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  Secret Symphony: The Ultimate Guide to Readable Web Typography

Right now, there’s a mathematical symphony happening on your website.Every single one of your readers is subconsciously aware of this symphony, and more important, they are all pre-programmed to respond to it in a particular way.The question is this:Is your site’s symphony pleasing and inviting to your readers, or does it turn them off and make it harder to communicate with them? The Mathematical Symphony of TypographyAs it turns out, this symphony is not unique to websites. You...

   Web design,Typography,Math,Golden rule     2011-12-23 07:48:10

  Deep inside ARM's new Intel killer

ARM has swung a one-two punch at Intel's plans to muscle in on the smartphone and tablet space that's currently dominated by the plucky chip designers from Cambridge.At press soirées in London and San Francisco on Wednesday, ARM announced both a design for a tiny new chip, the Cortex-A7 MPCore, and a system-on-chip scheme that will marry the new A7 with the much more robust Cortex-A15 MPCore, which was announcedlast September and which should see the light of day next...

   ARM,Killer,Intel,Chipzilla,Performance     2011-10-22 12:55:23

  I am a programmer

Admitting that may be career suicide, or possibly it will cost me dearly because 'software engineers' are raking in the big bucks these days, but the fact of the matter is that I'm a programmer. It's what I do best and it is the job title that I associate with most because it feels as though the biggest chunk of me will always be most likely to blurt that out when people ask me what my job is. That I like to program definitely helps.So instead of choosing some fancy title for what it is that I d...

   Programmer,Skill,Future,Requirements,Software engineer     2011-11-01 07:08:11

  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

  Vim: revisited

I’ve had an off/on relationship with Vim for the past many years. Before, I never felt like we understood each other properly. Vim is almost useless without plugins and some essential settings in .vimrc, but fiddling with all the knobs and installing all the plugins that I thought I needed was a process that in the end stretched out from few hours to weeks, months even; and it the end it just caused frustration instead of making me a happier coder. Recently, I decided to give Vim ano...

   Linux,Editor,Vim,Setup,Quick guideline     2011-12-12 07:55:27

  YOU'RE A DEVELOPER, SO WHY DO YOU WORK FOR SOMEONE ELSE?

As a developer, you are sitting on a goldmine. Do you even realize it? No, seriously, a @#$% goldmine!Never in modern history has it been so easy to create something from scratch, with little or no capital and a marketing model that is limited only by your imagination.Think about the biggest websites you visit or use on a regular basis: Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Foursquare, or even Google for that matter -- all of them were created by developers who created something from little more than an id...

   Developer,Work,Startup,Money,Idea,Time     2011-11-06 14:35:48

  Why developer-friendliness is central to API design

Today, APIs play a bigger role in software development than ever before. The evolution of computing has been dominated by ever-increasing levels of abstraction; the use of higher-level languages, of course, but also the development of platforms, libraries, and frameworks. Professor Douglass C. Smith claims the progression of this second category far outpaced the development of programming languages.  Developers are also noticing that difficulty has shifted from designing algorithms a...

   API,User friendly,Significance, Improve quality     2011-12-21 02:29:54

  True Scala complexity

Update 2: Sorry for the downtime. Leave it to the distributed systems guy to make his blog unavailable. Nginx saves the day.It’s always frustrating reading rants about Scala because they never articulate the actual complexities in the core language.Understandable—this post is intended fill that gap, and it wasn’t exactly easy to put together. But there’s been so much resistance to the very thought that the complexity exists at all, even from on up high, that I thou...

   Scala,Complexity     2012-01-10 07:17:07

  Scala feels like EJB 2, and other thoughts

At Devoxx last week I used the phrase "Scala feels like EJB 2 to me". What was on my mind?ScalaFor a number of years on this blog I've been mentioning a desire to write a post about Scala. Writing such a post is not easy, because anyone who has been paying attention to anti-Scala blog posts will know that writing one is a sure fire way of getting flamed. The Scala community is not tolerant of dissent.But ultimately, I felt that it was important for me to speak out and express my opinions. As I s...

   Scala,Module,EJB,Concurrency,Feature     2011-11-22 08:29:44

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