April 9, 2010
How to find Crappy Programmers →

“There’s nothing developers love more than playing buzzword bingo in job posts. 

JMS, XML, J2ME, AJAX, SSRS, SSIS, JSB, WCS, JSTL, HTML, DHTML, XHTML, MOSS, SOAP, BO, WPF. 

You get bonus points if the technology is over ten years old.  Don’t worry if it seems like you’re filling positions with checklists, developers like having years of their work marginalized into a neat little box.”

April 8, 2010
Comma first codestyle →

“A better coding convention for lists and object literals in JavaScript”

March 18, 2010
March 12, 2010

Six stages of debugging

  1. Can’t happen
  2. Doesn’t repro
  3. Shouldn’t happen
  4. Why is that happening
  5. I see!
  6. How did that ever work?

March 12, 2010
IBM: Advanced applications of rsync →

“Let’s look at some common uses of rsync as review, then look at more advanced applications…”

March 11, 2010

The numbers every engineer should know

Jeff Dean, a engineer at Google, gave a talk a while ago listing the numbers every engineer should know (Blog: Handwaving).

  • L1 cache reference 0.5 ns
  • Branch mispredict 5 ns
  • L2 cache reference 7 ns
  • Mutex lock/unlock 100 ns
  • Main memory reference 100 ns
  • Compress 1K bytes with Zippy 10,000 ns
  • Send 2K bytes over 1 Gbps network 20,000 ns
  • Read 1 MB sequentially from memory 250,000 ns
  • Round trip within same datacenter 500,000 ns
  • Disk seek 10,000,000 ns
  • Read 1 MB sequentially from network 10,000,000 ns
  • Read 1 MB sequentially from disk 30,000,000 ns
  • Send packet CA->Netherlands->CA 150,000,000 ns
March 11, 2010
Algorithm X in 30 lines! →

“If you were ever interested in writing a Sudoku solver, then you probably heard about the exact cover problem. It asks whether, for a given set X and a collection Y of subsets of X, there exists a subcollection Y* of Y such that Y* forms a partition of X.”

February 24, 2010
wtfjs.com →

“JavaScript is a language we love despite it giving us so much to hate. This is a collection of those very special irregularities, inconstancies and just plain painfully unintuitive moments for the language of the web.”

February 15, 2010

“The Worlds Fastest Lego Mindstorms RCX Speedcubing Robot. Built entirely from lego elements now scanning and solving any 3x3x3 Rubik’s cube combination in under 12 seconds.”

Ok die Lösung des Cubes ist wohl kaum das Problem, gibt es genug Algorithmen für, die Bastelarbeit ist jedoch eine Leistung.

February 14, 2010
Bash Guide for Beginners →
February 11, 2010
February 11, 2010
"No, you can’t do that with H.264" →

“A lot of commercial software comes with H.264 encoders and decoders, and some computers arrive with this software preinstalled. This leads a lot of people to believe that they can legally view and create H.264 videos for whatever purpose they like. Unfortunately for them, it ain’t so.”