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  Good programmer made bad designers

I got an email request to publish this article a few days ago.I was actually on the verge of moving the email to the trash when I noticed the first name of the author: Rand.For those of you not familiar with the Wheel of Time series, the main character’s name is Rand.I admit that it’s an embarrassing weak reason to respond to a strange email, but reading some 10,000 pages of a fantasy series obviously messes with your mind.Then again, it’s probably no stranger than...

   Programmer,Designer,Comparison     2011-08-29 22:06:33

  10 tools to make your shell script more powerful

Many people mistakenly think that shell scripts can only be run in command line. In fact shell can also call some GUI components such as menus,alert dialogs, progress bar etc. You can control the final output, cursor position and various output effects. Here we introduce some tools which can help you create powerful, interactive and user friendly Unix/Linux shell scripts. 1. notify-send This command can let you inform the process to send a desktop notification to users. This can be used to send ...

   shell,GUI,zenity     2013-04-05 08:50:41

  Why does Symbian collapse?

On 24th January, Nokia announces a disappointing news that they would give up Symbian. The 808 PureView released last year will be its last Symbian model.  Symbian was born in 1998, it was supported by the then three mobile giants : Sony Ericson, Motorola and Nokia after its birth, later Samsung and LG also joined the Symbian camp. In 2000, the first Symbian model in the world Ericoson R380 was released, in 20006, there were over 100 million Symbian handphones on the market. But in 2007, t...

   Nokia, Symbian, Collapse, Analysis     2013-01-28 03:06:09

  Why accessing Java HashMap may cause infinite loop in concurrent environment

HashMap in Java is frequently used to handle key/value pairs. But it is not a good candidate to be used in concurrent environment where ConcurrentHashMap should be used instead. If used in concurrent environment, it may cause lots of unexpected behavior even including make the program getting into an infinite loop situation. To understand how this can happen, let's first discuss how HaspMap works internally. In this post we will use implementation of HashMap before Java 8 as example, Java 8 prov...

   JAVA,HASHMAP,INFINITE LOOP     2020-03-29 01:47:00

  How multitasking really works on Android and iOS

As the horsepower packed into mobile devices gets ever greater, more full-featured forms of multitasking are possible. The market leaders have very different ways of going about things, and there are numerous misconceptions about what is going on behind the scenes. This isn’t all the fault of the user, though. In the interest of ease of use, sometimes the multitasking metaphor is overly simplified on both Android and iOS. iOS: It’s more complicated than it looksEver since iOS...

   Android,iOs,Multitasking,Task bar     2012-01-06 09:58:09

  HTTP Streaming and Internet Explorer

In early 2006, Alex Russell posted about a neat hack that the Google Talk team in Gmail use to support Comet in Internet Explorer, a trick which works as far back as IE 5.01. What great news! A reliable way to stream Comet messages to Microsoft’s browsers. If only it were that easy. I have not been alone in the following findings: after connecting the htmlfile ActiveX object as a streaming Comet transport to my Comet server, everything works perfectly for a few messages, but then abruptly...

   IE,Streaming,JavaScript,htmlfile,ActiveX     2011-09-05 04:05:23

  Developing Game Audio with the Web Audio API

Caution: This article discusses APIs that are not yet fully standardized and still in flux. Be cautious when using experimental APIs in your own projects. Introduction Audio is a huge part of what makes multimedia experiences so compelling. If you've ever tried watching a movie with the sound off, you've probably noticed this. Games are no exception! My fondest video game memories are of the music and sound effects. Now, in many cases nearly two decades after playing my favorites, I still c...

   Web Audio,HTML5,Game audio     2012-04-15 01:25:23

  Processing Unicode Data in Python - A Primer to Understand Non-English Data Processing

Introduction: Currently we live in a world where people of diverse cultures/backgrounds use electronic devices to express their ideas, do their daily work that earns them their daily bread, and entertain themselves using content that is created using their own language and so on. Naturally, in order to make all these things happen, any computational instrument, be it a laptop or a desktop computer, or a smartphone, or something else, should be capable enough to serve all of these things in a man...

   PYTHON,UNICODE,UTF-8,NON-ENGLISH DATA,ASCII CODE     2019-04-10 00:55:19

  Hackers vs. Coders

Photo Credit: Pranav MistryBeing a good hacker is an invaluable skill. But is being a coder the same as being a hacker? Is it possible that coders are at a creative disadvantage to hackers who don’t know how to code?Here’s a story that helped me see the difference.I was recently invited to mentor at Startup Weekend. On Friday night, we gathered to eat pizza, pitch ideas, create teams and discuss launch plans. At the end of the day, everyone was feeling great about what theyââ...

   Hacker,Coder,Comparison,Innovation     2011-05-11 02:11:09

  PHP sucks (but, some frameworks don't)

I started web development with PHP, and I've decided I've had enough. Why? Keep reading.PHP (the language) sucks. There, I said it. 1029380128301928301823 GlobalsObject system hacked onC extension system sucksDocumentation sucks (read more; no, I'm not drunk)Has a terrible communityAll in all, designed by total idiots. You've probably heard this a ton of times before, but, here it is again. THERE ARE JUST WAY TOO MANY GLOBALS. Why in the world does md5() need to be global? Do you serio...

   PHP,Sucks,Framework,Good,Bad Design     2011-11-20 07:08:16

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