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  The worst program I ever worked on

Most contract jobs fade pretty quickly in memory after the work is done, but some you remember for the rest of your life. This is one of the latter variety. This happened long ago, at a (fair sized) company that shall remain nameless. The software was a chunk of code that had been maintained by a single guy that had been fired recently and was a core component of a commercial system. So far nothing unusual, companies tend to find out that they have a piece of critical knowledge in one head all ...

   Program,worst     2011-03-17 13:58:36

  I've run out of adjectives

The news of Dennis Ritchie's passing hit hard. So much has been written in the past day. His impact was enormous, and outside the tech world, mostly unknown - but very much felt. C underpins everything. My whole career has grown out of C and Unix. Wow.For most engineers working today, it's hard to understand the euphoria I felt in the 70s when a programming language finally came along that I (and everyone else) could use to move up from writing in assembler to a real programming l...

   Dennis Ritchie,James Gosling,Death,Praise,Comment,C     2011-10-20 02:55:58

  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

  Google's new pirate penalty doesn't affect YouTube

Google has just announced a new policy: sites with high numbers of removal notices may appear lower in our results. However, this new policy may not affect the company's video site YouTube. In fact, they themselves clearly know that there are copyright protected contents on YouTube.According to a report published by Search Engine Land, through the "Removing Content From Google" page, users can remove content from the Google services with valid reasons, the services including Google Play, Google+...

   Google,Privacy,YouTube,Rank     2012-08-12 12:35:29

  HTTP Streaming and Internet Explorer

In early 2006, Alex Russell posted about a neat hack that the Google Talk team in Gmail use to support Comet in Internet Explorer, a trick which works as far back as IE 5.01. What great news! A reliable way to stream Comet messages to Microsoft’s browsers. If only it were that easy. I have not been alone in the following findings: after connecting the htmlfile ActiveX object as a streaming Comet transport to my Comet server, everything works perfectly for a few messages, but then abruptly...

   IE,Streaming,JavaScript,htmlfile,ActiveX     2011-09-05 04:05:23

  A list of different CAPTCHA designs

Here is a list of website CAPTCHA designs which demonstrate all kinds of weird verification methods. By looking at these designs, as a website designer, you should distinguish which design is accessible and which is not.Is this human readable?What characters are in the picture?One moreWe will be crazy if we see theseOMG,What's the answer?IQ Test?Are you a normal person?You know how blind people read?ASCII PictureAre you an adult?3D verification codereCaptchaIt increase a new feature recently. It...

   CAPTCHA,Website design     2012-07-19 11:51:06

  Why is Great Design so Hard?

I want to take a slight detour from usable privacy and security and discuss issues of design. I was recently at the Microsoft Faculty Summit, an annual event where Microsoft discusses some of the big issues and directions they are headed. In one of the talks, a designer at Microsoft mentioned two data points I've informally heard before but had never confirmed. First, the ratio of developers to user interface designers at Microsoft was 50:1. Second, this ratio was better than any other comp...

   Apple,Microsoft,UI design     2011-03-28 02:06:31

  Linux Command Line tips that every Linux user should know t

Below is the collection of Linux command line tips which I’ve found useful for Linux users. To get more information about the command mentioned below just open your terminal and type man <command>.Things a Linux user must learnLearn bash: No need to refer a lengthy bash guide or something else. Just read the complete man page of bash (man bash).Learn vim: You might be using Emacs or Eclipse for your work all the time but nothing can compete vim.Learn ssh: Learn the basics of passw...

   Linux,Unix,Command line,Tips     2012-03-21 09:27:03

  Ubuntu and GNOME jump the shark

I upgraded to Ubuntu 11.04 a week or so back in order to get a more recent version of SCons. 11.04 dropped me into the new “Unity” GNOME interface. There may be people in the world for whom Unity is a good idea, but none of them are me. The look is garish and ugly, and it takes twice as many clicks as it did before to get to an application through their supposedly “friendly” interface as it did in GNOME Classic. No, dammit, I do not want to text-search my applic...

   Ubuntu,GNOME,Open source,Unity     2011-10-17 11:19:00

  Using msmtp to replace sendmail

sendmail is a mail client in Linux with many vulnerabilities and tedius configuration steps, many system administrators have disabled using it. Then how do we know what happens if a crontab script executes with error? Actually there are some replacements for sendmail, one is ssmtp, but this application is no longer maintained, we even cannot find its source code on Google. Fortunately, we can use msmtp to replace sendmail. The address : http://msmtp.sourceforge.net/ 1. Installation After downloa...

   sendmail, msmtp, replacement     2012-09-27 11:41:48

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