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  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

  Understanding database, instance and schema in Oracle database

Oracle database is the most popular database system among enterprises. To start working on Oracle database, some concepts must be understood first. They include database, instance, schema and user etc. And among these concepts, some have different meanings from those in other database systems such as MS SQL, MySQL, DB2. On the web, there are already some good posts which explain different concepts such as Ask Tom's database vs instances, Difference between database vs user vs schema. In this pos...

   DIFFERENCE,DATABASE,ORACLE DATABASE,INSTANCE,SCHEMA,USER     2016-12-14 23:30:56

  HeartBleed: OpenBSD now starts to clean up OpenSSL

Since the disclosure of HeartBleed bug in OpenSSL, some arguments emerge around the safety of OpenSSL, the largest open source SSL/TLS library used by large number of servers, applications. Some people are even starting to create their own version of SSL library. This includes OpenBSD, a famous Unix like open source operating system. Just a few days after the HeartBleed bug, OpenBSD forked a new branch of OpenSSL and started to clean up the forked branch and plans to merge it to its own cod...

   HeartBleed,OpenBSD     2014-04-15 04:21:26

  Snipping Tool is moving on Windows 10

There is some recent change for a built-in tool on Windows 10 where the Snipping Tool is moving. Snipping Tool is a tool on Windows for taking screenshots and editing screenshots taken. But now it's moving to a new tool called Snip & Sketch which has enhanced features. Now if you try to launch Snipping Tool, you will notice there is a notification telling that the Snipping tool is moving to a new tool called Snip & Sketch. And you can click Try Snip & Sketch to launch the new tool. ...

   WINDOWS 10,SNIPPING TOOL,SNIP & SKETCH,SCREENSHOT     2019-11-03 02:30:53

  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

  Gmail supports 10 GB attachment after integrating with Google Drive

Google today announced Gmail allows users to send attachment up to 10GB after integrating with Google Drive, the attachment size can be 400 times larger than traditional mail attachment size.Google also added another feature recently, it will pop up a separate window when writing new email. The integration of Gmail with Google Drive will introduce one Google Drive button at the bottom of the popup window, as a solution for sending large attachment.At the same time, because the attachment will b...

   Google Drive, Gmail,SkyDrive,attachment     2012-11-28 11:12:56

  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

  the Performance Golden Rule

Yesterday I did a workshop at Google Ventures for some of their portfolio companies. I didn’t know how much performance background the audience would have, so I did an overview of everything performance-related starting with my first presentations back in 2007. It was very nostalgic. It has been years since I talked about the best practices from High Performance Web Sites. I reviewed some of those early tips, like Make Fewer HTTP Requests, Add an Expires Header, and Gzip Components. ...

   Web design,Golden rule,Performance     2012-02-17 07:51:09

  The craziest Javascript implementations

Since its birth in 1994, Javascript has come a long way. Today it’s one of the most popular programming languages on the web because of high popularity of AJAX based web-applications. Also the rise of micro-frameworks such as jQuery (also Prototype, Moo Tools etc) which have reduced dramatically the complexity of code developers needed to write, it is well tested, has a ton of plug-ins, has a large development community and reduced development time.And lately even Server-S...

   JavaScript,Crazy implementation,JVM,Turing machine     2012-01-03 12:09:42

  Supercolliding a PHP array

Did you know that inserting 2^16 = 65536 specially crafted values into a normal PHP array can take 30 seconds? Normally this would take only 0.01 seconds. This is the code to reproduce it: <?php echo '<pre>'; $size = pow(2, 16); // 16 is just an example, could also be 15 or 17 $startTime = microtime(true); $array = array(); for ($key = 0, $maxKey = ($size - 1) * $size; $key <= $maxKey; $key += $size) { $array[$key] = 0; } $endTime = microtime(true); echo 'Inserting...

   PHP,Array,hashtable,Slow,Colliding     2011-12-29 09:02:01