything in that field. This is most likely a simple fix of where the validation originates from (the second field instead of the first), but the programmer seems to think this is hard to do or not doable. I may have to dig into C#, but some help here would be appreciated. Thanks, Russell

Alright, I'll try that. Thanks.

I'm tasked with helping a developer finish up a web page that collects information about an order and populates some SQL Server tables. ASPX with C#. I'm not a C# guy, but my main job here is to keep him on task, interface with the dept. that will need this, and validate the data design. At present, there are some issues with postbacks. He does a good bit of validation, mostly to ensure fields aren't blank, and posts back upon exit of a good many fields. One problem is retaining focus after postback. The user enters a value, presses tab, and a postback occurs. Instead of the focus moving to the next field, there seems to be no field with focus after the postback, which forces the user to click in the next field with the mouse. So instead of being able to tab to fields as expected, the user keeps having to use the mouse to get the focus to the appropriate field. This is not very desireable at all. Another issue is what fields cause a postback. An example would be a field that can be empty (zero), but if it's >0 another field needs to be populated. The postback occurs after the first field and an error message is displayed next to the second field saying it can't be empty, yet the user hasn't even had a chance to enter anything in that field. This is most likely a simple fix of where the validation originates from (the second field instead of the first), but the programmer seems to think this is hard to do or not doable. I may have to dig into C#, but some help here would be appreciated. Thanks, Russell

Oh, no wonder I didn't understand. I'm not a gamer at all.

Maybe. "I are troll" ??? Wouldn't want to associate myself with trolls . . . perhaps I am not understanding this correctly.

I recently reinstalled VS 2005 and after that, a dialog would come up when I started MS Word. It said "the feature you are using is on the VS 2005 CD and must be installed" (or something to that effect). Naturally, MS can't tell you what bleeping feature I'm supposedly using (all I had done was to start up Word). Then it takes 10 minutes or more to install this "feauture" after I supply the disk and still never tells me WTF it did. This happened the other day on another MS product - I think it was Expression Web - and it was the same story: no indication of what "feature" I was using and a long install (about 20 minutes). What the &$^# is going on when VS 2005 has to screw up other working programs and force you to do a further install? Those programs were on my machine at the time. Couldn't it install what it needed for those programs? In both cases I was not really doing anything or using any "feature" - I was just opening the app. Is it not possible MS to get what it needs installed the first time and not make you go back to do more installation later? Is it not possible for them to tell you what "feature" you're supposedly using and what the blank they just installed? This is something of a rant and complaint, but I would like to know the answers to these questions if you happen to be familiar with why this happens. Thanks. Russell

I suppose I could just not get it, but so often the ads on a site are ads for competitors. I'm not sure why people do this. I know competitor sites can be found in many other ways, but I guess it just seems very odd to allow your competitors to advertise on your own site.

Good article with obnoxious web design.

Yeah - trying to not let the boob tube rot my kids' brains. The snarky comment that could have been: 16 hot roles for IT pros Careful, hot roles can turn into rot holes

It's a legal copy of Infragistics NetAdvantage that I won that I won't be using. Just figured I'd sell it.

I wanted to find a site that is specializing in auctioning software. I found SoftwareExchange.com and it seems someone told me about another site once. EBay is a possibility, but I'm just not seeing a lot development tools being offered there. Anyone have any ideas?