RANDOM THOUGHTS

Three ways to tell if a .NET Assembly is Strongly Named (link)

2012-02-01T13:23:00.002+02:00

Here are several convenient ways to tell whether a .NET assembly is strongly named. Read here

Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory (link)

2012-02-01T08:01:00.002+02:00

A lifelong Apple superfan, Daisey sees some photos online from the inside of a factory that makes iPhones, starts to wonder about the people working there, and flies to China to meet them. Read more here...

Tilera preps many-cored Gx chips for March launch (link)

2012-01-30T12:58:00.000+02:00

Upstart multicore RISC chip maker Tilera is timing the launch of its third generation of Tile processors to rain a little on Intel's forthcoming parade, and to try to blunt all of the excitement that is building for ARM-based alternatives for servers. Read more...

Read "CouchDB The Definitive Guide" online

2012-01-30T08:00:00.000+02:00

Here is draft of "CouchDB The Definitive Guide" second edition and you can read it online!

Howto: resize VirtualBox image

2012-01-27T16:19:00.002+02:00

How would your resize VirtualBox image? The answer is simple:

Usage:

VBoxManage modifyhd         |
                            [--type normal|writethrough|immutable|shareable|
                                    readonly|multiattach]
                            [--autoreset on|off]
                            [--compact]
                            [--resize |--resizebyte ]


Example
C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox>VBoxManage.exe modifyhd YourImageFile.vdi --resize 20480
0%...10%...20%...30%...40%...50%...60%...70%...80%...90%...100%

PUT or POST: The REST of the Story (link)

2012-01-27T08:24:00.002+02:00

Web service designers have tried for some time now to correlate CRUD (Create, Retrieve, Update and Delete) semantics with the Representational State Transfer (REST) verbs defined by the HTTP specification–GET, PUT, POST, DELETE, HEAD, etc. So often, developers will try to correlate these two concepts–CRUD and REST–using a one-to-one mapping of verbs from the two spaces, like this:

Create = PUT
Retrieve = GET
Update = POST
Delete = DELETE

The free lunch is over now welcome to the hardware jungle (link)

2012-01-26T09:32:00.001+02:00

The good news is that Moore’s “local scale-in” transistor mine isn’t empty yet; it appears the transistor bonanza will continue for about another decade, give or take a half decade or so, which should be long enough to exploit the lower-cost side of the Law to get us to parity between desktops and pocket tablets. The bad news is that we can clearly observe the diminishing returns as the transistors are decreasingly exploitable – with each new generation of processors, software developers have to work harder and the chips get more difficult to power. And with each new crank of the diminishing-returns wheel, there’s less time forimage hardware and software designers to come up with ways to overcome the next hurdle; the motherlode free lunch lasted 30 years, but the homogeneous multicore era lasted only about six years, and we are now already overlapping the next two eras of hetero-core and cloud-core. Read more...

Javascript Best Practices (link)

2012-01-25T13:00:00.000+02:00

This document is a list of best practices and preferred ways of developing JavaScript code, based on opinions and experience from many developers in the JavaScript community. Since this is a list of recommendations rather than a list of absolute rules, experienced developers may have slightly differing opinions from those expressed below. Read more...

Good intro to couchdb (link)

2012-01-25T08:00:00.000+02:00

Go read here...

JavaScript on the server: Growing the Node.js Community (link)

2012-01-24T10:40:00.003+02:00

While we all know and love JavaScript as a language for browser-based scripting, few remember that, early on, it was destined to be used as a server-side language as well. Only about a year after JavaScript’s original release in Netscape Navigator 2.0 (1995), Netscape released Netscape Enterprise Server 2.0: Read more...

Monokai theme for MonoDevelop

2012-01-23T16:02:00.000+02:00

Hi,

I have ported Textmate Monokai theme to MonoDevelop, this is work in progress so try it and give me feedback.

Link to my github repo. Have fun :)

Node.js case study: The Trello at Fog Creek

2012-01-21T08:00:00.000+02:00

"That led us toward a single-page app that would generate its UI on the client and accept data updates from a push channel. This is pretty far from any of the work we’ve done before at Fog Creek, so from a technical perspective Trello has been an adventure." Read here...

Node v0.6.8 verson released (link)

2012-01-20T12:30:00.002+02:00

Update V8 to 3.6.6.19
Numeric key hash collision fix for V8 (Erik Corry, Fedor Indutny)
Add missing TTY key translations for F1-F5 on Windows (Brandon Benvie)
path.extname bugfix with . and .. paths (Bert Belder)
cluster: don’t always kill the master on uncaughtException (Ben Noordhuis)
Update npm to 1.1.0-2 (isaacs)
typed arrays: set class name (Ben Noordhuis)
zlib binding cleanup (isaacs, Bert Belder)
dgram: use slab memory allocator (Michael Bernstein)
fix segfault #2473

Read here...

