While reading up on The ABA Problem I came across a fantastic hack.  The ABA problem, in a nutshell, results from the inability to atomically access both a pointer and a "marked" bit at the same time (read the wikipedia page).  One fun, but very hackish solution is to "smuggle" data in a pointer.  Example:#include "stdio.h"void * smuggle(void * ptr, int value){  return (void *)( (long long)ptr | (value & 3) );}int recoverData(void * ptr){  return (long long)ptr & 3;}void * recoverPointer(void * ptr){  return (void *)( (long long)ptr & (~3) );}int main(...

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This post is part of our ReadWriteCloud channel, which is dedicated to covering virtualization and cloud computing. The channel is sponsored by Intel and VMware. Read the case study about how Intel Xeon processors and VMware deliver unprecedented reliability in the face of RAM errors.For years, everyone was talking about the convergence of interfaces. The Web, and as a result, the browser, were "clearly" about to take over as the major platforms and cloud computing emerged. Then, in March 2008, Steve Jobs unleashed the iOS followed by the mobile apps revolution. What seems to have happened nex...

First who we are: account managers and business developers at web design agencies. This process is geared towards bigger agencies, however it can be applied to freelance and smaller shops in theory.The important piecesWeb design projects tend to be unique in nature, however it is important to have a basic process that can be applied in most cases. This process is executed in a linear fashion starting with information and ending in code, but requires iteration loops at each step.Information â€“ The organization of content and data.Design â€“ The face that communicates inform...

It’s Tuesday, I get a call from an unknown number.  There is a little hesitation, but I finally pick it up.  My number is listed on my business card and I feel like I should get these calls unless I am in a meeting.- Hi, is this Mike?- Yes, speaking….- Hi Mike!  How are you today?- Fine…- I am calling from XYZ Co, and we deal with recruiting and staff augmentation.  I was wondering if you are looking for software developers.We are in San Francisco and it’s late 2011.  Every tech company is looking for developers.  If they were not looking...

Working on one of the Chromebooks Google lets you borrow on Virgin America flights, I noticed scrolling down the page on my airbnb.com dashboard was much slower than on my normal laptop. I chalked it up to weak Chromebook hardware, but other sites were scrolling just fine. box-shadow had caused slow scrolling on our search results page before, so I did some investigation.I used Chrome's Timeline tab to see the duration of paint events on the page. Before each test I forced a garbage collection and scrolled to the same window position using window.scroll(0, 140). Then I clicked the down arrow i...

There are a bunch of iPhone apps I own though I have no clue what they do. These apps include but aren’t limited to; FLUD, Apptitude, Cartoonatic, Can’t Wait!, Punch, Pah, Prize Claw, Traveler, Concur, Jajah, Fast Customer, Pimple Popper and many more whose names I can’t even remember.Occupying my valuable homescreen real estate are also a bunch of apps whose purpose I remember only because they were built by people I know or am friends with, but that I sadly never use. And in some cases I really wish I did, because it would make my friends happy and the world a better pla...

Michael Braude decries the popularity of web programming:The reason most people want to program for the web is that they're not smart enough to do anything else. They don't understand compilers, concurrency, 3D or class inheritance. They haven't got a clue why I'd use an interface or an abstract class. They don't understand: virtual methods, pointers, references, garbage collection, finalizers, pass-by-reference vs. pass-by-value, virtual C++ destructors, or the differences between C# structs and classes. They also know nothing about process. Waterfall? Spiral? Agile? Forget it. They've n...