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LLVM is a complex piece of software. There are several paths one may take on the quest of understanding how it works, none of which is simple. I recently had to dig in some areas of LLVM I was not previously familiar with, and this article is one of the outcomes of this quest. What I aim to do here is follow the various incarnations an "instruction" takes when it goes through LLVM’s multiple compilation stages, starting from a syntactic construct in the source language and until being encoded as binary machine code in an output object file. The amazing lifecycle of a simple division operation. Part 1: The Miracle of Birth...
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Very cool. The layers of abstraction make a lot of sense.
Marc
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Parallax background is a really simple but extremely cool feature you can add to your application. You just need a div containing your background picture and a listview on top of it. Here's how it works. Excellent extreme close-up. Now it's Wayne's World's Totally Amazing Excellent Discoveries...
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A few weeks ago at the Build conference, Scott Hanselman and I sat down to talk about C++ and modern UI/UX. Scott mentions he has used C++ in the past. C++ has changed. We still call it C++, but it’s a very different language now.... C++ is having a resurgence. Herb and Scott discuss why.
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Over the course of a few years I piled up a long list of git aliases.... I rely on many of them dozens of times a day. And maybe some have slipped your radar. Maybe you’ve never thought you could do some of these useful things with an alias. Let me show you some of the cool things you can do. gitconfig is the new .profile.
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I've found, contrary to what you sometimes read, that learning Python and Haskell has not improved my programming using other languages. Haskell in particular, being so different from imperative languages, is supposed to give new insights into programming that will help you even when you are not using the language. My current experience doesn't exactly tally with this, and here is why. The moral of the story: don't bother improving yourself.
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My takeaway from that article is to ignore articles from 2006 that complain about lack of features in C# that have been there for years already, like LINQ.
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I agree with Brady - this article, being almost 7 years old, is outdated. True at the time, but not now.
Marc
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ZRTP has recently gotten some press for being the primary key agreement used by Silent Circle, a new encrypted voice/video/text service launched by PGP inventor Phil Zimmerman and some other bright folks. But it's also used in other secure VoIP solutions, like Zfone and Moxie's RedPhone. Silent Circle's an interesting case, since it's gotten some gentle criticism lately from a variety of folks -- well, mostly Nadim Kobeissi -- for being partially closed-source and for having received no real security audits.... It gives us a (wonky) chance to learn a little bit about this ZRTP protocol that so many people seem to be using. ZRTP seems determined to address every possible attack simultaneously.
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People are doing a lot of cool things with the Raspberry Pi. One of the first things I thought to do was to see if I could make a Raspberry Pi web server. As I found out it’s really easy. Setting up a Web Server on this device really isn’t much different from any other Linux machine, but there are a couple things you’ll want to do in order to get it working right. You don't need to make tiny web pages for it, however.
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Back in May, the ICANN registration process for new gTLDs finally drew to a close, and in June ICANN published a list of which domain names had been applied for and by whom. A total of 1930 applications were received for suffixes such as .cloud, .music, .docs and .lol. ICANN said at the time that anyone who objected to an application and believed they had the grounds to do so could file a formal objection within seven months. OMG.ICantBelieveTheyreStillMessingThisUp
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For decades, the AN/FSQ-7 -- Q7 for short -- helped define the image of a computer in the popular consciousness. Nevermind that it was just a radar system originally backed by tens of thousands of vacuum tubes. For moviegoers everywhere, this was the sort of thing that automated myriad tasks not only in modern-day America but the distant future. It never made much sense. But sometimes, it made even less sense. It's a UNIX system! I know this!
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The author wanted to but Hal 9000 on the list, but his computer refused to cooperate.
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A while back, I wrote a simple blog on how to call a SQL Server stored procedure from VB.NET. I was asked by a reader to generate a more detailed "Hello World" style stored procedure so they could more easily identify exactly what was going on. In this tutorial, you will find just such a stored procedure and the associated VB.NET code. Data Access in VB 101.
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Even I don't think this is news.
