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  How I Learned to Program Computers

I’ve been asked this question a lot lately, especially after I built YouTube Instant. So, here’s the answer, once and for all, for those who are interested.In short:I learned how to program by building lots of websites.The full story:I learned how to program by working on lots of different website projects starting from a pretty young age. What follows is a full account of all the major websites I’ve built, back to the very first site I made when I was 11 years old. Wha...

   Programming,Computer,Tips,Feross Aboukhadijeh     2011-10-17 10:25:32

  C Macro Tips and Tricks

Preprocessor vs Compiler To properly understand C macros, you must understand how a C program is compiled. In particular, you must understand the different things that happen in the preprocessor and in the compiler. The preprocessor runs first, as the name implies. It performs some simple textual manipulations, such as: Stripping comments. Resolving #include directives and replacing them with the contents of the included file. Evaluating #if and #ifdef directives. Evaluating #defin...

   C,Macro,Preprocessor,Trick     2012-05-01 06:49:05

  Why Android Will Always Be Laggier Than iOS

One of the things that really stands out using an iPhone is just how smooth it feels compared to using Android. Where as Android is laggy, with a measurable interim between when you touch the screen and when the OS responds, iOS almost seems to anticipate what you want to do before your finger touches the display.How has Apple managed this incredible feat? A better question might be: “How has Google managed to screw up Android’s multitouch so much?” According to Andrew M...

   Android,iOs,Speed,UI Design,Lag     2011-12-07 03:17:18

  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

  Why are column oriented databases so much faster than row oriented databases?

I have been playing around with Hybrid Word Aligned Bitmaps for a few weeks now, and they turn out to be a rather remarkable data structure.  I believe that they are utilized extensively in modern column oriented databases such as Vertica and MonetDB. Essentially HWABs are a data structure that allows you to represent a sparse bitmap (series of 0's and 1's) really efficiently in memory.  The key trick here is the use of run length encoding to compress the bitmap into fe...

   Database,Column oriented,Speed analysis,Vertica     2012-01-29 04:27:05

  Node.js: Five Things Every PHP Developer Should Know

I recently started working on a few Node.js applications. Coming most recently from PHP (and Drupal in particular), I found the transition to Node.js to be surprisingly easy. Pleasurable, in fact. But I had to learn to think differently about a few things. Below I list the five things I think every PHP developer should know about Node.js. 1. Node.js Is Built On Chrome's JavaScript Engine Google's browser, Chrome, has a notoriously fast JavaScript engine called V8. And this JavaScript engine ...

   PHP,Node.js,Developer,Feature     2012-02-09 07:37:48

  Surprising applications of math

The comments in the previous post touched on surprising applications of math, so I thought I’d expand this theme into it’s own post. Below I’ll give a couple general examples of surprising applications and then I’ll give a couple more personal applications I found surprising.Number theory has traditionally been the purest of pure mathematics. People study number theory for the joy of doing so, not to make money. At least that was largely true until the ...

   Math,Number theory,Algorithms,Differential euqation     2011-11-18 09:24:19

  Set file permission in Java

Prior to Java 6,  there is no good solution at the Java level to provide file permission management. You need to implement your own native methods or call the Runtime.exec() to invoke the system routine such as chmod in LInux. Since Java 6, Java introduces a set of methods which can be used to set the file permission at Java level. These methods include: File.setReadable(boolean); File.setWritable(boolean); FIle.setExecutable(boolean); File.setReadable(boolean, boolean); File.setWritable(bo...

   JAVA, FILE PERMISSION, POSIX,learnjava     2015-08-29 03:37:37

  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

  One of the Best Bits of Programming Advice I ever Got

Years ago (early 1992), I attached myself to this crazy skunkworks project that was using this weird language called Smalltalk. "Object Oriented" was in its infancy as a "hot" item. High paid consultants. Lots of people laying claim to what this new object religion was all about. This was 5 years before Alan Kay would make the statement "I invented the term 'Object Oriented Programming' and this {Java and C++} is not what I had in mind."Shortly after hooking up with this whacky group with t...

   Programming advice,OOP,Smalltalk,Better design     2011-11-28 03:14:25

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