Building a Modern Web Stack for the Real-time Web (link)

2012-01-19T15:58:00.003+02:00

The web is evolving. After a few years of iteration the WebSockets spec is finally here (RFC 6455), and as of late 2011 both Chrome and Firefox are SPDY capable. These additions are much more than just "enhancing AJAX", as we now have true real-time communication in the browser: stream multiplexing, flow control, framing, and significant latency and performance improvements. Now, we just need to drag our "back office" - our web frontends, app servers, and everything in between into this century to enable us to take advantage of these new capabilities. Read more...

Case study: How & why to build a consumer app with Node.js (link)

2012-01-19T14:02:00.003+02:00

Node.js has been getting great press for being used to build real-time web applications and fast networking tools that help big web sites run and scale. But is Node just as good a fit for web agencies and developers that build dozens, scores, or even hundreds of sites a year? Read here...

What is the defining characteristic of a local variable? (link)

2012-01-18T12:59:00.002+02:00

If you ask a dozen C# developers what a "local variable" is, you might get a dozen different answers. Read more...

node.js GitHub API search repositories by keyword example

2012-01-18T10:20:00.000+02:00

Not long time ago I started learning JavaScript and node.js. Today I found this node.js module called node-github. I had fun while played with it. And here it goes one little sniped for searching GitHub source repositories by keywords.

var GitHubApi = require('github').GitHubApi;

var github = new GitHubApi(true);
var repoApi = github.getRepoApi();

repoApi.search('node github', function(err, repos){
    if (repos){
        var i;
        for(i = 0; i < repos.length; i++){
            console.log(repos[i].name);
        }
    } else {
        console.log('Not found any repos!\n');
    }
});

How to run

download and install node.js from here
run 'npm install github' in your source directory
create new file 'example.js' and paste code sniped into it and save changes
run 'node example.js'

Output you should see the following output to console:

C:\code\node\npm-index>node scripts\example_github.js
The "sys" module is now called "util". It should have a similar interface.
get:  post
send GET request: /api/v2/json/repos/search/node%20github
node-github
node-buildbot-github
node-bus.github.com
node-github-receiver
node-uso-github
node-github-issues
node.github.com
github-node-tools
NodeGithubResumeWriter
g-node.github.com
node-github-deployhook

JSON will be a core type in PostgreSQL 9.2 (link)

2012-01-17T09:31:00.001+02:00

On Wednesday, four days before the start of the final commitfest for release 9.2 of PostgreSQL, Robert Haas published YA patch to include JSON as a core type. Read more here...

Quote of The Day 2012-01-16

2012-01-16T09:30:00.000+02:00

"If you want to do something big in your life, you must remember that shyness is only the mind," she said. "If you think shy, you act shy. If you think confident you act confident. Therefore never let shyness conquer your mind."

- Arfa Karim Randhawa the computer programming prodigy who became the world’s youngest Microsoft Certified Professional at 9 years old, has passed away at the age of 16, according to reports out of her native Pakistan this weekend.Read more...

Prozac Extinguishes Anxiety by Rejuvenating the Brain (link)

2012-01-05T15:00:00.000+02:00

"...new study in the December 23 issue of Science shows that the antidepressant Prozac (fluoxetine) gives mice the youthful brain plasticity they need to learn that a once-threatening stimulus is now benign." Read more...

A Man. A Van. A Surprising Business Plan. (link)

2012-01-05T09:00:00.000+02:00

We've all been there. Trapped in line at the DMV. Or stuck on hold while trying to call a city agency. It's easy to complain about government bureaucracy. But it's the rare person who sees such inefficiency as a business opportunity. Go to article...

DoS using Hash Collisions in ASP .net (link)

2012-01-04T09:00:00.000+02:00

This weekend in the 28C3 Alexander “alech” Klink and Julian “zeri” Wälde presented Effective Denial of Service attacks against web application platforms which can make a server with 99% CPU usage using very low resources. Read more...

