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SEARCH KEYWORD -- Stupid

  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

  How Many Hours Can a Programmer Program?

I am a little late to this party where Michael Arrington says that startups mean working hard and sleeping under your desk. But I will add a few words. I read a lot of commentary about how such death marches can be counter-productive and ultimately unsuccessful, and also the real dangers they pose to the well-being (short-term and long-term) of the lives of the programmers. But I didn’t see many people actually do a quantitative analysis. So here it is. Your average working day...

   Programmer,Working hour,Efficiency     2012-01-28 07:17:17

  Unix Philosophy

First, let me tell two stories.The first one is one Japan soap factory had a problem that they sometimes shipped empty boxes to the customer without soap inside. So they spend much time and money to invent a X-ray machine to check whether the soap box is empty.The same thing happens in a small factory which doesn't have too much money. The solution of them to solve this problem is they use a desk fan to blow the empty boxes out of the belt and into a bin.The second story is NASA finds that in sp...

   Unix Philosophy,Simple,Rules     2012-05-06 06:49:26

  The most stupid C bug ever

I have been programming for a number of years already. I have seen others introduce bugs, and I have also introduced (and solved!) many bugs while coding. Off-by-one, buffer-overflow, treating pointers as pointees, different behaviors or the same function (this is specially true for cross-platform applications), race conditions, deadlocks, threading issues. I think I have seen quite a few of the typical issues. Yet recently I lost a lot of time to what I would call the most stupid C bug in ...

   C,Bug,Comment,Back slash     2012-04-22 03:40:49

  So, just what IS the problem with Windows Phone?

Charlie Kindel (who left Microsoft earlier this year after 21 years, most recently as a Windows Phone General Manager), posted today on an “impedance mismatch” between carriers and device manufacturers, and Windows Phone, where those carriers and OEMs are “reluctant” to push Windows Phone, while Google’s Android has taken an approach that “reduces friction with carriers & device manufacturers at the expense of end users”. Kindel seems to be imply...

   Windows Phone,Trend,Weak market,Analysis     2011-12-27 09:11:19

  Why Android Will Always Be Laggier Than iOS

One of the things that really stands out using an iPhone is just how smooth it feels compared to using Android. Where as Android is laggy, with a measurable interim between when you touch the screen and when the OS responds, iOS almost seems to anticipate what you want to do before your finger touches the display.How has Apple managed this incredible feat? A better question might be: “How has Google managed to screw up Android’s multitouch so much?” According to Andrew M...

   Android,iOs,Speed,UI Design,Lag     2011-12-07 03:17:18

  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

  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

  Text editor vs IDE

A meaningless editor war Many people like to debate which editor is the best. The biggest controversy is between Emacs and vi. vi supporters like to say: "Look it's very fast to type in vi, our fingers no need to leave the keyboard, we even no need to use the up,down,left and right keys" Emacs supporters often downplayed this and said: "What's the use of typing fast if I just need to press one key and it equals to dozens keys you type in vi?"In fact, there is another group of people who like to ...

   Editor,IDE,Structured editor,vi     2013-05-20 12:03:39

  How The Web Became Just Another Interface to the Cloud

This post is part of our ReadWriteCloud channel, which is dedicated to covering virtualization and cloud computing. The channel is sponsored by Intel and VMware. Read the case study about how Intel Xeon processors and VMware deliver unprecedented reliability in the face of RAM errors.For years, everyone was talking about the convergence of interfaces. The Web, and as a result, the browser, were "clearly" about to take over as the major platforms and cloud computing emerged. Then, in March 2008, ...

   Cloud,Web,Interface,Reason     2011-11-14 02:43:10

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