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I believe the day-to-day practice of writing JavaScript is going to change dramatically for the better when ECMAScript.next arrives. The coming year is going to be an exciting time for developers as features proposed or finalised for the next versions of the language start to become more widely available. In this post, I will review some of the features I'm personally looking forward to landing and being used in 2013 and beyond. Some of these features are already available for experimenting.
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In his presentation, André starts with the foundations of Objective-C, how things are stored in memory and then goes on to look at the philosophy of programming. Although the tools, the operating systems and the devices may all have changed since this talk, the principles that he considers are still important: André talks about Small Talk, Lambda calculas, why assignment is bad, uniformity, functional programming and Haskell and the lessons we can learn for programming in Objective-C. André Pang's presentation on Objective-C from the very first NSConference.
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I’ve found writing unit tests in F# very productive, with it’s terse syntax and powerful type inference. I write F# tests against C# and F# implementations. Writing tests in F# can be a good introduction to the language and this is something we do on our team. To get up to speed quickly you’ll typically want a familiar unit testing framework and mocking library syntax. F# code works with all the popular open source .Net unit testing frameworks... Here are examples using many of the most popular testing frameworks.
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This is the first post in the Real World Problems with Windows Azure Web Sites blog series, as it intends to answer one of the most common questions I receive when I’m doing presentations about Windows Azure Web Sites. This situation demonstrates a typical setup, wherein a site owner has multiple environments to which they push their web site. This setup is extremely valuable for staging site releases and for delivering solid web applications or for doing A-B testing of a site’s changes. Code, Commit, Deploy... to the Cloud!
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Windows Azure now offers customers a cloud platform that can cost effectively and reliably meet the needs of Big Compute. With a massively powerful and scalable infrastructure, new instance configurations, and a new HPC Pack 2012, Windows Azure is designed to be the best platform for your Big Compute applications. In fact, we tested and validated the power of Windows Azure for Big Compute applications by running the LINPACK benchmark. The network performance was so impressive... that we submitted the results and have been certified as one of the Top 500 of the world’s largest supercomputers. 151.3 TFlops on 8,064 cores with 90.2 percent efficiency.
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A newly discovered form of malware that targets Linux servers acting as Web servers allows an attacker to directly inject code into any page on infected servers—including error pages. The rootkit, which was first publicly discussed on the Full Disclosure security e-mail list on November 13, appears to be crafted for servers running the 64-bit version of Debian Squeeze and NGINX. Iframe annoyances.
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As more and more software distribution are going through so-called App Stores, the question about the compatibility of their terms and conditions with the open source licenses, notably the GPL, often arise.... So far, the Android store is open source friendly, and Apple one is not yet open source friendly. But there is a new one in town, so I will look at the new Windows Store, that will ship WinRT Metro and Windows Phone 8 applications. Is it safe to publish a FOSS application on the Windows Store? Read on to find out.
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It is commonly thought by instigators of research in big data that most companies seek to use big data to understand customers/consumers better, and most have misunderstood the stark difference between personal data and non-personal data. Data that is generated from activities and events taking place are different from personal information that we may willingly or unwittingly share. Either way, the basic fact is that the most accurate personal data is the most valuable, and (here's the key) that data happens to be the most private. Are you in the game of exploiting information regardless of morality?
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Recently I’ve undertaken a personal project (computoser) that is a bit strange. I tried to write software that generates music at random. Good music, that is, because “random” usually generates noise. The idea, of course, is not at all new – there has been research on the topic and there is software that attempts to generate music. It's got a good beat, and I can dance to it.
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The human brain is an extraordinary computing machine. Nobody understands exactly how it works its magic but part of the trick is the ability to store and process information at the same time. That's entirely unlike conventional computers which store information in random access memory or on hard disc and shuttle it back and forth as required to a central processing unit. The time and energy all this takes is the thing that ultimately limits conventional computing performance, the so-called von Neumann bottleneck. Essentially, it is this that prevents conventional computers from approaching the performance of biological ones. All that may be about to change. The more contact I have with humans, the more I learn...
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