Richard Stallman Was Right All Along (link)

2012-01-03T15:00:00.000+02:00

Late last year, president Obama signed a law that makes it possible to indefinitely detain terrorist suspects without any form of trial or due process. Peaceful protesters in Occupy movements all over the world have been labelled as terrorists by the authorities. Initiatives like SOPA promote diligent monitoring of communication channels. Thirty years ago, when Richard Stallman launched the GNU project, and during the three decades that followed, his sometimes extreme views and peculiar antics were ridiculed and disregarded as paranoia - but here we are, 2012, and his once paranoid what-ifs have become reality. Read more...

The Coming War on General Purpose Computation By Cory Doctorow (link)

2012-01-03T13:00:00.000+02:00

"As a member of the Walkman generation, I have made peace with the fact that I will require a hearing aid long before I die, and of course, it won't be a hearing aid, it will be a computer I put in my body, so when I get into a car - a computer I put my body into - with my hearing aid - a computer I put inside my body - I want to know that these technologies are not designed to keep secrets from me, and to prevent me from terminating processes on them that work against my interests." The Coming War on General Purpose Computation By Cory Doctorow

Supercolliding a PHP array (link)

2012-01-03T09:00:00.000+02:00

Did you know that inserting 2^16 = 65536 specially crafted values into a normal PHP array can take 30 seconds? Normally this would take only 0.01 seconds. Read here more...

Reducing Code Nesting (link)

2012-01-02T09:50:00.001+02:00

"This guy’s code sucks!" It’s something we’ve all said or thought when we run into code we don’t like. Sometimes it’s because it’s buggy, sometimes it’s because it conforms to a style we don’t like, and sometimes it’s because it just feels wrong. Recently I found myself thinking this, and automatically jumping to the conclusion that the developer who wrote it was a novice. The code had a distinct property that I dislike: lots of nesting. But the more I think about it, the more I realized that it’s not really something I’ve heard discussed much. Read more on Reducing Code Nesting here...

Postgresql query in transaction

2011-12-28T13:44:00.000+02:00

The following is short example of query in transaction. We will delete all records and will insert new one in single transaction those actions both fails or both succeeds:

BEGIN;
DELETE FROM hi_value;
INSERT INTO hi_value(next_value) VALUES(5308);
COMMIT;

Developing software is like building something fairly simple out of bricks (link)

2011-12-28T09:00:00.000+02:00

Although very few managers ever express it directly this way, many behave as if developing a piece of software is like building something fairly simple out of bricks. It might be something large. But it’s still fairly simple. This is tempting. The inexperienced person thinks that bricks are easy to understand: they’re all the same: if you know how to work with one, you know how to work with them all. You can measure the progress of building something out of bricks by counting the bricks in place. And anyone can contribute, even if only by moving bricks from one place to another using brute force. Read here more...

Code evolution vs. Intelligent design (link)

2011-12-27T09:00:00.000+02:00

You are feeling proud of yourself. You sit back after having just polished off another piece of masterful code and look down at the next item on your to-do list. You start to think through how you are going to tackle the next problem and then it dawns on you. To implement the next step you are going to have to go back and dig up all that perfect code you have just finished writing, hack it apart and bolt-on a whole new bunch of functionality. The perfect structure you have been building might not make it through through the carnage. Read here more...

HipHop for PHP at Hyves (link)

2011-12-23T09:00:00.000+02:00

At Hyves, we use HipHop to run our web servers and our daemons, which are also written in in PHP. In this blog, I will detail some of our experiences and results. Read more...

All Programmers Are Self-Taught (link)

2011-12-22T12:06:00.001+02:00

A pitching coach teaches you how to pitch, but a CS professor doesn’t teach you how to code. Read more...

The Switch: Python to Node.js (link)

2011-12-20T09:00:00.000+02:00

Cloudkick was primarily written in Python. Most backend services were written in Twisted Python. The API endpoints and web server were written in Django, and used mod_wsgi. We felt that while we greatly value the asynchronous abilities of Twisted Python, and they matched many of our needs well, we were unhappy with our ability to maintain Twisted Python based services. Specifically, the deferred programming model is difficult for developers to quickly grasp and debug. It tended to be ‘fail’ deadly, in that if a developer didn’t fully understand Twisted Python, they would make many innocent mistakes. Django was mostly successful for our needs as an API endpoint, however we were unhappy with our use of the Django ORM. It created many dependencies between components that were difficult to unwind later. Cloud Monitoring is primarily written in Node.js. Our team still loves Python, and much of our secondary tooling in Cloud Monitoring uses Python. Read here more...

Ideas and execution (link)

2011-12-19T09:22:00.000+02:00

Some people regret the fact that they can come up with lots of great ideas, but cannot execute them. Others are frustrated that they can execute well, but cannot come up with an idea that is original or noteworthy... Read more here...

