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  Esmerelda's Imagination

An actress acquaintance of mine—let's call her Esmerelda—once said, "I can't imagine being anything except an actress." To which the retort was given, "You can't be much of an actress then, can you?"I was reminded of this exchange when someone said to me about Go, "I can't imagine programming in a language that doesn't have generics." My retort, unspoken this time, was, "You can't be much of a programmer, then, can you?"This is not an essay about generics (which are a fine...

   Programmer,Imagination,Lack     2012-02-08 10:31:09

  Front-end Style Guides

We all know that feeling: some time after we launch a site, new designers and developers come in and make adjustments. They add styles that don’t fit with the content, use typefaces that make us cringe, or chuck in bloated code. But if we didn’t leave behind any documentation, we can’t really blame them for messing up our hard work. To counter this problem, graphic designers are often commissioned to produce style guides as part of a rebranding project. A style guide ...

   Design,Guideline,CSS,Style,System     2011-12-07 08:54:59

  A Perl Regular Expression That Matches Prime Numbers

perl -lne '(1x$_) =~ /^1?$|^(11+?)\1+$/ || print "$_ is prime"' Can you figure out how it works? I give an explanation below, but try to figure it out yourself. Here is what happens when you run it: $ perl -lne '(1x$_) =~ /^1?$|^(11+?)\1+$/ || print "$_ is prime"' 1 2 2 is prime 3 3 is prime 4 5 5 is prime 6 7 7 is prime 8 9 10 11 11 is prime Here is how it works. First, the number is converted in its unary representation by (1x$_). For example, the number 5 gets converted into 1x5, which is ...

   Perl,Regex,Regular expression,Prime number,One line     2011-12-26 08:42:00

  Mark Zuckerbeg's hacker way

According to TechCrunch, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote codes for the latest mobile IM application : Poke, the tone played when receiving push notifications is from the mouth of Zuckerberg. This approach reflects the way pursued by Zuckerberg : hacker way.As one of the earliest features of Facebook the "Poking" is invented by Zuckerberg, it is not surprising that Zuckerberg involves in Poke's development.Zuckerberg recorded his own voice on the phone initially just for fun. But he was later ...

   Poke,Facebook,Snapchat, Mark Zuckerberg     2012-12-24 12:01:52

  One interesting story about Chinese software development

I have once seen an interesting complaint written by one foreigner about Beijing South Railway Station (China) on foursquare. It says: "There is simply no way to buy a ticket at the machine unless you have a Chinese ID. What the hell they have English interface for then?" Apparently,the foreigner cannot buy ticket because he doesn’t have Chinese ID but there still presents an English interface for foreigners on the vending machine. Because of my profession, I find this awkward situation w...

   Software design,User experience,Importance     2012-03-26 14:42:50

  Design Secrets for Engineers

If you are a designer like me, you must be asked on a regular basis to “make it look pretty.” The request can stroke your designer ego, making you feel like a design rockstar with super powers to make this world a more beautiful place. This is especially true at startups, where you are one of the few, maybe the only designer there. However, it can also be really annoying–almost degrading at times. Thoughts like “why the hell can’t engineers do this on their o...

   Design,UI,pretty,engineer,designer font     2011-10-24 11:18:25

  C/C++ Pointer Declaration Syntax – It makes sense!

I never really liked the way pointers are declared in C/C++: int *a, *b, *c; // a, b and c are pointers to int The reason is that I am used to reading variable declarations as MyType myVar1, myVar2, myVar3; and I always read “int*” as the type “integer pointer”. I therefore wanted the following int* a, b, c; // a is a pointer to int, b and c are ints to mean that a, b and c all were of type int*, i.e. pointers to int. and I therefore found it slightly a...

   C,Pointer,Declaration,Attempt     2012-02-22 05:43:58

  Paint messages will come in as fast as you let them

There is a class of messages which are generated on demand rather than explicitly posted into a message queue. If you call Get­Message or Peek­Message and the queue is empty, then the window manager will look to see if one of these generated-on-demand messages is due, messages like WM_TIMER, WM_MOUSE­MOVE, and WM_PAINT. Neil wonders, "In that program that called Invalidate­Rect 100,000 times, how many paint messages were generated?" The Zen answer to this question is "Yes." A ...

   WM_PAINT,paint message,work,Mouse move     2011-12-21 09:37:14

  About go get and go install in Go 1.16

Go version 1.16 beta1 has been released on 18 Dec 2020, major features of Go 1.16 have been finalized with this beta release. Many people are discussing about the support of Apple M1, however, this post will not cover this topic. Instead the focus will be on go get and go install changes. There are lots of changes related to modules in Go 1.16, the details can be found in the release note. Below are some of the key highlights. GO111MODULE is on by default, if wanna keep old behavior, needs...

   GOLANG,GO 1.16,GO INSTALL     2020-12-26 00:26:58

  A Javascript When Function

function when(conditionFunc, execFunc, interval){ if (conditionFunc()){ execFunc(); }else{ setTimeout(function(){ when(conditionFunc, execFunc, interval);}, interval); } } You have some code which should only execute when a condition is true. E.g. You have code which relies on a javascript library but can't be sure the library has loaded yet and don't want the code to execute until it has. This is common if you have a bookmarklet which injects more than one <...

   JavaScript,When,Implementation,When function     2012-02-24 05:08:34

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