Introduction On an evolutionary scale of innovation from one to ten (one being Bloomberg and Citi Group, eight being Google and Cirque Du Soleil, and ten being the company you couldn't imagine in your wildest dreams), the company I work for is about a three1. Being employed by this bastion of ingenuity affords me certain opportunities I can't get elsewhere. For example, every developer gets to interview potential candidates he might end up working with. During our last round of these int...

This is one of those problems that I couldn’t find a complete example for when I needed it, so hopefully this will save somebody else the extra time it took me to piece it together.We frequently need to have data tables in our UI, and allow the user to select a subset of those items for action. In JavaServer Faces, this means having a DataTable, each row having its own checkbox. But when the action is triggered, how to we find which items the user has selected.The first step is to add a boolean property to your objects that can represent the selection. If you have a lot objects in your ...

Young scientists at a Chinese genomics institute are foregoing conventional postgraduate training for the chance to be part of major scientific initiatives. Is this the way of the future?The approach to extended postgraduate training varies from country to country. The United States and Europe, for example, have long believed that students need to finish a multiyear programme of postgraduate work before they can fully participate in the front rank of research, whether in industry or academia.In Asia, scientific communities instead tend to value directed, practical research. In Japan, for examp...

"This guy’s code sucks!" It’s something we’ve all said or thought when we runinto code we don’t like. Sometimes it’s because it’s buggy, sometimes it’sbecause it conforms to a style we don’t like, and sometimes it’s because itjust feels wrong. Recently I found myself thinking this, and automaticallyjumping to the conclusion that the developer who wrote it was a novice. Thecode had a distinct property that I dislike: lots of nesting. But the more Ithink about it, the more I realized that it’s not really something I�...

The tail of 2011 has gone through my heart silently, Year of 2012 is coming with mystery. Looking back to 2011 and looking forward to 2012, it's time to record something...In the past 2011, nothing specials happened in my life. At the beginning of 2011, I was a college student with full of passion, while at the end of 2011, I am an engineer with 5 month's working experience. At the beginning of 2011, I was struggling through my Final Year Project and job hunting, while at the end of 2011, I am preparing for all kinds of hands on and objective tests before working onsite. At the beginning of 20...

An actress acquaintance of mine—let's call her Esmerelda—once said, "I can't imagine being anything except an actress." To which the retort was given, "You can't be much of an actress then, can you?"I was reminded of this exchange when someone said to me about Go, "I can't imagine programming in a language that doesn't have generics." My retort, unspoken this time, was, "You can't be much of a programmer, then, can you?"This is not an essay about generics (which are a fine thing and may arrive in Go one day, or may not) but about imagination, or at least what passes for imagina...

This morning Miroslav Bajtoš asked “Why do C++ folks make things so complicated?” in response to my article on regular expressions in C++. Other people asked similar questions yesterday.My response has two parts:Why I believe C++ libraries are often complicated.Why I don’t think it has to be that way.Why would someone be using C++ in the first place? Most likely because they need performance or fine-grained control that they cannot get somewhere else. A Ruby programmer, for example, can make a design decision that makes code 10% slower but much easier to use. “Hey, ...

The Analogies Are WrongOriginally, web pages were static documents, and web browsers were static document viewers; there was text, some formatting, and images—if you could pay for the bandwidth to serve them. Hyperlinks were the really big thing, because they were the main point of user interaction—but what a powerful thing they were, and still are.Then along came CGI and Java, and the web was transformed: all of a sudden, a web browser became a way to serve interactive content to users. A web page was no longer just a document, but a portal to a living, breathing world. You your...