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

SEARCH KEYWORD -- GOD

  Speed Hashing

A given hash uniquely represents a file, or any arbitrary collection of data. At least in theory. This is a 128-bit MD5 hash you're looking at above, so it can represent at most 2128 unique items, or 340 trillion trillion trillion. In reality the usable space is substantially less; you can start seeing significant collisions once you've filled half the space, but half of an impossibly large number is still impossibly large. Back in 2005, I wondered about the difference between a checksum and...

   Speed hashing,Security,MD5     2012-04-07 10:35:15

  Scala feels like EJB 2, and other thoughts

At Devoxx last week I used the phrase "Scala feels like EJB 2 to me". What was on my mind?ScalaFor a number of years on this blog I've been mentioning a desire to write a post about Scala. Writing such a post is not easy, because anyone who has been paying attention to anti-Scala blog posts will know that writing one is a sure fire way of getting flamed. The Scala community is not tolerant of dissent.But ultimately, I felt that it was important for me to speak out and express my opinions. As I s...

   Scala,Module,EJB,Concurrency,Feature     2011-11-22 08:29:44

  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

  #46 – Why software sucks

No one makes bad software on purpose. No benevolent programmer has ever sat down, planning out weeks of work, with the intention of frustrating people and making them cry. Bad software, or bad anything, happens because making things is hard, making good things doubly so. The three things that make it difficult are: Possessing the diverse skills needed not to suck.Understanding who you’re making the thing for.Orchestrating the interplay of skills, egos and constraints over the course of...

   Software design,Sucks,Software industry     2012-03-19 13:10:37

  Comparing Floating Point Numbers, 2012 Edition

We’ve finally reached the point in this series that I’ve been waiting for. In this post I am going to share the most crucial piece of floating-point math knowledge that I have. Here it is:[Floating-point] math is hard.You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly hard it is. I mean, you may think it’s difficult to calculate when trains from Chicago and Los Angeles will collide, but that’s just peanuts to floating-point math.Seriously. Each ti...

   Floating point number,Comparison,True value     2012-02-23 07:11:03

  Ruby is beautiful (but I’m moving to Python)

The Ruby language is beautiful. And I think it deserves to break free from the Web. I think the future of Ruby is firmly stuck in Web development, though, so I’m going to invest in a new language for data analysis, at least for now. This is a look at the fantastic language I came to from Java and a look at a possible candidate. (Update: I’ve since written a followup.)Java to RubySix years ago, I added Ruby to my technical arsenal. I learned C++ and Java in high school, and I p...

   Ruby,Java,Python,Comparison,Advantage,Ruby vs Python     2011-11-01 07:18:11

  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

  True Scala complexity

Update 2: Sorry for the downtime. Leave it to the distributed systems guy to make his blog unavailable. Nginx saves the day.It’s always frustrating reading rants about Scala because they never articulate the actual complexities in the core language.Understandable—this post is intended fill that gap, and it wasn’t exactly easy to put together. But there’s been so much resistance to the very thought that the complexity exists at all, even from on up high, that I thou...

   Scala,Complexity     2012-01-10 07:17:07

  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

RECENT