Today's Question:  What does your personal desk look like?        GIVE A SHOUT

SEARCH KEYWORD -- Big four

  Put Your HTML in a Box

In the first article in this series, I walked through the basics of cascading style sheets (CSS) and showed how CSS can make your code easier to maintain. CSS allows you to keep your presentation rules separate from your content, and I showed you some of the benefits this separation provides. In this article, I’ll move forward with CSS and describe how to position elements on a page.The first step in understanding how to position elements is to understand the fundamental model of CSSâ€...

   HTML,Box,Div,Container,Format     2011-08-19 08:22:58

  When and How to Use the Go Channel

Go’s concise structure and powerful native library enable us to hit the ground running easily. It is more efficient than Java or Python when implementing the same functions, especially its concurrent programming, which is very handy and widely admired due to its goroutine and channel. goroutine and channel has much to dig into, and let’s start with channel, which I used to consider narrowly as a message queue to transfer data between gorouti...

   GOLANG,CONTEXT,CHANNEL     2022-09-17 23:06:36

  The Death Of The Spec

Earlier today, my colleague Matt Burns wrote a post noting that most tablet makers may be largely failing because they’ve sold their soul to Android and are now just in the middle of a spec war, which no one can win. I’m gonna go one step further in that line of thinking: the spec is dead.There have been a few key stories from the past couple of weeks that highlight this new reality. Barnes & Noble unveiled the new Nook Tablet. Consumer Reports looked at the...

   Specification,Android,Platform,Software design     2011-11-15 08:20:22

  Signs that you're a bad programmer

1. Inability to reason about codeReasoning about code means being able to follow the execution path ("running the program in your head") while knowing what the goal of the code is.SymptomsThe presence of "voodoo code", or code that has no effect on the goal of the program but is diligently maintained anyway (such as initializing variables that are never used, calling functions that are irrelevant to the goal, producing output that is not used, etc.)Executing idempotent functions multiple times (...

   Sign,Programmer,Characteristics,Knowledge,Skill     2011-10-20 08:56:16

  Optimization Tricks used by the Lockless Memory Allocator

With the releasing of the Lockless Memory Allocator under the GPL version 3.0 license, we can now discuss more of the optimization tricks used inside it. Many of these are things you wouldn't want to use in normal code. However, when speed is the ultimate goal, sometimes we need to break a few rules and use code that is a little sneaky.The SlabA slab is a well-known technique for allocating fixed size objects. For a given object size, a chunk of memory is divided up into smaller regions of that ...

   Optimization,Memory allocation     2011-11-16 08:02:16

  How expensive is a MySQL query?

Database access speed is always the bottle neck of many applications. Many application have large amount of data to search, retrieve and display nowadays. How do we improve the performance of our applications, how do we reduce the cost of database access? Apart from the design of database, the quality of the query is also one important factor to take care.  But before that, we need to know how much network traffic a query will consume. Yunyang,Zhang from Nubee in Singapore did some research...

   MySQL,Network traffic,Query     2013-04-09 05:13:33

  10 Web Design Elements that You Shouldn’t Overlook

When it comes to designing and building websites, it never seems to happen fast enough.Given this fast pace, many small details that are eventually required to build the website are often left out of the design process. While these details might be minor, they are what take a website from nice to truly awesome.These details are often easy to miss because they don’t drive the overall look and feel of the website. The problem is that as your development team works through the design, it wil...

   Web design,Verification,jQuery     2011-03-30 00:09:49

  Don’t Call Yourself A Programmer, And Other Career Advice

If there was one course I could add to every engineering education, it wouldn’t involve compilers or gates or time complexity.  It would be Realities Of Your Industry 101, because we don’t teach them and this results in lots of unnecessary pain and suffering.  This post aspires to be README.txt for your career as a young engineer.  The goal is to make you happy, by filling in the gaps in your education regarding how the “real world” actually works.  ...

   Career,Programmer,Advice,Low level,Development     2011-10-29 07:09:23

  The trap of the performance sweet spot

This post is about JavaScript performance but I would like to start it by telling a story that might seem unrelated to JS. Please bear with me if you don’t like C.A story of a C programmer writing JavaScriptMr. C. is a C programmer as you can probably guess from his name. Today he was asked by his boss to write a very simple function: given an array of numbered 2d points calculate vector sum of all even numbered points... He opens his favorite text editor and quickly types somet...

   C,JavaScript,Sweet spot,Memory,Low level,Trap     2011-11-06 14:45:01

  FTP Must Die

The File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is specified in RFC 959, published in October 1985. The attempt in this specification is to satisfy the diverse needs of users of maxi-hosts, mini-hosts, personal workstations, and TACs, with a simple, and easily implemented protocol design.That's from the introduction. Does anyone here know what a TAC is? I don't. I had to look it up, since the acronym wasn't even expanded in the RFC. It took three tries in Google, and I finally found it in some obscur...

   FTP,Future,Death,Trend,Protocol     2012-02-06 08:13:36

RECENT