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  Pointers, arrays, and string literals

A recently posted question on Stack Overflow highlighted a common misconception about the role of pointers and arrays held by many programmers learning C.The confusion stems from a misunderstanding concerning the role of pointers and strings in C. A pointer is an address in memory. It often points to an index in an array, such as in the function strtoupper in the following code:void strtoupper(char *str) { if (str) { // null ptr check, courtesy of Michael while (...

   char pointer,initialization,literal,cann     2011-09-22 13:29:23

  Valid JavaScript variable names

Did you know var π = Math.PI; is syntactically valid JavaScript? I thought this was pretty cool, so I decided to look into which Unicode glyphs are allowed in JavaScript variable names, or identifiers as the ECMAScript specification calls them. Reserved words The ECMAScript 5.1 spec says: An Identifier is an IdentifierName that is not a ReservedWord. The spec describes four groups of reserved words: keywords, future reserved words, null literals and boolean lite...

   JavaScript,Name convention,Standard     2012-02-22 05:16:53

  What It’s Really Like to Work at Google

Google. It’s one of the most common household words in today’s modern society, and yet for a company that is used by most of us essentially as an algorithm, it tends to trigger a highly emotional response when overheard. It’s a dream job for college students nearing graduation, a highly coveted invitation to lunch by friends and colleagues who work near campus, and the bane of existence for those who produce content for the Internet. For several years, most of the publ...

   Google,Work,Life,Workplace     2012-01-18 08:19:00

  How Integers Should Work (In Systems Programming Languages)

My last post outlined some of the possibilities for integer semantics in programming languages, and asked which option was correct. This post contains my answers. Just to be clear: I want practical solutions, but I’m not very interested by historical issues or backwards compatibility with any existing language, and particularly not with C and C++. We’ll start with: Premise 1: Operations on default integer types return the mathematically correct result or else trap. This is th...

   Number,Algorithm,System,Embedded system     2011-12-05 12:48:41

  Build route graph of Hurricane Sandy

Hurricane Sandy swept US east side and landed in New York, it killed 113 persons and incurred 50 billion US dollars economic loss. Sandy is also considered as the most expensive hurricane. We will now use matplotlib and basemap libraries in Python to build a route graph of Sandy. Below is the animated GIF. Shadow is added in the graph to show the time at night, we can see from the graph that Sandy stayed a while in Panama after emerging, then it went through Cuba and became Hurricane-2. Late...

   Hurricane Sandy,Route graph,Python     2012-11-17 07:58:13

  VIM Plugins for C/C++ developers

Following up on my previous post on Essential Vim Plugins for Web Developers, I have decided to tell you about the awesomeness of the C / C++ plugin for Vim in this article.Now to get things going, let’s start by thinking what are the basic stuffs that you would be carrying out as a C / C++ developer? Include header files, some functions, loops, conditional statements and a main function. These are some repetitive boring tasks that you would rather have someone else do it for you. We...

   Plugin,Vim,C,C++,developer,Vim for C     2011-09-28 09:23:55

  Guide to use Compass

Sass is one kind of CSS Preprocessor, it can make CSS development simple and maintainable. But to show its real power we may need to have Compass. This article is to introduce Compass. Once you learn Compass, your CSS development efficiency will be largely improved. Here we assume you have mastered the major uses of CSS, if you know Sass, then it's better. It's still ok if you don't know Sass. 1. What is Compass? In simple, Compass it the toolkit of Sass. Sass itself is only a compiler, Compass...

   Compass,CSS,Sass,Tutorial     2012-12-03 13:35:46

  The most stupid C bug ever

I have been programming for a number of years already. I have seen others introduce bugs, and I have also introduced (and solved!) many bugs while coding. Off-by-one, buffer-overflow, treating pointers as pointees, different behaviors or the same function (this is specially true for cross-platform applications), race conditions, deadlocks, threading issues. I think I have seen quite a few of the typical issues. Yet recently I lost a lot of time to what I would call the most stupid C bug in my ca...

   C,Bug,Stupid,Bug code,All     2011-08-26 02:37:29

  Bash Shell Scripting - 10 Seconds Guide

This Bash shell scripting guide is not a detailed study but a quick reference to the BASH syntax. So lets begin... Common environment variables PATH - Sets the search path for any executable command. Similar to the PATH variable in MSDOS. HOME - Home directory of the user. MAIL - Contains the path to the location where mail addressed to the user is stored. IFS - Contains a string of characters which are used as word seperators in the command line. The string normally consists of the spac...

   Bash,Shell,Linux,Tutorial,10 seconds,Shortcut key     2012-02-28 08:05:41

  An open letter to those who want to start programming

First off, welcome to the fraternity. There aren’t too many people who want to create stuff and solve problems. You are a hacker. You are one of those who wants to do something interesting. “When you don’t create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability." – WhyTheLuckyStiff Take the words below with a pinch of salt. All these come from me – a bag-and-tag programmer. I love to get things working, rather than sit at something and over-o...

   Programming,Tips     2011-06-09 23:45:45

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