How big are PHP arrays (and values) really? (link)

2011-12-19T09:00:00.000+02:00

Very interesting observations about PHP implementation

Metaclass in Python explained (link)

2011-12-16T12:18:00.004+02:00

Very good explanation of Metaclass in Python...

Vim: revisited (link)

2011-12-15T22:29:00.001+02:00

Very good article for VIM beginners My vim configuration

More shell, less egg (link)

2011-12-13T17:04:00.003+02:00

Jon Bentley had a regular column called “Programming Pearls” in the Communications of the ACM (you may have come across this collection of some of his columns). In 1986 he got interested in literate programming, so he asked Donald Knuth to write a program in that style as a guest column and Doug McIlroy to write a literary-style critique of it. Read more here...

PostgreSQL 9.1.2

2011-12-12T09:41:00.001+02:00

Release notes here...

Getting Started with Git and GitHub on Windows (link)

2011-12-08T09:36:00.001+02:00

Example of Regex: validating GUID

2011-12-06T12:17:00.001+02:00

Here is a simple example of Regex used to validate GUID.

using System;
using System.Text.RegularExpressions;

namespace Program
{
    class MainClass
    {
        public static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            string[] uuids = new string[]
            {
                Guid.NewGuid().ToString("D"), 
                Guid.NewGuid().ToString("D"),
                "some random string"
            };
   
            foreach(string uuid in uuids)
            {
                Console.WriteLine("uuid: '{0}' macth '{1}'", 
                    uuid, Regex.IsMatch(uuid, @"^[a-z0-9]{8}-[a-z0-9]{4}-[a-z0-9]{4}-[a-z0-9]{4}-[a-z0-9]{12}$"));
            }
        }
    }
}

Tyranny of the tools (link)

2011-12-02T09:14:00.001+02:00

"When we create Agile teams, we create teams of real, live people. That means our control and communication systems must be built around the qualities and capabilities of people, not robots. We are doing much more in a team room than simply transferring abstract pieces of metadata around about a project. We are gaining a common emotional understanding of the problems and the players, getting a deep feeling for what might go wrong and what we need to worry about, adjusting our work patterns, our communication techniques, and our problem solving skills to this particular team, this particular problem, in this particular situation." ... "An Agile team isn't a team that moves stories across a wall. It's a team that looks each other in the eye and talks about things the Product Owner wants and how they're going to give it to them." Read more...

Postgres 9.2 is going to have a boat-load of performance enhancements

2011-12-01T14:53:00.001+02:00

Read more here...

In managed code we trust, our recent battles with the .NET Garbage Collector (link)

2011-11-08T09:58:00.001+02:00

Recently Marc blogged about some performance optimizations we implemented at Stack Overflow to work around some Garbage Collection (GC) issues. This post evoked many emotions and opinions both on his Blog and on Hacker News. In this post I would like to cover some of the history involved with this particular problem, explain how we found it and eventually fixed it.

Read more here...

The One Chart You Need To See To Understand Mobile (link)

2011-11-07T22:51:00.001+02:00

How to speed up the Android Emulator by up to 400%

2011-11-07T17:36:00.000+02:00

Good trick how to improve android emulator speed...

Quote of The Day - 2011-11-05

2011-11-05T17:06:00.000+02:00

“Fashion is what seems beautiful now but looks ugly later; art can be ugly at first but it becomes beautiful later.” - Steve Jobs

NHibernate FAQ: how to specify exact database type in mapping

2011-10-20T12:46:00.000+03:00

So you have simple class mapping like this:



 

  
   
    hi_value
    next_value
    1

and want to specify exact database type to „Timing“ property. So what should you do? You need the following very simple change in your mapping file:

That's it! Happy hibernating!

ISO C++11 Published (link)

2011-10-12T14:10:00.004+03:00

ISO has now published the new C++11 standard and issued a press release...

More here...

Why the Era of Free Stuff Is Ending (link)

2011-10-07T15:00:00.000+03:00

Just a couple of years ago, writer Chris Anderson asserted that free was the new price of everything . But now, it's looking like time to say farewell to free.

Read more here...

Steve Jobs: A Few Memories (link)

2011-10-07T09:08:00.003+03:00

I’m so sad this evening—as millions are—to hear of Steve Jobs’s death. Scattered over the last quarter century, I learned much from Steve Jobs, and was proud to consider him a friend. And indeed, he contributed in various ways to all three of my major life projects so far: Mathematica, A New Kind of Science and Wolfram|Alpha.

Read more here...

