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  The business of software

Inspired by a talk I gave yesterday at the BOS conference. This is long, feel free to skip!My first real job was leading a team that created five massive computer games for the Commodore 64. The games were so big they needed four floppy disks each, and the project was so complex (and the hardware systems so sketchy) that on more than one occasion, smoke started coming out of the drives.Success was a product that didn't crash, start a fire or lead to a nervous breakdown.Writing software...

   Software,Design,Business,Software design     2011-10-29 07:22:09

  An easy way to log client side information to server

JavaScript debug is a very troublesome thing in web application development. Because many web browsers will not notify you if there is any error in the JavaScript codes you write. They just silently fail and block the following codes execution. In order to debug JavaScript codes, we need a good log mechanism which will help us log the error information,, we often need to log errors in JavaScript codes to server for debug purpose in a production web application, What should we do? The first ...

   JavaScript log, Ajax,Image,Debug     2012-12-30 09:16:50

  Build your own internet search engine - Part 2

After having started to build my own internet search engine as described in a previous blog post, I now have read some papers and books about web search engine architecture and information retrieval to complete my hobby project. Here is a list of papers and books that I highly recommend to anybody who is interested in this topic: 1. Google: data structures and algorithms by Petteri Huuhka 2. The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine by the Google founde...

   Search engine,Paper,Database,Data structure     2011-12-22 08:25:59

  A New Experimental Feature: scoped stylesheets

Chromium recently implemented a new feature from HTML5: scoped stylesheets, aka. <style scoped>. A web author can limit style rules to only apply to a part of a page by setting the ‘scoped’ attribute on a <style> element that is the direct child of the root element of the subtree you want the styles to be applied to. This limits the styles to affect just the element that is the parent of the <style> element and all of its descendants. Example Here’s a...

   HTML5,Style,Draw,Use case     2012-03-23 12:11:47

  Penrose Tiling in Obfuscated Python

Here’s a Python script which renders some Penrose tiling. Yes, this is valid Python code: _ =\ """if! 1:"e,V=100 0,(0j-1)**-.2; v,S=.5/ V.real, [(0,0,4 *e,4*e* V)];w=1 -v"def! E(T,A, B,C):P ,Q,R=B*w+ A*v,B*w+C ...

   Python,Disorder,Code,Writing,Style     2011-09-14 11:57:34

  The Death of File Sharing

Last week’s violent government attack on the hugely popular site Megaupload — the U.S. government arresting Belgian citizens in New Zealand, of all places, and stealing at gunpoint servers bank accounts and property — has sent shock waves through the entire digital world. The first shock was the realization that the gigantic protest against legislative moves (SOPA and PIPA) that would smash the Internet turned out to be superfluous. The thing everyone wanted to prevent is al...

   File sharing,Death,Trend,Cloud     2012-02-01 04:44:06

  Bill Gates to return as Microsoft's white knight?

Summary: Could and should Bill Gates return to day-to-day responsibilities at Microsoft? Fortune is reporting there’s a rumor to that effect. Fortune reported on December 8 that there’s talk Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates might be mulling a comeback, largely to help boost Microsoft’s stagnant stock price and employee morale. I have to say I am very, very, very skeptical on this one. First, it seems this is a single-sourced report....

   Microsoft,Change,Bill Gates,Return,White Knight     2011-12-09 07:39:39

  Smuggling data in pointers

While reading up on The ABA Problem I came across a fantastic hack.  The ABA problem, in a nutshell, results from the inability to atomically access both a pointer and a "marked" bit at the same time (read the wikipedia page).  One fun, but very hackish solution is to "smuggle" data in a pointer.  Example:#include "stdio.h"void * smuggle(void * ptr, int value){  return (void *)( (long long)ptr | (value & 3) );}int recoverData(void * ptr){  return (long long)ptr &...

   C,Pointer,Bit,Data,Atomic,Smuggle     2011-11-14 08:15:59

  CSS3 animation vs CSS3 transition

Both CSS3 animation and CSS3 transition can be used to transition an element in a webpage. They can be used to transition some CSS properties within a given period of time. They have many similarities. They do have a few differences as well. So an user needs to understand the differences between them in order to better use them in different scenarios. First, let's see an example on how to change the width of a div from 100px to 200px within 2 seconds when hovering on it. With CSS3 animation , th...

   CSS3 animation,CSS3 transition, Difference     2015-06-15 08:46:39

  How the Internet is Changing Economics

I'm not an economist by training, but I've spent a long time observing markets, and I've often wondered what the great economic thinkers of centuries past (Marx, Smith, Keynes, others) would say if they were alive today and could witness the transformations that have been caused by mass media (radio, TV, print) and the Internet. The Internet, in particular, has had a transformative effect that will doubtless be studied for hundreds of years to come. One of the things that can be said abou...

   Internet,Economic,Change,Reason     2012-01-14 12:03:05

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