Today's Question:  What does your personal desk look like?        GIVE A SHOUT

SEARCH KEYWORD -- Work rationale

  The mystery of Duqu Framework solved

The Quest for Identification In my previous blogpost about the Duqu Framework, I described one of the biggest remaining mysteries about Duqu – the oddities of the C&C communications module which appears to have been written in a different language than the rest of the Duqu code. As technical experts, we found this question very interesting and puzzling and we wanted to share it with the community. The feedback we received exceeded our wildest expectations. We got more than 200...

   Duqu,Code mystery,OO C,C++     2012-03-21 09:29:18

  Transparency in Cloud Services

37signals recently launched public “Uptime Reports” for their applications (announcement). The reaction on Hacker News was rather tepid, but I think it’s a positive development, and I applaud 37signals for stepping forward. Reliability of cloud applications is a real concern, and there’s not nearly enough hard data out there. Not all products are equally reliable; even within 37signals, the new reports show a 3:1 variation in downtime across apps. That said, ...

   Cloud,Transapency,37signals,Announcement     2012-01-10 07:24:02

  Before Python

This morning I had a chat with the students at Google's CAPE program. Since I wrote up what I wanted to say I figured I might as well blog it here. Warning: this is pretty unedited (or else it would never be published :-). I'm posting it in my "personal" blog instead of the "Python history" blog because it mostly touches on my career before Python. Here goes.Have you ever written a computer program? Using which language?HTMLJavascriptJavaPythonC++COther - which?[It turned out the students ha...

   Python,History,Programming language,B     2012-01-18 08:08:53

  In-memory key-value store in C, Go and Python

Subtitle: Wow Go’s net library is fast On paternity leave for my second child, I found myself writing an in-memory hashmap (a poor-man’s memcached), in Go, Python and C. I was wondering how hard it would be to replace memcached, if we wanted to do something unusual with our key-value store. I also wanted to compare the languages, and, well, I get bored easily! The code is on github as Key-Value-Polyglot. Each version implements enough of the get and set commands from the mem...

   key-value,Memory,C,Python,Go     2012-03-21 09:21:51

  Set up Superset on ubuntu 16.04 LTS

Apache Superset (incubating) is a modern, enterprise-ready business intelligence web application. Compared with business-focused BI tool like Tableau, superset is more technology-navy. It supports more types of visualization and able to work in distributed manner to boost the query performance. Most importantly, it is free of charge! An example dashboard: Let’s go and set it up. Create a virtualenv Assume Anaconda is installed for python management. # create a virtualenv with python 3.6 co...

   TUTORIAL,UBUNTU,SUPERSET     2019-10-19 21:34:55

  Why Objective-C is Hard

As an active member of "The Internet" and vocal Objective-C coder, I get a lot of questions surrounding the language. They're often framed around thinking about learning the language or trying to write an app, but they also usually involve a phrase like "Objective-C looks really hard" or "what are all those minus signs about?" Both of these are pretty good questions, and I'd like to address why someone might be more hesitant to jump into iOS or OS X development compared to, say, Ruby or J...

   Objective-C,difficult,hard,reason,analysis     2012-03-07 05:11:28

  Week 1 : Research - Elements of Successful iPhone Games.

This weekend I started work on my first full blown game for the iPhone. I’m not ready to share the details of what the game will be specifically as I’m sure these will change dramatically over the coming weeks. All I’m sure on is it will be a platform game built with Corona SDK. To get me started I’ve been downloading a bunch of games from the app store, jotting down some of the areas contributing to their addictiveness and success. Short levels I do most of my ...

   iPhone,Game design,Mobile,Facors     2012-01-16 09:47:53

  Top 10 PHP Best Security Practices for Sys Admins

PHP is widely used for various of web development. However, misconfigured server-side scripting would create all sorts of problem. And here are php security best practices that you should aware when configuring PHP securely. Nowadays most of the web servers are operated under Linux environment (like: Ubuntu, Debian...etc). Hence, in the following article, I am going to use list top 10 ways to enhance PHP Security Best Practices under Linux environment. My sample setup for PHP Security Tips: D...

   PHP,code security,System admin,Advice,Best practice     2012-02-01 00:04:37

  Functional Programming For Object Oriented Programmers

After recently remarking about how I finally "got" functional programming I was asked by one of my millions of twitter followers... ¬_¬ to write up an explanation of a small F# program spoken in terms that fellow O-O programmers would understand. Before I become too entrenched into the functional programming way of thinking, that is, and can't explain it anymore. As a former tutor this is one of the major problems with being able to teach something once you understand it. You've ...

   Functional programming,OOP,F#,Pattern     2011-11-25 13:49:16

  Obviously Correct

What do automatic memory management, static types and purity have in common? They are methods which take advantage of the fact that we can make programs obviously correct (for some partial definition of correctness) upon visual inspection. Code using automatic memory management is obviously correct for a class of memory bugs. Code using static types is obviously correct for a class of type bugs. Code using purity (no mutable references or side effects) isobviously c...

   Memory management,Code,Static,Purity     2011-11-07 08:13:05

RECENT