The Global Interpreters lock and Ruby/Python concurrency (link)

2011-10-05T07:44:00.004+03:00

The Global Interpreter Lock has also been in a subject a lot of discussions in the Python community and it’s not surprising that the Ruby community experiences the same debates since the evolution of their implementations are somewhat similar.

When "clever" goes wrong: how Etsy overcame poor architectural choices (link)

2011-10-04T09:06:00.001+03:00

Ross Snyder, a senior software engineer at craft e-commerce site Etsy, recounted the story of the evolution of his company's technical architecture to a roomful of fellow travelers at the Surge conference in Baltimore. It was a story that, by his admission, is not entirely his own—he's only been with Etsy for a year and a half, which accounts for the “after” phase of the company's architectural picture.

Read more here...

Asynchronous Programming with Async and Await (msdn link)

2011-10-03T08:00:00.000+03:00

Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview introduces a simplified approach to asynchronous programming that makes code easier to write, understand, and maintain

The approach relies on two new keywords, the async (C#) modifier and the await (C#) operator.

MSDN article...

Xerox PARC, Apple, and the truth about innovation. (link)

2011-09-30T08:00:00.000+03:00

In late 1979, a twenty-four-year-old entrepreneur paid a visit to a research center in Silicon Valley called Xerox PARC. He was the co-founder of a small computer startup down the road, in Cupertino. His name was Steve Jobs.

a href="http://www.gladwell.com/2011/2011_05_16_a_creationmyth.html">Read all article...

Agile Scrum: Delivering Broken Software Since 1991 (link)

2011-09-29T12:12:00.000+03:00

Agile Scrum: Delivering Broken Software Since 1991. The first third of this article describes Scrum; The second third describes how it gets subverted to produce broken software; The final third is where the practical advice for avoiding this is...

Read all article here...

It’s the end of the web as we know it (link)

2011-09-29T08:00:00.000+03:00

When you own a domain you’re a first class citizen of the web. A householder and landowner. What you can do on your own website is only very broadly constrained by law and convention. You can post the content you like...

If you use a paid-for web service at someone else’s domain you’re a tenant. A second class citizen. You don’t have much control. You’ll probably have to live with your landlord’s furniture and decoration and a restrictive set of rules...

Read here full article...

Secrets of PostgreSQL Performance (link to video)

2011-09-28T08:00:00.000+03:00

Secrets of PostgreSQL Performance

2011-09-27T08:00:00.000+03:00

I realize how ridiculous it sounds to say "Quake changed my life," but it honestly did.

Read full article here...

PostgreSQL Magazine: Issue #00 is out ! (link)

2011-09-26T08:55:00.001+03:00

Launching a print magazine in 2011 may look like a weird idea… But PostgreSQL is now 25 years old and although it is one of the oldest open source projects alive, there are no print media for its large user base…

Go and read it now! :)

Graphics programming black book (link)

2011-09-26T08:00:00.000+03:00

Michael Abrash's classic Graphics Programming Black Book is a compilation of Michael's previous writings on assembly language and graphics programming (including from his "Graphics Programming" column in Dr. Dobb's Journal). Much of the focus of this book is on profiling and code testing, as well as performance optimization. It also explores much of the technology behind the Doom and Quake 3-D games, and 3-D graphics problems such as texture mapping, hidden surface removal, and the like. Thanks to Michael for making this book available.

Grab book copy here...

How To Write Unmaintainable Code (link)

2011-09-23T13:00:00.000+03:00

In the interests of creating employment opportunities in the Java programming field, I am passing on these tips from the masters on how to write code that is so difficult to maintain, that the people who come after you will take years to make even the simplest changes. Further, if you follow all these rules religiously, you will even guarantee yourself a lifetime of employment, since no one but you has a hope in hell of maintaining the code. Then again, if you followed all these rules religiously, even you wouldn't be able to maintain the code!

Read here...

Quake 2 Source Code Review (link)

2011-09-23T08:00:00.000+03:00

I spent about a month in my spare time reading the source code of Quake II. It was a wonderful learning experience since one major improvement in idTech3 engine was to unify Quake 1, Quake World and QuakeGL into one beautiful code architecture. The way modularity was achieved even though the C programming language doesn't feature polymorphism was especially interesting.

Read full article...

Learn REST: A Tutorial (link)

2011-09-22T08:00:00.000+03:00

REST is an architecture style for designing networked applications. The idea is that, rather than using complex mechanisms such as CORBA, RPC or SOAP to connect between machines, simple HTTP is used to make calls between machines.

Learn more...

