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  How Integers Should Work (In Systems Programming Languages)

My last post outlined some of the possibilities for integer semantics in programming languages, and asked which option was correct. This post contains my answers. Just to be clear: I want practical solutions, but I’m not very interested by historical issues or backwards compatibility with any existing language, and particularly not with C and C++. We’ll start with: Premise 1: Operations on default integer types return the mathematically correct result or else trap. This is th...

   Number,Algorithm,System,Embedded system     2011-12-05 12:48:41

  Bash Shell Scripting - 10 Seconds Guide

This Bash shell scripting guide is not a detailed study but a quick reference to the BASH syntax. So lets begin... Common environment variables PATH - Sets the search path for any executable command. Similar to the PATH variable in MSDOS. HOME - Home directory of the user. MAIL - Contains the path to the location where mail addressed to the user is stored. IFS - Contains a string of characters which are used as word seperators in the command line. The string normally consists of the spac...

   Bash,Shell,Linux,Tutorial,10 seconds,Shortcut key     2012-02-28 08:05:41

  6 Tips to Help You Build a Great Web Application

Web applications are a little more challenging to design than websites. Designers need to anticipate user behavior, make users’ lives easier and make the experience as visually appealing as possible. Many designers tend to do what is easier for them than think about what’s easier for the user. The following is a small list of tips that designers often overlook in the process of designing a web application.1. The Power of a Good TooltipWhen you present your web application to a...

   Web design,Mobile device,Library,Style     2011-11-25 03:02:11

  I hate cut-and-paste

Me, I blame the IDE's.Coding used to be hard. Not because programming itself was overly hard, but mostly because editors absolutely sucked. How much the typical development environment in the 70's and 80's sucked is hard to convey (except for a very lucky few, and those would have likely been using DEC and WANG gear). I got in on the tail end of the punch card era. Punching your own program is lots of fun. Once. And if you drop a deck you get to play with the sorter, which is also lots of fun (o...

   IDE,Editor,Cut and paste,Shortcut,Blame     2011-10-24 11:33:46

  10 New Year’s resolutions for designers

Get the new year off to a positive start with these design resolutions Wake up. I hope you enjoyed your holiday because it’s a new year and it’s time to get back to work. We did pretty good last year. We started standing up for ourselves. We stopped working for free. We started getting our financial house in order. (Please don’t make me do the contract thing again this year.) We rediscovered typography ...

   Designer,Chanllenge,2012,New UI     2012-01-18 09:11:02

  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

  Top Ten Tips for Correct C++ Coding

Brian Overland, long-time Microsoft veteran and author of C++ Without Fear: A Beginner's Guide That Makes You Feel Smart, 2nd Edition, shares 10 of his most hard-earned, time-saving insights from decades of writing and debugging C++ code.My first introduction to the C family of languages was decades ago (yes, I know this dates me horribly). Later I learned C++. I wish someone back then had steered me around the most obvious potholes; it might have saved me hundreds of frustrating hours.I ca...

   C++,Tips,Top,Ten,Magic number,Integer di     2011-09-03 10:58:35

  Put Your HTML in a Box

In the first article in this series, I walked through the basics of cascading style sheets (CSS) and showed how CSS can make your code easier to maintain. CSS allows you to keep your presentation rules separate from your content, and I showed you some of the benefits this separation provides. In this article, I’ll move forward with CSS and describe how to position elements on a page.The first step in understanding how to position elements is to understand the fundamental model of CSSâ€...

   HTML,Box,Div,Container,Format     2011-08-19 08:22:58

  Why, oh WHY, do those #?@! nutheads use vi?

Yes, even if you can't believe it, there are a lot fans of the 30-years-old vi editor (or its more recent, just-15-years-old, best clone & great improvement, vim). No, they are not dinosaurs who don't want to catch up with the times - the community of vi users just keeps growing: myself, I only got started 2 years ago (after over 10 years of being a professional programmer). Friends of mine are converting today. Heck, most vi users were not even born when...

   Linux,Vi,Vim,Advantage,History     2012-02-05 07:21:17

  PHP: a fractal of bad design

Preface I’m cranky. I complain about a lot of things. There’s a lot in the world of technology I don’t like, and that’s really to be expected—programming is a hilariously young discipline, and none of us have the slightest clue what we’re doing. Combine with Sturgeon’s Law, and I have a lifetime’s worth of stuff to gripe about. This is not the same. PHP is not merely awkward to use, or ill-suited for what I want, or suboptimal, or...

   PHP,Design,Analysis     2012-04-11 13:46:57

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