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SEARCH KEYWORD -- set theory

  Want to be a software engineer? Go to university

This editorial was originally submitted to the Sydney Morning Herald in response to an editorial proclaiming that people wanting to become software engineers should not attend university and instead learn a current popular programming language.   Over the past few years I’ve developed software for large corporations, started the Vodafail campaign, co-founded Mijura and represented Australia in the global Robocup (humanoid robotic soccer) competition. I graduated from University...

   Software engineer,University,Systematic study,Research     2011-12-07 08:48:54

  Surprising applications of math

The comments in the previous post touched on surprising applications of math, so I thought I’d expand this theme into it’s own post. Below I’ll give a couple general examples of surprising applications and then I’ll give a couple more personal applications I found surprising.Number theory has traditionally been the purest of pure mathematics. People study number theory for the joy of doing so, not to make money. At least that was largely true until the ...

   Math,Number theory,Algorithms,Differential euqation     2011-11-18 09:24:19

  The significance of coding competition to actual work

Some friends asked this question: In secondary schools we participate in the NOI, in university we participate in ACM/ICPC, TopCoder.What's the significance of coding competition to actual work? I participated in the NOI from 1994 to 1996, ACM/ICPC from 1999 to 2000 and TopCoder in 2002 for six months. Later I paid little attention to coding competition, so I may not understand the changes in recent years and race mode . The capabilities we can get by participating the competition can be summari...

   ACM,Programming,Facebook,TopCoder     2013-02-28 20:38:23

  Application vs Database Programming

A few years ago, I had a problem.  A database routine for processing bulk payments for LedgerSMB that was humming along in my test cases was failing when tested under load with real data prior to implementation.  Some testing showed that while it ran fine with small numbers of inputs, it eventually slowed way down as the number of inputs rose.  Andrew Sullivan, who was also on the project through a different company, suggested it was something called a "cache miss" because I...

   Application Programming,Database programming,Comparison,Difference     2012-03-04 12:08:35

  Android Hardware Buttons are not broken, let me tell you why

This post is written as a reaction on Christoffer Du Rietz’s article The Android Hardware-Buttons Are Broken. In his article Christoffer explains how the Android back button shows inconsistent behavior like doing different actions when it is used on the same screen.In the following article I will try to explain that this behavior is not broken. Instead it is exactly what the Android developers had in mind while designing the back button behavior.The way the back button is broken according...

   Android,Hardware,Button,Protect     2011-11-03 13:38:21

  Set Theory in C++11

Have you ever felt the need to perform set theoretic operations on types? Not really? Me neither, but I thought it’s a fun thing to try out. So, if you ever feel the need of using type sets, C++11 makes it quite easy to do so. Especially variadic templates allow for a much more condensed syntax compared to type list constructs formerly used. (Disclaimer: This is rather a proof of concept, but maybe somebody comes up with a useful scenario.) Let’s start by d...

   C++,set theory,Math     2012-03-11 13:15:55

  Practice of using spinlock instead of mutex

Spinlock and mutex are two important concepts in multithreading programs. They are used to lock some shared resource to prevent concurrent access which may affect data consistency. But they do have differences, what are the differences? when should we use spinlock instead of mutex? The Theory In theory, when a thread tries to lock a mutex and it does not succeed, because the mutex is already locked, it will go to sleep, immediately allowing another thread to run. It will continue to sleep until...

   Spinlock,Mutex,Concurrency     2014-04-19 21:54:12

  How deep should unit test go?

There is a question on Stackoverflow which says "How deep are your unit tests?". It is asked by a guy named John Nolan. The question is not too new, but what catches me is the Best Answer given by Kent Beck, who is the creator of Extreme programming(XP) and Test Driven Development(TDD). Let's look at the question first. The thing I've found about TDD is that its takes time to get your tests set up and being naturally lazy I always want to write as little code as possible. The first thing I seem ...

   Unit test,TDD,XP     2012-09-03 10:11:27

  Good ways to "insult" a computer scientist

Computer scientists are a group of people who are hard working and talented. They build the theory foundation for information and computation and they usually work on something difficult to understand. Many computer algorithms are created by computer scientists. In our mind, they are those people we admire most. But sometimes we also want to make fun of them or "insult" them. What are good ways to "insult" them? Here we share some. Ask him to make a website for you...and with PHP. Ask them why ...

   Computer scientist,Jokes     2013-08-06 09:32:56

  Code Optimization Techniques for Graphics Processing Units

Books on parallel programming theory often talk about such weird beasts like the PRAM model, a hypothetical hardware that would provide the programmer with a number of processors that is proportional to the input size of the problem at hand. Modern general purpose computers afford only a few processing units; four is currently a reasonable number. This limitation makes the development of highly parallel applications quite difficult to the average computer user. However, the low cost and th...

   Optimazation,GUI,Graphic processing     2011-12-18 01:11:53

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