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  C Preprocessor Hell

Lisp programmers should stop reading right now because they'll likely suffer severe injury of the jaw muscles as they laugh themselves silly at how hard it is to do some things in C. The C language has a pre-processor (typically called cpp) that is both infuriating and powerful. How powerful is usually best described as 'just too little' and it has happened more than once that I found myself almost - but not quite - able to do what I wanted to do. The frustration can run very deep at ti...

   C,Preprocessor,Lisp,Hell     2012-01-19 10:22:31

  Do things, tell people.

These are the only things you need to do to be successful*. You can get away with just doing one of the two, but that's rare, and usually someone else is doing the other part for you. If you you don't have any marketable skills, learn some. It's the future. We have Khan Academy and Wikipedia and Codecademy and almost the entire world's collective knowledge at your fingertips. Use it. Then make something that you can talk about. Make something cool. Something interesting. Spend time on it. Go ...

   Tihings,Promote,Product,Open source     2012-02-21 05:28:39

  I’m too lazy to be a HTML developer

There’s no denying it. I’m just to damn lazy to be an HTML developer. This really sunk in when I looked at a tutorial for doing a jQuery Lightbox – for a client project. The tutorial was titled “Super Simple Lightbox with CSS and jQuery” but after reading it over I thought a better title would be “A really freaking hard tutorial on the inane intricacies of doing something that looks simple but in reality is a skein of HTML, Javascript and CSS that no...

   Web design,HTML,JavaScript,Complexity,Messy     2011-12-18 10:42:45

  Open Letter to sites with annoying interfaces

Remember those childhood games where you are given two nearly identical images and your objective was to find some number of subtle differences? Well, I shouldn't have to play that game when I'm using your damn website. I show here two examples of a common practice that is plaguing the modern web. First, a clipping from a project page on github.com.     And now the second image:     See the difference? My question is this: why? That edit button is the only component of...

   Web design,User interface,User friendly,Layout     2011-12-27 09:32:10

  XML Abuse

It’s everywhere. XML Abuse. From Domain Specific Languages to Data Serialization, XML is the most commonly abused data format I’ve ever encountered. XML is perfectly fine for (because it was designed for this): First of all: XML was designed to be written by humans and read by humans. Nearly all generated XML I’ve seen sucks badly. I think this is because XML cannot efficiently represent common data structures found in programming languages.XML is good...

   XML,Abuse,Alternative,Serialization,Data storage     2011-12-14 07:12:10

  Advice From An Old Programmer

You've finished this book and have decided to continue with programming. Maybe it will be a career for you, or maybe it will be a hobby. You'll need some advice to make sure you continue on the right path, and get the most enjoyment out of your newly chosen activity. I've been programming for a very long time. So long that it's incredibly boring to me. At the time that I wrote this book, I knew about 20 programming languages and could learn new ones in about a day to a week depending on how w...

   Advice,Programming,Python,Old programmer     2012-03-08 13:51:11

  One interesting story about Chinese software development

I have once seen an interesting complaint written by one foreigner about Beijing South Railway Station (China) on foursquare. It says: "There is simply no way to buy a ticket at the machine unless you have a Chinese ID. What the hell they have English interface for then?" Apparently,the foreigner cannot buy ticket because he doesn’t have Chinese ID but there still presents an English interface for foreigners on the vending machine. Because of my profession, I find this awkward situation w...

   Software design,User experience,Importance     2012-03-26 14:42:50

  Building The Linux Kernel In 60 Seconds

In less than one minute, it's now possible to build the Linux kernel from source on a desktop. Besides finishing up the Phoronix Test Suite 3.6-Arendal release this weekend, on Saturday I began running some new Intel CPU benchmarks. In building the Linux 3.1 kernel for x86_64 in a default configuration (make defconfig), I've now managed to trim down the compile time to less than sixty seconds on a single-socket desktop system. Similar speeds can be achieved out of multi-socket servers and othe...

   Linux kernal,Build,Intel processor,sgort time     2011-12-12 07:45:32

  Sorry, I don't want to download your fucking app

You should not claim yourself as a mobile Internet service provider if your product doesn't have an App nowadays. The topic cannot get away from App when we talk on bus, restaurant. Recently it becomes a little bit quiet, but the app wind does not seem to stop, it seems every website may have an App. According to data released by Apple a couple of days ago, its application store app downloads already exceeded 50 billion. However some people are not happy with this.Some people created a blog ...

   App,Update,Force download     2013-05-19 02:50:02

  Three things you should never put in your database

As I've said in a few talks, the best way to improve your systems is by first not doing "dumb things". I don't mean you or your development staff is "dumb", it's easy to overlook the implications of these types of decisions and not realize how bad they are for maintainability let alone scaling. As a consultant I see this stuff all of the time and I have yet to ever see it work out well for anyone. Images, files, and binary data Your database supports BLOBs so it must be a good idea to shove ...

   Database,BLOB,Log,Image     2012-05-02 04:44:25

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