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  How To Make The Most of Your Least Productive Time

Everybody talks about mastering the art of staying productive. Not many people willingly accept that such efforts are futile. It’s impossible to stay productive 100% of the time, and this will never change. Something that I believe to be just as important, if not more so, is what we make of our least productive time. We all have the capacity to be extremely productive for some part of the day. Even the world’s grandest underachievers. But I believe that to be successful runni...

   Productive time,Limit time,Effort     2012-02-06 07:49:47

  Pointers, arrays, and string literals

A recently posted question on Stack Overflow highlighted a common misconception about the role of pointers and arrays held by many programmers learning C.The confusion stems from a misunderstanding concerning the role of pointers and strings in C. A pointer is an address in memory. It often points to an index in an array, such as in the function strtoupper in the following code:void strtoupper(char *str) { if (str) { // null ptr check, courtesy of Michael while (...

   char pointer,initialization,literal,cann     2011-09-22 13:29:23

  Why Do Some People Learn Faster?

The physicist Niels Bohr once defined an expert as “a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.” Bohr’s quip summarizes one of the essential lessons of learning, which is that people learn how to get it right by getting it wrong again and again. Education isn’t magic. Education is the wisdom wrung from failure. A new study, forthcoming in Psychological Science, and led by Jason Moser at Michigan State University, expands on this ...

   Learn,Speed,Reason,Analysis     2012-02-24 05:04:46

  If PHP Were British

When Rasmus Lerdorf first put PHP together, he - quite sensibly, despite his heritage - chose not to write it in Greenlandic or Danish. Good job too - that would have been rather unpleasant to work with. He opted instead, being in Canada at the time, for the local tongue. No, not French - that bastard dialect of the Queen's English commonly referred to as "US English"1. PHP developers in Britain have been grumpy about this ever since. What was he thinking? And more importantly, how do we ...

   PHP,British,Class,Statement,Engilish like     2011-12-01 02:36:55

  Unfortunate Python

Python is a wonderful language, but some parts should really have bright WARNING signs all over them. There are features that just can't be used safely and others are that are useful but people tend to use in the wrong ways. This is a rough transcript of the talk I gave at my local Python group on November 15, with some of the audience feed back mixed in. Most of this came from hanging around the Python IRC channel, something I highly recommend. [update 2011-12-19: improved "array" cr...

   Python,Defects,Deprecated methods,Warning     2011-12-20 08:27:36

  Programming language choices for an IT manager

A TechRepublic reader named Aaron emailed me and posed excellent questions; here’s an excerpt from his email:“I manage a small IT department and all my skills are self-taught. At times I struggle with complex business initiatives and I believe if I had some programming skills I would be more adept at handling the initiatives. Can you recommend a programming language? Is formal education the best path or have you found that programming can be self-taught?”I’m sure a lot ...

   IT Manager,Programming,Skills,Programming knowledge     2011-10-21 08:37:10

  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

   Python – parallelizing CPU-bound tasks with multiprocessing

In a previous post on Python threads, I briefly mentioned that threads are unsuitable for CPU-bound tasks, and multiprocessing should be used instead. Here I want to demonstrate this with benchmark numbers, also showing that creating multiple processes in Python is just as simple as creating multiple threads. First, let’s pick a simple computation to use for the benchmarking. I don’t want it to be completely artificial, so I’ll use a dumbed-down version of factorization...

   Python,Multitasking,Multiprocessing,CPU bound     2012-01-17 11:38:22

  Best “must know” open sources to build the new Web

Here the dump of my ultimate collection of online Web development resources and directory, oriented for the Front-End user Interface (UI). HTML5 and all related open standards are moving fast, but for now, building a whole Website/WebApp on top of that can be very inconsistent, especially across various browsers experiences.   So… how to embrace new awesome web technologies ? Now, as Web Developers and Designers, we have to build on top of more stable framework. It’s her...

   Open source,Wbesite,Web application,HTML     2011-06-09 03:10:24

  Deep Understanding of ReentrantLock: Unlocking the Mysteries of Java Concurrent Programming

ReentrantLock introduction ReentrantLock is a class in the Java concurrent package, java.util.concurrent.locks, and is an implementation of the Lock interface. As its name suggests, it is a reentrant mutual exclusion lock. A mutual exclusion lock is a synchronization tool used to protect shared resources, ensuring that only one thread can access the resource at a given time. Reentrant means that a thread can acquire the same lock multiple times without causing a deadlock. This lock provides some...

   JAVA,REENTRANTLOCK,CONCURRENCY,MULTITHREADING     2023-05-22 08:01:13

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