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  How multitasking really works on Android and iOS

As the horsepower packed into mobile devices gets ever greater, more full-featured forms of multitasking are possible. The market leaders have very different ways of going about things, and there are numerous misconceptions about what is going on behind the scenes. This isn’t all the fault of the user, though. In the interest of ease of use, sometimes the multitasking metaphor is overly simplified on both Android and iOS. iOS: It’s more complicated than it looksEver since iOS...

   Android,iOs,Multitasking,Task bar     2012-01-06 09:58:09

  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

  That “JavaScript not available” case

During some interesting discussions on Twitter yesterday I found that there is now more than ever a confusion about JavaScript dependence in web applications and web sites. This is a never ending story but it seems to me to flare up ever time our browsing technology leaps forward. I encountered this for the first time back in the days of DHTML. We pushed browsers to their limits with our lovely animated menus and 3D logos (something we of course learned not to do again, right?) and we were ...

   JavaScript,Security,Banned,Reason     2012-01-04 02:37:35

  Parallel Javascript

Lately the ideas for a parallel, shared memory JavaScript have begun to take shape. I’ve been discussing with various JavaScript luminaries and it seems like a design is starting to emerge. This post serves as a documentation of the basic ideas; I’m sure the details will change as we go along. User Model The model is that a JavaScript worker (the “parent”) may spawn a number of child tasks (the “children”). The parent is suspended while the children exe...

   Parallel JavaScript,API,Spawn,Parent,Task     2012-01-11 12:02:00

  Automate Everything

Performing manual, repetitive tasks enrages me. I used to think this was a corollary of being a programmer, but I’ve come to suspect (or hope) that this behaviour is inherent in being human. But being able to hack together scripts simply makes it much easier to go from a state of rage to a basic solution in a very small amount of time. As a side point, this is one of the reasons that teaching the basics of programming in schools is so important. It’s hard to think of any j...

   Automate,Email,Repeative     2012-02-07 06:21:19

  On Erlang's Syntax

I first planned to release this text as an appendix entry for Learn You Some Erlang, but considering this feels more like editorial content and not exactly something for a reference text, I decided it would fit better as a blog post. Many newcomers to Erlang manage to understand the syntax and program around it without ever getting used to it. I've read and heard many complaints regarding the syntax and the 'ant turd tokens' (a subjectively funny way to refer to ,, ; and .), how annoying...

   Erlang,Syntax,Error     2011-12-22 08:35:42

  Why I switched from Ruby back to C++

After two months of Sol Trader development in Ruby, I took a difficult decision last Wednesday morning: I’ve decided to rewrite the game code from scratch in C++. Let me explain my reasons. If you'd like to receive announcements about Sol Trader or be part of the beta program, sign up at soltrader.net. Why I did it Slow frames: When working with Ruby, I use the excellent Gosu library to do all my game specific coding. This initially worked great, but occasionally I’d just...

   C++,Ruby,Advantage,Feature     2012-01-09 08:56:21

  Optimization Tricks used by the Lockless Memory Allocator

With the releasing of the Lockless Memory Allocator under the GPL version 3.0 license, we can now discuss more of the optimization tricks used inside it. Many of these are things you wouldn't want to use in normal code. However, when speed is the ultimate goal, sometimes we need to break a few rules and use code that is a little sneaky.The SlabA slab is a well-known technique for allocating fixed size objects. For a given object size, a chunk of memory is divided up into smaller regions of that ...

   Optimization,Memory allocation     2011-11-16 08:02:16

  Cybersecurity | The New Dangers That Lurk Online and Their Solutions

(Image source: Pexels) Data is one of the most important things to us. While robbers that steal valuables like laptops, phones, or money are still a threat, cybercrimes are also more dangerous than ever. That’s because your data is far more valuable than you might think. Companies benefit from users’ data by applying it for their indexing, marketing, and accumulation needs. They actively use this information to sell you more products. Have you ever visited Amazon and instantly got a ...

   DATA SECURITY,VPN     2020-04-23 06:47:37

  Hash Tables in Javascript

IntroductionHash tables are a permutation of associative arrays (i.e. name => value pairs). If you use PHP, then you are very familiar with this type of data structure already since all PHP arrays are associative.The Javascript language implements very loose and somewhat limited support for associative arrays. Any JavaScript array can use other objects as keys, making it a hash, but there exists no formal constructor for initializing them and it is more or less unweildy to work with. A short ...

   JavaScript,Hashtable,Implementation,Array     2011-11-26 02:43:40

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