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  Writing robust shellling scripts

Many people hack together shell scripts quickly to do simple tasks, but these soon take on a life of their own. Unfortunately shell scripts are full of subtle effects which result in scripts failing in unusual ways. It's possible to write scripts which minimise these problems. In this article, I explain several techniques for writing robust bash scripts. Use set -u ...

   Robust,Shell script,Set,Commands     2012-03-19 13:25:26

  PHP's Output Buffering

While profiling our application I came across a a rather strange memory usage by the ob_start() function. We do use ob_start() quite a bit to defer output of data, which is a common thing in many applications. What was unusual is that 16 calls to ob_start() up chewing through almost 700kb of memory, given that the data being buffered rarely exceeds 1-2kb, this was quite unusual. I started looking at the C code of the ob_start() function and found this interesting bit of code inside php_sta...

   PHP,Memory,ob_start(),source,40kB     2011-12-08 10:20:32

  Dates in PHP and MySQL

I see a lot of people on forums and on my training courses asking about the best way (or any way) to manage dates stored in a MySQL database and used in PHP. Three options follow, but first the problem.PHP uses unix timestamps for all its date functionality. It has methods to convert these timestamps into pretty much any text format you could want but internally it uses the timestamp format. A timestamp is simply an integer. Specifically, it’s the number of seconds that have ela...

   PHP,MySQL,Date format,Date,Comparison,Date compare     2011-10-17 14:00:57

  I’m too lazy to be a HTML developer

There’s no denying it. I’m just to damn lazy to be an HTML developer. This really sunk in when I looked at a tutorial for doing a jQuery Lightbox – for a client project. The tutorial was titled “Super Simple Lightbox with CSS and jQuery” but after reading it over I thought a better title would be “A really freaking hard tutorial on the inane intricacies of doing something that looks simple but in reality is a skein of HTML, Javascript and CSS that no...

   Web design,HTML,JavaScript,Complexity,Messy     2011-12-18 10:42:45

  PHP 7 is coming soon

After a few RCs, PHP 7 will be officially released on November 12, 2015. This is a major release of PHP since PHP 5.6. @Laruence, one of the core contributors of PHP, has posted this news on Weibo(China's Twitter).  This is a one month later than the expected time as recorded in PHP 7 timeline. But it's not that late. The new release will come with a few features including: Scalar type declaration, you can define variable like int now Return type support. Besides declare scalar type ...

   RELEASE DATE,PHP7     2015-11-08 09:13:37

  The Evolution of a Programmer

High School/Jr.High 10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD" 20 END First year in College program Hello(input, output) begin writeln('Hello World') end. Senior year in College (defun hello (print (cons 'Hello (list 'World)))) New professional #include <stdio.h> void main(void) { char *message[] = {"Hello ", "World"}; int i; for(i = 0; i < 2; ++i) printf("%s", message[i]); printf("\n"); } Seasoned professional #include <iostream....

   Humour,Evolution,Programmer     2012-04-23 06:30:33

  Use DTrace to diagnose gdb issues

A few days ago, I installed the newest 64-bit gdb program (version 7.7.1) on Solaris 10 (X86_64 platform) to debug programs. After playing with the gdb a day, I found 2 issues about gdb:(1) The "set follow-fork-mode child" command doesn't take effect. By default, after the parent process forks the child process, the gdb will track the parent process, so this command can make gdb begin to follow the child process. But this command works OK on Linux.(2) The gdb can't parse the 32-bit application c...

   DTrace, debug, gdb, UNIX     2014-06-28 05:11:20

  When will resizing be triggered in Java HashMap?

HashMap is one of the most frequently used collection types in Java, it stores key-value pairs. Ideally it expects to use hash table which expects the data access time complexity to be O(1), however, due to hash conflicts, in reality, it uses linked list or red-black tree to store data which makes the worst case time complexity to be O(logn).  Although collections are using data structures like arrays and linked lists, unlike arrays, they will dynamically resize when there is not enough spa...

   JAVA,RESIZE,HASHMAP,THRESHOLD     2020-05-02 20:41:19

  Exit main thread and keep other threads running in C

In C programming, if using return in main function, the whole process will terminate. To only let main thread gone, and keep other threads live, you can use thrd_exit in main function. Check following code: #include #include #include int print_thread(void *s) { thrd_detach(thrd_current()); for (size_t i = 0; i < 5; i++) { sleep(1); printf("i=%zu\n", i); } thrd_exit(0); } int main(void) { ...

   C LANGUAGE,MULITHREAD,MAIN THREAD     2020-08-14 21:20:04

  Add ContextMenu to a customized View in Android

In Android, we may sometimes need to add ContextMenu to a View, it's not so easy to add ContextMenu to a customized View. Here we explain how to add ContextMenu to a customized View. First, we may need to create View.OnCreateContextMenuListener so that the customized view can register for it. Here is the class definition: public class GraphView extends View {     private View.OnCreateContextMenuListener vC = new View.OnCreateContextMenuListener() {       &...

   Android, ContextMenu,Customized view     2012-11-04 07:10:40

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