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  Origin of Windows blue screen

Many of you from old ages might see the classical blue Windows blue screen before.Do you still remember the most famous Windows blue screen incident during a presentation of a Windows 98 beta by Bill Gates at COMDEX on April 20 1998. But do you know the history of blue screen? John Vert, an ex-Windoes NT kernel guy, shared the story on Quora.  Back in 1991 John Vert wrote the original code for Windows NT 3.1 that put the video screen back into text mode and the routines to put text on it (a...

   Windows blue screen,History     2013-07-24 09:25:16

  The new TV rating standard: Nielsen + Twitter

Recently, the market research company Nielsen and Twitter made an agreement to propose an new TV rating standard based on Twitter chats in the U.S television market in the fall of 2013, The new standard is called "Nielsen Twitter TV Rating", it will be the complement of Nielsen's traditional rating standard.Steve Hasker, president of Nielsen Global media advertising says "'Nielsen Twitter TV Rating" is a milestone in the entire television industry, Now not only television producers but also adve...

   Nelson, Twitter, TV rating     2012-12-18 12:56:18

  Guest Post from a CodeBoy: The Five Stages of Debugging

Being confronted with a serious and difficult-to-diagnose bug can be one of the most traumatic and stressful experiences of a professional programmer's career. Those who have been through such an ordeal rate the stress as on a par with that accompanying serious injury, divorce, or the death of a family member. Researchers who have studied the psychology of computer programming have lately constructed a framework to understand the stages through which the programmer's mind progresses as she...

   Debug,Steps,Stages     2012-05-01 06:39:38

  A simple example of git bisect command

git bisect is a very powerful command for finding out which commit is a bad commit when bug occurs.  The rationale behind this command is that it pin locates the bad commit by divide and conquer. It divides the commit history into two equal parts, then determines whether the bad commit is at the first half or at the other half. This process will continue until the bad commit is located. Here is a really good example created by bradleyboy, this is a simple git repository which demonstr...

   GITHUB,GIT,GIT BISECT     2019-07-12 10:31:51

  Why Javascript is a Joy

I’m probably a bit biased – being a front-end web developer for a few years will do that – but I really enjoy writing Javascript. I’ve recently retreated from pure coding the last few months, but I got an opportunity this past week to jump back into some tasks, and it has reminded me how fun it is to dive into our[1] front-end codebase. Yes, Javascript can be surprisingly elegant yet completely infuriating, and all on the same line of code; for a long time, ...

   JavaScript,Speed,Simplicity,Malleable     2012-03-26 15:00:31

  Understand diff in Unix

diff is an important tool program in Unix. It is used to compare differences of two files, it is the foundation for code version control. If you type : $ diff <file_before_change> <file_after_change> diff will tell you what's the difference between these two files. The result may not be so easy to understand, so now I will show you how to understand diff. 1. 3 formats of diff diff has 3 formats due to historic reasons. normal diff context diff unified diff 2. Demo files For easy d...

   diff,Unix,version control,git     2012-09-03 10:49:36

  Use downcase! with caution in Ruby

Ruby provides ! to change state of some object in place. Hence if you see some functions have ! appended, it means the state of the caller of the function is expected to be changed. This is a very interesting Ruby feature. But sometimes one should be cautious when using this kind of functions because you would get unexpected behavior if using improperly. Let's take an example of String#downcase!. According to the documentation. Downcases the contents of str, returning nil if...

   RUBY,EXCLAMATION MARK,DOWNCASE     2017-02-10 06:34:44

  Greedy and Nongreedy Matching in a Regular Expression

By default, pattern matching is greedy, which means that the matcher returns the longest match possible. For example, applying the pattern A.*c to AbcAbcA matches AbcAbc rather than the shorter Abc. To do nongreedy matching, a question mark must be added to the quantifier. For example, the pattern A.*?c will find the shortest match possible. COPY // Greedy quantifiers String match = find("A.*c", "AbcAbc"); // AbcAbc match = find("A.+", "AbcAbc"); // AbcAbc // Nongreedy quantifier...

   Regular expression,Pattern match,Greedy,     2011-08-09 12:42:28

  Valid JavaScript variable names

Did you know var π = Math.PI; is syntactically valid JavaScript? I thought this was pretty cool, so I decided to look into which Unicode glyphs are allowed in JavaScript variable names, or identifiers as the ECMAScript specification calls them. Reserved words The ECMAScript 5.1 spec says: An Identifier is an IdentifierName that is not a ReservedWord. The spec describes four groups of reserved words: keywords, future reserved words, null literals and boolean lite...

   JavaScript,Name convention,Standard     2012-02-22 05:16:53

  Command line todo list manager-- Taskwarrior

What is Taskwarrior? Taskwarrior is a task management tool in a terminal environment, it has powerful functions. Here is a short description about it from its official website: It maintains a task list, allowing you to add/remove, and otherwise manipulate your tasks. Task has a rich set of subcommands that allow you to do sophisticated things. You'll find it has customizable reports, charts, GTD features, device synching, documentation, extensions, themes, holiday files and much more. Installa...

   Taskwarrior,Task management     2013-08-12 23:44:20