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  Avoiding and exploiting JavaScript's warts

One's sentiment toward JavaScript flips between elegance and disgust without transiting intermediate states. The key to seeing JavaScript as elegant is understanding its warts, and knowing how to avoid, work around or even exploit them. I adopted this avoid/fix/exploit approach after reading Doug Crockford's JavaScript: The Good Parts: Doug has a slightly different and more elaborate take on the bad parts and awful parts, so I'm sharing my perspective on the four issues that ha...

   JavaScript,warts,Exploit,with,variable,this     2012-02-15 05:51:21

  Python Patterns - An Optimization Anecdote

The other day, a friend asked me a seemingly simple question: what's the best way to convert a list of integers into a string, presuming that the integers are ASCII values. For instance, the list [97, 98, 99] should be converted to the string 'abc'. Let's assume we want to write a function to do this. The first version I came up with was totally straightforward: def f1(list): string = "" for item in list: string = string + chr(item) return string ...

   Python,Optimization,Anecdote,Loopup,ASCII     2011-12-18 10:52:49

  Inside Google's recruiting machine

FORTUNE -- In the hot war for talent being fought in Silicon Valley, no company has an arsenal quite like Google's. Named Fortune's Best Company to Work For in 2012, the search giant made a record 8,067 hires last year -- boosting total headcount by a third. The thirteen-year-old firm's recruiting has an almost mythical quality about it, particularly for the two million candidates applying to work there each year. In terms of elite American institutions, getting a job at Google ranks with b...

   Google,Recruiter,Contract,Recruit machine     2012-02-25 04:50:01

  Why Emacs?

PreludeIf you are a professional writer – i.e., if someone else is getting paid to worry about how your words are formatted and printed – Emacs outshines all other editing software in approximately the same way that the noonday sun does the stars. It is not just bigger and brighter; it simply makes everything else vanish.Neal StephensonIn the Beginning … Was the Command LineI’m an Emacs user and I’m proud of the fact. I know my reasons for using it (and loving i...

   Emacs,Linux,IDE,Editor,Usage     2011-11-21 10:22:05

  The ugliest C feature:

<tgmath.h> is a header provided by the standard C library, introduced in C99 to allow easier porting of Fortran numerical software to C. Fortran, unlike C, provides “intrinsic functions”, which are a part of the language and behave more like operators. While ordinary (“external”) functions behave similarly to C functions with respect to types (the types of arguments and parameters must match and the restult type is fixed), intrinsic functions accept arguments of...

   C,,Fortran,Intrinsic functions,C99,Ugly     2011-12-26 08:33:27

  etcd installation and usage

etcd is an open source and highly available distributed key-value storage system and is commonly used in critical data storage and service discovery and registration use cases. It is focusing on: Simple: well-defined, user-facing API (gRPC) Secure: automatic TLS with optional client cert authentication Fast: benchmarked 10,000 writes/sec Reliable: properly distributed using Raft etcd and Redis both support key-value storage and can be set up in distributed systems. Also Redis supporst more key...

   ETCD,TUTORIAL,RAFT,DISTRIBUTED SYSTEM     2021-03-07 03:10:33

  CSS3 & HTML5 Support in Browsers

Last week we launched FindMeByIP.com, a simple app which reveals your browsers' support for CSS3 and HTML5 features in an easy to read format using Modernizr.We've had a great response and we're going to be implementing some of your feedbackin the near future.UPDATE: Check out our Web Designers' HTML5 & CSS3 ChecklistFor now though I thought people mind find it useful to know the state of support in the current browser market.  I've taken all the A-Gra...

   CSS,HTML5,Web browser,Support     2011-05-14 11:26:45

  Inspiration vs. Imitation

Every now and then I get a really lovely email from an aspiring letterer that is about to publish a passion project of his or her own. They tell me my work was an inspiration and that they can’t wait to share their creation with the world. I feel all warm and fuzzy inside for a moment…until I click on their link and realize that much of what they intend to publish is nearly a direct tracing of my work. A lot of established illustrators and designers deal with the same ...

   Designer,Copy,Divisify,Classification,Judgement,History     2011-12-05 12:26:38

  My life as a freelancer

In the summer of 2006 a work buddy, George, has told me that I could make some extra money programming on a site named Rent A Coder. I’ve signed up the same day. After losing some time on a project that never started I lost my interest in “coding for money”. I almost forgot about RAC.Fast-forward two years, I was a PhD student at a small North American University with a student visa and … nothing else in my pockets. For a few months I was able to make a living from ...

   Life,Freelancer,C,Rent a Coder,RAC     2011-11-07 02:53:03

  Host multiple websites in Wamp

I have decided to start playing around with the Zend Framework. I have a web host (of course) however sometimes when developing I find it is easier and faster to use a local web server, with all the bells and whistles. WAMP, LAMP (this link is ubuntu specific, but any linux distribution should have easy HowTo guide for installing the LAMP software stack), MAMP, all provide the basic environment for beginning web development, and some have nice little GUIs to help you con...

   multiple hosts, wamp, websites, differen     2011-04-04 11:42:06

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