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My love for programming languages is very much akin (and I swear linked to the same part of my brain) as my love for human languages: they are all unique and beautiful in their own way. I love Python, I love C, I love Smalltalk, I love Erlang, etc, etc. But Perl has taken an entirely undeserved beating in recent years, and so, in karmic balance, it deserves a round of outspoken championship, far more than others need right now. In pondering why Perl’s current reputation is so completely disjointed from the reality of the language, I’ve boiled it down to three “Big Bang Theory”-esque ideas: “The Cookie Slap! Effect”, “The Awkward Adolescence Fallacy”, and “The Singularity Paradox”. People still use Perl because it still works and the community has evolved with the language.
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While at Waza this year, I had a chance to talk to my friend Guillaume Roques. In addition to talking about SalesForce, we took advantage of our mutual .NET backgrounds to discuss Microsoft. We did the typically uncompromising praise of The Gu and how far Azure has come along in the last 18 months… and of course we had to talk databases. Below is my quick little list of reasons I gave him as to why I’m favoring Postgres over SQL Server from a technical/business aspect. Is the table half-full or half-empty?
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A UNIX programmer was working in the cubicle farms. As she saw Master Git traveling down the path, she ran to meet him. “It is an honor to meet you, Master Git!” she said. “I have been studying the UNIX way of designing programs that each do one thing well. Surely I can learn much from you.” “Surely,” replied Master Git.... Upon seeing this, the novice was enlightened.
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Last week, web developer Francois Remy published an initial analysis of Internet Explorer 11 -- the next version of IE that surfaced via a leaked copy of Windows "Blue". In his analysis, he noted that he found references to various WebGL APIs but ultimately wrote them off as non-functional. Picking up where Remy left off, I dug a little deeper and discovered WebGL support is indeed incomplete but is coming and can be enabled for experimentation. Tired of WebKit wrangling? Teach IE11 some new tricks.
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I beleive the frustation is with the fact that Win 8 does such a lousy job for desktop environments (and laptop), and now people have to deal with it. The fact the Microsoft has apparently sold few Win 8 copies to the existing windows base seems to indicate that they have not succeeeded in replacing the traditional OS. Of course Vista was never real successful, but Windows 7 was. I expect, again, that Microsoft will have to wait until the next version of windows before it produces an OS that people will want to replace thier Windows 7 OS, and I suspected this would be true before it was released with what I heard about it..
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I think it's common knowledge MS make a beyond terrible OS so that they can sell more of the one they make after it.
.-.
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Struts 1, the venerable Java MVC Web framework, has reached End Of Life status, the Apache foundation has announced. In a sense, the move simply formalises what has already happened, as the Struts team have focused their efforts on version 2; the last release of Struts 1 was version 1.3.10 in December 2008. The change of status does mean however that, whilst the code and documentation will still be available, no further security patches or bug fixes will be issued. Once the 'Killer App' for J2EE, Struts is now effectively dead.
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There is a lot of hate for “touch” out there and I thought I’d talk about it a bit. I can tell when I’m reading an unreasonable discussion because there is always something about having to stand there all day with your arms stretched out to touch the screen. I stop reading when this is mentioned. Why would anyone stand there with their arms stretched out constantly? Microsoft certainly doesn’t require this, so anyone who makes that comment just isn’t paying attention. Or rather, is just trying to be difficult. My frustration with Windows 8 on most of the PCs I use is that they don’t have touch.
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In his presentation at Breaking Development in Orlando FL Rod Farmer outlined some of the challenges you're likely to encounter when making the transition to designing for TV. Here's my notes from his talk on Context, multi-device and the future of TV in the browser. TV as a device is dead. TV as entertainment is very much alive.
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I am the most happy when I’m challenged which is twisted because I also doubt my abilities the most when I’m challenged because with challenges comes failures. I’m a competitive person. I see people writing code or having deep knowledge in subjects I don’t understand, so I ask questions, and more questions, until people are probably blue in the face.... Bigger apps, faster code, new languages and frameworks... there's always something new for coders.
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No one wants to think of themselves as a Luddite, which is part of what makes technological conservatism so insidious. It can color the thinking of the nerdiest among us, even as we use the latest hardware and software and keep up with all the important tech news. The certainty of our own tech savvy can blind us to future possibilities and lead us to reject anything that deviates from the status quo. We are not immune. When I was a kid we coded in vim, and we liked it... Oh, wait...
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Terrence Dorsey wrote: When I was a kid we coded in vim, and we liked it...
When I was a kid, we coded in vi. Today we have vim.