Stack-checking a program that will execute in orbit (link)

2011-09-21T08:00:00.000+03:00

For those of us that were raised with Z80 CPUs, it is abundantly clear that we are living in "times of plenty"; most developers no longer have to think about things like "fitting into memory" or "having enough stack space". Moore's Law provided orders of magnitude of improvements in both CPU speeds and memory sizes; so big in fact, that resource-wasting virtual machines dominate our everyday software, and we don't even feel it.

Read full article...

Quote of The Day 2011-09-20

2011-09-20T15:00:00.000+03:00

Those who stand for nothing fall for anything Read more...

Greedy Register Allocation in LLVM 3.0 (link)

2011-09-20T08:00:00.001+03:00

LLVM has two new register allocators: Basic and Greedy. When LLVM 3.0 is released, the default optimizing register allocator will no longer be linear scan, but the new greedy register allocator.

With its global live range splitting, the greedy algorithm generates code that is 1-2% smaller, and up to 10% faster than code produced by linear scan.

What’s wrong with this code, really? (link)

2011-09-20T08:00:00.000+03:00

Here are five lines of code I found during a review not too long ago. This code had been tested and was ready for release.

Feel free to stare at this for a while and absorb the quality.

WinRT demystified (link)

2011-09-19T08:00:00.000+03:00

Microsoft is using the launch of Windows 8 as an opportunity to fix long-standing problems with Windows, bring a new user interface, and enable a safe AppStore model for Windows. To do this, they have created a third implementation of the XAML-based UI system. Unlike WPF which was exposed only to the .NET world and Silverlight which was only exposed to the browser, this new implementation is available to C++ developers, HTML/Javascript developers and also .NET developers.

Read full article...

openshift by redhat (link)

2011-09-16T13:53:00.000+03:00

OpenShift is a collection of cloud services forming a solid redefining Platform-as-a-Service for developers who build apps on open source technologies.

Go read...

defining IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS for cloud computing (link)

2011-09-16T08:00:00.000+03:00

Looking through cloud literature, it seems we've run out of three letter acronyms (TLA), so we're now using four letter acronyms (FLA?). Chief among these are the "as a service" acronyms which describe what level of stuff is handled by the provider. Wikipidia has some sort of explanation buried in the cloud computing page, but I thought I'd give the abridged version.

Read full article...

What's New in the .NET Framework 4.5 (MSDN link)

2011-09-15T12:53:00.001+03:00

This article contains information about key features and improvements in the .NET Framework 4.5 Developer Preview.

Read at MSDN...

Ultimate Vim Config (GitHub link)

2011-09-15T08:00:00.000+03:00

This is a distribution of vim plugins and tools intended to be run on top of VIM. It is a good starting point for anyone intending to use VIM for development.

here it is...

80% of People Quietly Despise Their Lives (link)

2011-09-14T08:00:00.000+03:00

This isn’t a statistic, it’s a casual observation based on talking to way more people about their careers than any normal person should. I’m convinced that most people dislike their lives, not in any robust way but with the kind of casual contempt that can be easily ignored by a society that prizes movement and action above just about everything else.

Full article is here...

Cancer and Aging (link)

2011-09-13T17:24:00.001+03:00

The main balance is between aging and cancer. Aging protects us from cancer, while staying "young" at older ages such as immortality predisposes you to cancer.

Read more here...

2011-09-13T08:00:00.000+03:00

Only a part – howbeit a very important part – of our behavior is practical… The remainder serve simply to express ideas that the organism yearns to express, i.e. to act upon without practical purpose, without any view to satisfying other needs than the need of completing in overt action the brain’s symbolic process.

- Susanne K. Langer

PostgreSQL 9.1 released

2011-09-13T06:00:00.000+03:00

"PostgreSQL 9.1 provides some of the most advanced enterprise capabilities of any open source database, and is backed by a vibrant and innovative community with proven customer success. PostgreSQL is well positioned for building and running applications in the cloud," said Charles Fan, Sr. VP R&D, VMware.

Nancy - .NET Micro Web Frameworks (link)

2011-09-12T08:00:00.000+03:00

Definition of Micro Web Frameworks:

Lean - provides only the bare essentials for serving web applications on the web
Simple setup - getting web pages up and running should not require a lot of infrastructure code
Extensible API - enhanced features should be provided by other libraries that extend the framework
"Close to the metal"

Link to video, presentation and code by nicholascloud.com

Common mistakes and anti-patterns NHibernate user programmers make (link)

2011-09-10T08:00:00.000+03:00

What are the most common mistakes and anti-patterns NHibernate user programmers make? Please explain why those are bad practices or give link to resource for further reading. Read answers here...

