Up to date there is No single street name for a top programmer or computer scientist in any of the Top 20 most developed countries in the world during the last 60 years.There is no statue built in the center of a major city for a renown programmer or computer scientists.No “Presidential Medal” or “Congressional Gold Medal” has been awarded to a computer scientists or programmer.There is no nationally televised social reward ceremony for computer programmers and scientists like there is for artists, football or basketball players, etc.There is no red carpet and Nobel pri...

During some interesting discussions on Twitter yesterday I found that there is now more than ever a confusion about JavaScript dependence in web applications and web sites. This is a never ending story but it seems to me to flare up ever time our browsing technology leaps forward. I encountered this for the first time back in the days of DHTML. We pushed browsers to their limits with our lovely animated menus and 3D logos (something we of course learned not to do again, right?) and we were grumpy when people told us that there are environments out there where JavaScript isn’t available....

Since its birth in 1994, Javascript has come a long way. Today it’s one of the most popular programming languages on the web because of high popularity of AJAX based web-applications. Also the rise of micro-frameworks such as jQuery (also Prototype, Moo Tools etc) which have reduced dramatically the complexity of code developers needed to write, it is well tested, has a ton of plug-ins, has a large development community and reduced development time.And lately even Server-Side JavaScript (SSJS) like Node.js which allows you to create high performance, real-time web applica...

Look, everyone makes mistakes. It’s true. But not all of us have the chance to make mistakes that end up costing millions of dollars in hardware and production support costs.Any one of the following five mistakes listed below will add additional costs to your company. It’s guaranteed. The costs could be hardware related (extra disk space, network bandwidth), which tend to add up quickly. The costs are also support related (bad performance, database re-design, report creation, etc.), and they add up very quickly.Want to save your company some money, some headaches for yo...

OverviewThe author of these articles Are C# .Net Regular Expressions Fast Enough for You? and .Net Regex: Can Regular Expression Parsing be Faster than XmlDocument or Linq to Xml? recently pointed out to me that he had found that Regular expressions were at least as fast or faster than the alternatives in C#. However it has been my experience that regular expressions in Java were slower. It is hard for me to say why this might be different in Java and C# or even if these are fair comparisons but here is what I found in Java.Searching XML for the start of a fieldThis test searches for the exp...

Back in mid-2006, I documented my fairly dramatic weight loss in a series of blog postings. I went from a high of 224 pounds to a low of 164, which made for a total loss of 60 pounds (I’m about 6 feet tall). It’s interesting to go back and re-read what I wrote back then:Diet Tips or How To Lose Weight with a Spreadsheet and a Web SiteThe Diet Plan and The Three HabitsThe Diet SpreadsheetDiet Tips: How To Eat LessFast forward to January of 2011, and I had gained back about half the weight. I was hovering just below 200 pounds and had needed to purchase larger jeans a few times d...

C is the classic go-to tool for small programs that need to be really fast. When scripts.mit.edu needed a small program to be a glorified cat that also added useful HTTP headers to the beginning of its output, there was no question about it: it would be written in C, and it would be fast; the speed of our static content serving depended on it! (The grotty technical details: our webserver is based off of a networked filesystem, and we wanted to avoid giving Apache too many credentials in case it got compromised. Thus, we patched our kernel to enforce an extra stipulation that you must be runnin...

"Well, it's a start, but basically it stinks," said Steve Jobs, telling early Apple engineer Chris Espinosa exactly how he felt about the company's first calculator application. Iteration after iteration, Jobs continued to be dissatisfied with the calculator. Espinosa continued to code, slowly inching his way to perfection. But nothing was quite right. In a flash of both brilliance and perhaps frustration, Espinosa put together a visual builder that let Jobs design the calculator himself by changing the thickness of the lines, the size of the buttons, the shading, and the background, without ...