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  Taking C Seriously

Dennis Ritchie, a co-creator of Unix and C, passed away a few weeks ago, and was honored with many online tributes this weekend for a Dennis Ritchie Day advocated by Tim O’Reilly.It should hardly be necessary to state the importance of Ritchie’s work. C is the #2 language in use today according to the TIOBE rankings (which, while criticized in some quarters, are at least the best system we currently have for gauging such things). In fact, TIOBE’s pre...

   C,Efficiency,Memorization,Dennis Ritchie     2011-11-03 13:42:14

  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

  Speed Hashing

A given hash uniquely represents a file, or any arbitrary collection of data. At least in theory. This is a 128-bit MD5 hash you're looking at above, so it can represent at most 2128 unique items, or 340 trillion trillion trillion. In reality the usable space is substantially less; you can start seeing significant collisions once you've filled half the space, but half of an impossibly large number is still impossibly large. Back in 2005, I wondered about the difference between a checksum and...

   Speed hashing,Security,MD5     2012-04-07 10:35:15

  The Death Of The Spec

Earlier today, my colleague Matt Burns wrote a post noting that most tablet makers may be largely failing because they’ve sold their soul to Android and are now just in the middle of a spec war, which no one can win. I’m gonna go one step further in that line of thinking: the spec is dead.There have been a few key stories from the past couple of weeks that highlight this new reality. Barnes & Noble unveiled the new Nook Tablet. Consumer Reports looked at the...

   Specification,Android,Platform,Software design     2011-11-15 08:20:22

  Circumventing browser connection limits for fun and profit

A few days ago, this video hosted by metacafe popped up on digg, explaining how to increase site download times by tweaking your browser settings to increase connection parallelism. To explain why this works, let’s step back a bit to discuss how browsers manage server connections. In building any application, developers are often required to make ‘utilitarian’ choices. Pretentiously paraphrasing Jeremy Bentham, ‘utilitarian’ describes an approach that ââ‚...

   HTTP,Concurrent connection limit,Solution,AJAX     2011-12-14 13:01:02

  Nokia is still alive and lives a good life indeed

1 Do you believe that Nokia, which you thought had gone bankrupt, not only survived but is still one of the world's most profitable technology companies, making trillions of dollars in profit every year? In 2022, Nokia's annual revenue reached 24.9 billion euros. Its net profit of 4.25 billion euros also hit a new high in nearly a decade. Moreover, as early as 2017, it quietly returned to the Fortune Global 500. In the telecommunications field, it is the world's third-largest telecommunications...

   5G,APPLE,NOKIA     2023-03-11 22:49:36

  Don't Give Your Users Shit Work

The problem with shit work is that no one likes doing it, but an awful lot of people say they do.Shit workTake a look at Twitter Lists. The idea behind Twitter Lists was that users would carefully cultivate lists on Twitter of different accounts they’re following (or not following). These could be divided into lists like Family, Friends, Coworkers, People I Find Mildly Attractive, People To Murder, People I Find Mildly Attractive And Want To Murder, and so on.The problem is that, anecdota...

   Design,Facebook,Twitter,User oriented     2011-11-03 13:28:59

  How NOT to teach a computer language

For the past year or so my wife has been taking online classes to get a computer science degree. For most of her classes she’s done great, she’s been flying through HTML and SQL, even up to the point where she can handle multilevel joins and optimizing through indexes. That was until she hit her vb.net class. I had no idea why she was having problems with a language has easy as vb.net so I started helping her out and find out why she was having so many problems. I’ve also ad...

   Programming,Teach,Book,Grade,Method,Computer     2011-11-06 14:52:13

  How I Learned to Program Computers

I’ve been asked this question a lot lately, especially after I built YouTube Instant. So, here’s the answer, once and for all, for those who are interested.In short:I learned how to program by building lots of websites.The full story:I learned how to program by working on lots of different website projects starting from a pretty young age. What follows is a full account of all the major websites I’ve built, back to the very first site I made when I was 11 years old. Wha...

   Programming,Computer,Tips,Feross Aboukhadijeh     2011-10-17 10:25:32

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