Java 8 lambda syntax decided - same as C# and Scala (link)

2011-09-09T09:19:00.000+03:00

After considering a number of alternatives, we decided to essentially adopt the C# syntax. We may still deliberate further on the fine points (e.g., thin arrow vs fat arrow, special nilary form, etc), and have not yet come to a decision on method reference syntax. Read full article...

Deconstructing an ELF File (link)

2011-09-09T08:00:00.000+03:00

A friend recently asked me to find the password for a little hard-to-hack program he had written and I agreed to it. The short journey of a few hours that led me to its password were extremely interesting and this article describes the process as well as some of the new techniques learnt along the way. Read article here...

The Ten Minute Build (link)

2011-09-08T08:00:00.000+03:00

Given a development environment any developer should be able to get hold of the source code, click a button or type a simple command and run a build. The build should compile and perform its unit tests within about ten minutes. Read full article...

How You Should Go About Learning NoSQL (link)

2011-09-07T09:01:00.000+03:00

Three simple rules to learning NoSQL:

use MongoDB
take 20 minute to learn Redis
watch this video to understand Dynamo

Read full article here...

Shocking photo created a hero, but not to his family (link)

2011-09-03T09:00:00.002+03:00

The mob was already waiting for James Zwerg by the time the Greyhound bus eased into the station in Montgomery, Alabama.

Looking out the window, Zwerg could see men gripping baseball bats, chains and clubs. They had sealed off the streets leading to the bus station and chased away news photographers. They didn't want anyone to witness what they were about to do.

Zwerg accepted his worst fear: He was going to die today.

Read full story...

What would it be like walking around on a cube-shaped planet? (link)

2011-09-02T09:00:00.001+03:00

If the earth was a perfect cube, what would the gravitational effect be at the edges? Could you casually step over the 90-degree bend onto an adjacent face?

Read full article...

10 Reasons Why I’m Done With Windows (link)

2011-09-01T09:00:00.001+03:00

The wife’s computer crashed last week. A big meaty crash, which is unusual for Windows XP, despite what the haters say. Apart from the execrable Windows Vista product, modern versions of the operating system have been extremely stable. Seriously.

But in this case the crash was one of those which results in an endless boot-up loop, lots of blue screen, very little computing. Windows XP wouldn’t reinstall for some reason, so now I had a choice - either plonk down some cash for Windows 7, which although a nice solid system is rather expensive, or take another look at Linux to see if that would work.

Read full article...

LHC results put supersymmetry theory 'on the spot' (link)

2011-08-31T09:00:00.000+03:00

Results from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have all but killed the simplest version of an enticing theory of sub-atomic physics.

Researchers failed to find evidence of so-called "supersymmetric" particles, which many physicists had hoped would plug holes in the current theory.

Read full article...

Experiments Show Gravity Is Not an Emergent Phenomenon (link)

2011-08-30T09:00:00.000+03:00

One of the most exciting ideas in modern physics is that gravity is not a traditional force, like electromagnetic or nuclear forces. Instead, it is an emergent phenomenon that merely looks like a traditional force.

Read full article here...

Regular expressions in lexing and parsing (link)

2011-08-29T09:00:00.001+03:00

I should say something about regular expressions in lexing and
parsing. Regular expressions are hard to write, hard to write well,
and can be expensive relative to other technologies. (Even when they
are implemented correctly in N*M time, they have significant
overheads, especially if they must capture the output.)

Read full article...

Commentary on the Sixth Edition UNIX Operating System (link)

2011-08-22T09:00:00.000+03:00

This directory contains a copy of John Lion's “A commentary on the Sixth Edition UNIX Operating System”. This form of the document was published on the USENET alt.folklore.computers newsgroup in May 1994.

Link to page...

The Kernel Report: 20th Anniversary Edition (link)

2011-08-21T09:00:00.000+03:00

The Kernel Report: 20th Anniversary Edition (Video)

What is intelligence, anyway? By Isaac Asimov (link)

2011-08-20T09:00:00.001+03:00

When I was in the army, I received the kind of aptitude test that all soldiers took and, against a normal of 100, scored 160. No one at the base had ever seen a figure like that, and for two hours they made a big fuss over me.

Read full story here...

