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  Automate Everything

Performing manual, repetitive tasks enrages me. I used to think this was a corollary of being a programmer, but I’ve come to suspect (or hope) that this behaviour is inherent in being human. But being able to hack together scripts simply makes it much easier to go from a state of rage to a basic solution in a very small amount of time. As a side point, this is one of the reasons that teaching the basics of programming in schools is so important. It’s hard to think of any j...

   Automate,Email,Repeative     2012-02-07 06:21:19

  On Erlang's Syntax

I first planned to release this text as an appendix entry for Learn You Some Erlang, but considering this feels more like editorial content and not exactly something for a reference text, I decided it would fit better as a blog post. Many newcomers to Erlang manage to understand the syntax and program around it without ever getting used to it. I've read and heard many complaints regarding the syntax and the 'ant turd tokens' (a subjectively funny way to refer to ,, ; and .), how annoying...

   Erlang,Syntax,Error     2011-12-22 08:35:42

  When to use STDERR instead of STDOUT

Every process is initialized with three open file descriptors, stdin, stdout, and stderr. stdin is an abstraction for accepting input (from the keyboard or from pipes) and stdout is an abstraction for giving output (to a file, to a pipe, to a console). That's a very simplified explanation but true nonetheless. Those three file descriptors are collectively called 'The Standard Streams'. Where does stderr come from? It's fairly straightforward to understand why stdin and stdout exist, however ...

   UNIX,STDERR,STDOUT,Difference     2012-01-14 12:07:43

  Why I switched from Ruby back to C++

After two months of Sol Trader development in Ruby, I took a difficult decision last Wednesday morning: I’ve decided to rewrite the game code from scratch in C++. Let me explain my reasons. If you'd like to receive announcements about Sol Trader or be part of the beta program, sign up at soltrader.net. Why I did it Slow frames: When working with Ruby, I use the excellent Gosu library to do all my game specific coding. This initially worked great, but occasionally I’d just...

   C++,Ruby,Advantage,Feature     2012-01-09 08:56:21

  Writing forward-compatible websites

This is a list of best practices for creating websites that do not break when browsers are updated. It's not always possible to follow all of these, but following as many of them as possible will help future-proof your website. This is especially important for intranet applications and other non-public websites where problems are likely to not be noticed during testing by browser vendors.JavaScriptPrefix all global variable access in onfoo attributes with “window.”When an e...

   Web design,Forward compatible,CSS,JavaScript,window     2011-11-23 08:07:35

  Automatically post to Facebook from PHP script

Facebook is currently on of the most important publishing and traffic generating sources for many websites. Manually Cross publishing content on your own site and Facebook seems like a lot of extra work. This post guides you through the creation of a Facebook application that can automatically post messages and other types of content on your Facebook wall. Getting started Building a php script that automatically posts status updates on your wall requires the following steps: Download Faceboo...

   PHP,Facebook,API,Auto post,OAuth     2012-02-27 09:03:00

  File upload once again

File upload is one of the oldest operation of web design. After 20 years, it's still has no big change, difficult to handle, lack of interaction and poor user experience. Web developers have thought many methods to improve the experience of uploading file in web apps, they developed various plugins based on different JavaScript libraries. However, because of the difference among different web browsers, there is no common interface which makes these plugins work properly or easily on all web brow...

   Web design, File upload, Asynchronous,HTML5     2012-09-02 11:52:21

  How to Think Creatively

I grew up hungry to do something creative, to set myself apart. I also believed creativity was magical and genetically encoded. As early as the age of 8, I began sampling the arts, one after another, to see if I'd inherited some gift.Eventually, I became a journalist. For many years, I told other people's stories. I was successful, but I rarely felt truly creative.The first hint I might have sold myself short came in the mid-1990s. In the course of writing a book called What Really Matters, Sear...

   Creative thinking,Saturation,Incubation,Illumination,Verification     2011-11-14 08:39:11

  A Better Way to Learn How to Program

Learning how to program can be a nightmare. An aspiring coder has to jump through many unpleasant hoops and mysterious error messages just to get "Hello, World!" printed on the screen. Then, she's left wondering, "OK, now what? How do I actually build something?"As game developers seeing someone struggle through this, we should be screaming, “NOOOOO!” The whole thing reeks of bad game design: a lot of work with no reward, unclear failure cases, advanced features pushed on new players...

   Programming pattern,Game design,Derivati     2011-09-19 13:51:17

  Building a Modern Web Stack for the Real-time Web

The web is evolving. After a few years of iteration the WebSockets spec is finally here (RFC 6455), and as of late 2011 both Chrome and Firefox are SPDY capable. These additions are much more than just "enhancing AJAX", as we now have true real-time communication in the browser: stream multiplexing, flow control, framing, and significant latency and performance improvements. Now, we just need to drag our "back office" - our web frontends, app servers, and everything in between into this cen...

   Web design,Real-time web,web stack     2012-02-15 05:54:41

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