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SEARCH KEYWORD -- Innovation works

  Please Steal These webOS Features

When Apple introduced the first iPad in 2010, I bought one immediately. I didn’t know what I’d use it for, but I was sure that I would find some use for it. I never did. I played around with it, wrote some code for it, but eventually stopped using it. I would pick it up from time to time to read something or watch a YouTube movie, but even that was a rare occurrence. I have since picked up an iPad 2, and I’m using it a lot more than the first iPad, but again, I’...

   WebOS,Feature,HP,borrow     2012-02-22 05:45:49

  In College, Working Hard to Learn High School Material

In June, Desiree Smith was graduated from Murry Bergtraum High. Her grades were in the 90s, she said, and she had passed the four state Regents exams. Since enrolling last month at LaGuardia Community College in Queens, Ms. Smith, 19, has come to realize that graduating from a New York City public high school is not the same as learning. She failed all three placement tests for LaGuardia and is now taking remediation in reading, writing and math. So are Nikita Thomas, ofBedford Stuyves...

   Education,College,High school,Material,Knowledge transfer     2011-10-24 11:51:39

  Tricks with Direct Memory Access in Java

Java was initially designed as a safe managed environment. Nevertheless, Java HotSpot VM contains a “backdoor” that provides a number of low-level operations to manipulate memory and threads directly. This backdoor – sun.misc.Unsafe â€“ is widely used by JDK itself in packages like java.nio or java.util.concurrent. It is hard to imagine a Java developer that uses this backdoor in any regular development because this API is extremely dangerous...

   Java,Directly memory access,Tricks,JVM     2012-02-13 05:31:19

  The seven rules of Unobtrusive JavaScript

I've found the following rules over the years developing, teaching and implementing JavaScript in an unobtrusive manner. They have specifically been the outline of a workshop on unobtrusive JavaScript for the Paris Web conference 2007 in Paris, France. I hope that they help you understand a bit why it is a good idea to plan and execute your JavaScript in this way. It has helped me deliver products faster, with much higher quality and a lot easier maintenance. 1. Do no...

   JavaScript,Feature,Tips     2012-01-18 08:21:39

  ECMAScript 5 Objects and Properties

ECMAScript 5 is on its way. Rising from the ashes of ECMAScript 4, which got scaled way back and became ECMAScript 3.1, which was then re-named ECMAScript 5 (more details)- comes a new layer of functionality built on top of our lovable ECMAScript 3. Update: I've posted more details on ECMAScript 5 Strict Mode, JSON, and More. There are a few new APIs included in the specification but the most interesting functionality comes into play in the Object/Property code. This new code gives you th...

   ECMAScript,Object,Property     2012-01-29 04:38:50

  Android hardware fails more than iPhone, BlackBerry; repairs cost carriers $2 billion

Repairs to Android smartphones cost wireless carriers $2 billion per year according to a new year-long WDS study that tracked 600,000 support calls around the globe. Android’s popularity and the introduction of a number of low-cost smartphones has put a strain on the wireless business model, WDS noted in its report. “Deployment by more than 25 OEMs and lower-cost product coming to market is leading to higher than average rates of hardware failures and, in turn, return and repair cos...

   Android,iPhone,Blackberry,Hardware,Cost     2011-11-03 13:26:42

  #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

  Python Performance Tips, Part 1

To read the Zen of Python, type import this in your Python interpreter. A sharp reader new to Python will notice the word “interpreter”, and realize that Python is another scripting language. “It must be slow!” No question about it: Python program does not run as fast or efficiently as compiled languages. Even Python advocates will tell you performance is the area that Python is not good for. However, YouTube has proven Python is capable of serving 40 million videos...

   Python,Performance,Efficiency,Tips     2012-02-14 10:50:22

  insertAdjacentHTML() Enables Faster HTML Snippet Injection

In Firefox 8, we’ve added support for insertAdjacentHTML(). It’s an ancient feature of Internet Explorer that has recently been formalized in HTML5 and then spun out into the DOM Parsing specification. The bad news is that Firefox is the last major browser to implement this feature. The good news is that since other major browsers implement it already, you can start using it unconditionally as soon as the Firefox 8 update has been rolled out to users.Basic Usage...

   InsertAjacentHTML,Firefox,HTML5,DOM     2011-11-10 10:52:00

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