A bit of Go language: type switch

2011-08-19T15:55:00.000+03:00

Not a long time ago I discovered very useful Go language construct “type switch”.

switch t := someValue.(type) {
default:
    fmt.Printf("unexpected type %T", t)
case bool:
    fmt.Printf("boolean %t\n", t)
case int:
    fmt.Printf("integer %d\n", t)
case *bool:
    fmt.Printf("pointer to boolean %t\n", *t)
case *int:
    fmt.Printf("pointer to integer %d\n", *t)
}

Description in Effective Go

A switch can also be used to discover the dynamic type of an interface variable. Such a type switch uses the syntax of a type assertion with the keyword type inside the parentheses. If the switch declares a variable in the expression, the variable will have the corresponding type in each clause.

My use case

I have started writing bindings of libcurl for go language (https://github.com/dkucinskas/gocurl).
In libcurl we have C function: curl_easy_setopt(CURL *curl, CURLoption option, ...);

I'm using cgo utility for binding generation and this utility doesn’t support varargs yet. So I wrote wrapper function in C for each type of arguments. And then I needed way to know then to invoke each specific type of wrapper function. Here we have prefect case for type switch. Here follows the code:

func (e *Easy)SetOption(option Option, param interface{}) {
    switch v := param.(type) { 
    default:
        fmt.Printf("unexpected type %T", v)
    case uint64:
        e.code = Code(C.curl_wrapper_easy_setopt_long(e.curl, C.CURLoption(option), C.long(v)))
    case string:
        e.code = Code(C.curl_wrapper_easy_setopt_str(e.curl, C.CURLoption(option), C.CString(v)))
    } 
}

"Avoid Premature Optimization" Does Not Mean "Write Dumb Code" (link)

2011-08-18T16:49:00.000+03:00

First there's a flurry of blog entries citing a snippet of a Knuth quote: "premature optimization is the root of all evil." Then there's the backlash about how performance needs to be considered up front, that optimization isn't something that can be patched in at the end. Around and around it goes.

Read full article here...

How far do I have to ride my bike to pay back its carbon footprint? (link)

2011-08-15T15:00:00.001+03:00

I'm thinking about switching my daily commute from four wheels to two. But I'm concerned about all the energy it takes to manufacture and ship a new bicycle. How many miles would I need to substitute a bike for my car before I've gone "carbon neutral"?

Read full article...

Understanding Linux CPU Load - when should you be worried? (link)

2011-08-15T09:00:00.000+03:00

Most people have an inkling of what the load averages mean: the three numbers represent averages over progressively longer periods of time (one, five, and fifteen minute averages), and that lower numbers are better. Higher numbers represent a problem or an overloaded machine. But, what's the the threshold? What constitutes "good" and "bad" load average values? When should you be concerned over a load average value, and when should you scramble to fix it ASAP?

Read full article...

Whatever happened to programming PART 2? (link)

2011-08-14T14:36:00.000+03:00

We talk about ‘flow’ quite a lot in software and I just have to wonder what’s happening to us all in that respect. Just like a conversation becomes stilted if the speakers keep having to refer to their phrasebooks and dictionaries, I wonder how much longer it will be possible to retain any sort of flowful state when writing software. Might the idea of mastery disappear forever under a constant torrent of new tools and technologies?

Read full article here...

How Virtuous Is Your Code? (link)

2011-08-14T14:19:00.000+03:00

Want to get in an argument with a developer? Tell them their code isn’t very good. The hackles rise, adrenaline kicks in, and then you get that “how dare you” look. But even though we may defend the quality of our code today in passionate arguments and reasoned apologetics, three years in the future—or even three weeks later—we may look back on it with embarrassment.

Read all article here...

We have an international standard: C++0x is unanimously approved (link)

2011-08-13T22:41:00.000+03:00

The final ISO ballot on C++0x closed on Wednesday, and we just received the results: Unanimous approval.

Read here...

Mono: A cure for Microsoft monotheism (link)

2011-08-12T19:02:00.001+03:00

When Attachmate bought Novell, it seemed for a while as if the open-source version of .NET would be a casualty.

Laying off the Mono team turned out to be a blessing in disguise, according to Miguel de Icaza, who now runs Xamarin and develops the Mono project, with a perpetual licence from Novell to take care of IP worries.

Read full article...

.Net DI container speed test (link)

2011-08-12T09:00:00.001+03:00

You probably don't care why I've done this, but if you don't even care about most of the details of this test, let me lay it on you short and sweet: Autofac, Castle.Windsor, and StructureMap put out some excellent, consistent numbers; Spring.Net is middle of the road; Ninject is consistently the slowest of the pack by several orders of magnitude; and finally Unity showed such a weird behavior that made me question both the validity of my approach and the sanity of its developers (mostly kidding, ctavares is awesome).

Read full article...