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Have you ever wondered how PCI cards are able to perform basic operations — such as accessing a disk, displaying graphics, or booting off the network — before their drivers have been loaded? Or why cards are platform specific, despite the fact that everyone is using standardized PCI interfaces? The answer actually lies on the card itself, inside a bit of addressable flash memory called the “Option ROM”, which contains executable code that’s located and run at boot time.... This leads me to my small Friday evening project in getting a PC version of the Radeon 7000 64MB working on a PCI Power Macintosh, for which no 64MB cards were released. Hardware not compatible? Nothing a little soldering can't solve...
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If you're reading this page, chances are that you're already well aware that E.T. for the Atari 2600 is one of the most reviled games ever made. I never understood why. As a child, it was one of my favorite games. I still think it's a good game. Apparently, I'm not alone. On this page I'm going to briefly explore why people hate E.T., and how the game can be fixed.... It turns out that E.T. isn't a bad game after all. With a few simple changes we were able to dramatically improve an already good game by eliminating the most common complaints. Just grab the ROM, open a hex editor and start playing...
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Bit level manipulation allows us to write more efficient code due to the fact that CPU's are really good at handling bits. In fact that's all they really do. Even if you've never played around with bit manipulation it's likely that your compiler has modified your code to use bit manipulation. Slide to the left. Now slide to the right...
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That brings back some memories !!
'g'
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Shifting right by 1 isn't actually the same as dividing by 2.. rounds the other way for negative numbers.
Anyway, no offense, but that wasn't very interesting. There are many interesting bit level manipulations, but that blog post shows none of them - the ones it does show are exactly the sort of thing a compiler does automatically.
Here are a few more interesting (IMO) examples:
- (x - 1) & x removes the lowest set bit. Very useful, for example to iterate over a sparse set of bits without having to test them all, or to test whether a number is "a power of 2 or zero".
- x & -x sort of the dual of the previous one; isolates the lowest set bit.
- (x + 1) | x an other kind of dual of the first thing - sets the lowest zero. Useful to iterate over dense sets of bits.
- mask = value >> 31; return (value + mask) ^ mask; computes the absolute value of a 32-bit integer without branching.
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Those are really useful, you should publish or at least point us to where you sourced them if they're not yours.
"The secret of happiness is freedom, and the secret of freedom, courage."
Thucydides (B.C. 460-400)
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harold aptroot wrote: They're common knowledge, right?
Sadly no they're not. They fall down an educational hole being too technical and low level to teach in our dumbed down schools and too simple and 'obvious' to make it into a degree course.
As they don't have explicit syntactic representation in any of the major languages these things seldom make it into any language based book except perhaps the appendices of the occasional tome on 'C'.
For the less mathematical like myself they may not be difficult to understand but I couldn't come up with any of them given a day to think about it so thank you very much for the links. I used to have the Stanford link but lost it somewhere. 
"The secret of happiness is freedom, and the secret of freedom, courage."
Thucydides (B.C. 460-400)
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"No offense, but..." it's important to remember that what you know is not necessarily shared by everyone else.
Whether this is the *best* introduction is open to debate. Your correction and links to further information help everyone. Thank you.
Director of Content Development, The Code Project
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We are all familiar with URLs: the string uniquely identifying the requested document. However, we don’t always consider they are more than that: URLs are user facing and should be considered important UI elements. They should be clean, understandable, semantic, hierarchical and not excessively long. If the URL looks like garbage people won’t click it.
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In September 2004, the activity we called audioblogging was starting to gain traction. There were a dozen or so regular programs. We had tools for creating audioblog feeds, and an aggregator that could pull them all together into a river of audio programming.... In the first days of the iPodder-dev mail list the term podcast was introduced and adopted as the name of the activity. Here's the sequence of events, with links. On September 15, 2004, Dannie Gregoire used the term "podcaster," and that's the way it was.
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If we go way back to the 18th century, we find ourselves in the heyday of mechanics. Indeed, many physicists believed that the world was essentially mechanical and deterministic. More importantly, everyone was thinking about mechanical solutions to problems. In that milieu, it seemed natural to think of computing in terms of gears, chains, sprockets, and cams. The result was mechanical computers. Once the electronics revolution hit full stride, these machines ended up being remembered as the pinnacle of a bygone age. Now, in a blast from the past, a pair of researchers from New Zealand have demonstrated an updated version of the mechanical computer: an artificial, muscle-based computer. It's slow and bulky, and it can't do a lot, but the researchers argue that it has great potential for robotics. Such a computer is very simple, but programming it is very, very complicated.
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This actually happened. An e-commerce website had been designed and developed. Launch had been initiated, and it was abruptly taken offline in mid-air.... The form, fit, and function of the entire website—particularly the content management, multivendor shopping, and the customer interaction—was not shared with the website customer. Sixteen months of design and development more than $25,000 wasted, to say nothing of the lost market opportunity. Bad UX, front-end and back-end, can kill a website. A fascinating case study of an e-commerce project gone bad. Very, very bad.
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