Dieter Rams is one of the most important designers of the 20th century but his famous 10 principles for good design focused on industrial design. Here Lisbon-based designer Nuno Loureiro applies them to web design “My heart belongs to the details. I actually always found them to be more important than the big picture. Nothing works without details. They are everything, the baseline of quality”  â€“ Dieter RamsSince I got to know the work of Dieter Rams back in college, I became fascinated by the exceptional pro...

Erlang is a complex system, and I can’t do its inner workings justice in a short article, but I wanted to give some insight into what goes on when a module is compiled and loaded. As with most compilers, the first step is to convert the textual source to an abstract syntax tree, but that’s unremarkable. What is interesting is that the code goes through three major representations, and you can look at each of them.Erlang is unique among functional languages in its casual scope rules. You introduce variables as you go, without fanfare, and there’s no creeping indentation cau...

Greg Kroah-Hartman has released long-term kernel 3.0.20 and stable kernel 3.2.5. Both contain just a single bug fix that allows PCIe power-saving technology ASPM (Active State Power Management) to be used on systems with a BIOS that activates ASPM on some components, but states in the FADT (Fixed ACPI Description Table) consulted by Linux that ASPM is not supported. According to Matthew Garrett, who developed the patch, the change can reduce the power consumption of a Thinkpad X220 by 5 watts. The H's associates at c't magazine in Germany tested systems in their laboratory and experienced...

During last semester I was attending Multiprocessor Architectures course, given at Facultad de Informática where I study my Computer Science degree.As part of the assignments due to pass the course, we had to do several programs written in C to benchmark matrix multiplication by testing different techniques and technologies. First of all we had to do a secuential program in three different versions:A normal one where the result matrix is ordered by rows and the loops range the matrix by rows tooAn “inter” version where the result matrix is ordered by rows but the loops range the...

Everybody's talking about how programming is the skill that we all are going to need. [Except those folks who might feel that most programming could be turned into wizard-like tools. Insert long discussion about Strong AI.]But what's a programmer? Is the guy who set up his own Apache Web Server a programmer? How about the guy who created a complex Excel spreadsheet? The guy who made his own RPG level? Minecraft players? When we say "Everybody is going to have to know programming" what, exactly, does that mean?We need a set of programming levels.Level 1, The Read-and-Type: This is the guy who ...

The benefits of getting to grips with Vim are immense in terms of editing speed and maintaining your “flow” when you’re on a roll, whether writing code, poetry, or prose, but because the learning curve is so steep for a text editor, it’s very easy to retain habits from your time learning the editor that stick with you well into mastery. Because Vim makes you so fast and fluent, it’s especially hard to root these out because you might not even notice them, but it’s worth it. Here I’ll list some of the more common ones.Moving one line at a timeIf ...

Why can’t we make more use of the 80/20 rule? I’ll review what the 80/20 rule is, explain how it can be powerful, then give four reasons why we don’t take advantage of it.What is the 80/20 rule?The 80/20 rule is amazing when you first learn about it. It says that efforts and results are often very unevenly distributed. You’ll get 80% of your results from the first 20% of your efforts. For example, maybe your top 20% of customers will provide 80% of your profit. Or when you’re debugging software, often 80% of the bugs will be in 20% of the code. Once you becom...

Use well defined and consistent names for tables and columns (e.g. School, StudentCourse, CourseID ...).Use singular for table names (i.e. use StudentCourse instead of StudentCourses). Table represents a collection of entities, there is no need for plural names.Don’t use spaces for table names. Otherwise you will have to use ‘{‘, ‘[‘, ‘“’ etc. characters to define tables (i.e. for accesing table Student Course you'll write “Student Course”. StudentCourse is much better).Don’t use unnecessary prefixes or suffixes for table nam...