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Binary Beat
Listen to the beat of a binary counter! Binary Beat from Niklas Roy on Vimeo. This is an experiment, where I count one byte up – from 00000000 to 11111111. Decimal spoken, this is from 0 to 255. I have … Continue reading
Posted in audio, computers, math, programming
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Inside Visual Studio 2008
Dr. Dobb’s Journal has a nice summary of the new features introduced in Microsoft’s latest developer environment. Since the release of the .NET Framework 1.0, Microsoft has committed to a made-to-measure programming environment with each new version of its managed … Continue reading
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Code’s Worst Enemy
Steve Yegge has put up an insightful post on some of the issues with dealing with a large code base. Definitely worth a read. I say my opinion is hard-won because people don’t really talk much about code base size; … Continue reading
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Book: Beautiful Code
Beautiful Code: Leading Programmers Explain How They Think edited by Andy Oram & Greg Wilson. O’Reilly, 2007. Beautiful Code is a collection of essays by master programmers, each discussing a piece of code or software architecture that they find particularly … Continue reading
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Downloads: DejaVu fonts
The DejaVu fonts are based on the Bitstream Vera fonts, and are a set of nicely designed fonts that are released and being improved upon under an open source license. Of particular interest for programmers is the monospaced font, which … Continue reading
Posted in design, downloads, programming
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Visualizing Fitts’s Law
Particletree has an informative article on Fitt’s Law, an important guideline in user-interface design. Published in 1954, Fitts’s Law is an effective method of modeling the relationship of a very specific, yet common situation in interface design. That situation involves … Continue reading
Posted in computers, design, programming
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Explaining the Excel Bug
Joel on Software examines the recent Excel 2007 bug. By now you’ve probably seen a lot of the brouhaha over a bug in the newest version of Excel, 2007. Basically, multiplying 77.1*850, which should give you 65,535, was actually displaying … Continue reading
Posted in apps, computers, programming
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Classic Computer Science Puzzles
Coding Horror has a nice summary of classic puzzles in computer science, which you may have seen in your university courses. I prefer to think of programming languages as utilitarian tools for real world problems. They let me accomplish pragmatic … Continue reading
Posted in programming, puzzles
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Code Like a Pythonista: Idiomatic Python
A great tutorial on how to code the Python way. In the tutorial I presented at PyCon 2006 (called Text & Data Processing), I was surprised at the reaction to some techniques I used that I had thought were common … Continue reading
Posted in programming, tips
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Laws of Software Development
This site has collected a large list of laws related to software development. Inspired by Phil Haack’s article 19 Eponymous Laws of Software Development, I decided to collect laws, axioms and rules pertaining to mainstream software development and put them … Continue reading
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Swarm Theory
National Geographic has published an interesting article on how swarm behaviour models can help create smart, distributed problem-solving systems. Where this intelligence comes from raises a fundamental question in nature: How do the simple actions of individuals add up to … Continue reading
Posted in programming, science/nature
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Cylons. Why debugging matters.
Amusing banner ad from Microsoft. Link (via Compiler – Wired Blogs)
Posted in funny, programming
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Punish Your Microsoft Developer
Rather than just sending back a memory dump, how would you like to be able to physically punish the developer that’s causing you so much anguish? Link (via Compiler – Wired Blogs)
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The Development of the C Language
If you are curious how the C language came to be, read this paper by Dennis Ritchie himself. The C programming language was devised in the early 1970s as a system implementation language for the nascent Unix operating system. Derived … Continue reading
Posted in history, programming
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Ridiculous Programming Request
This is quite an outrageous project posting at GetACoder.com. The budget is $1000-$3000! Good luck. Hi, So I’m posting for a rather large project. I need someone to program me a new OS (Operasting System) that looks different than Ms … Continue reading
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Decoding Office Build Numbers
It turns out that the version numbers in Microsoft Office products are more than just simple build numbers. The 4-digit build number is actually an encoded date which allows you tell when a build was born. The algorithm works like … Continue reading
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Charles Simonyi and Intentional Programming
An interesting article on how Charles Simonyi, who designed Microsoft Office and invented Hungarian notation <shudder>, hopes to make programming easier. Bill Gates calls Simonyi “one of the great programmers of all time.” Indeed, Simonyi is arguably the most successful … Continue reading
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Shelves in Subversion
Here is an informative post on how to create “shelves” using Subversion, similar to a feature available in Visual Studio Team System. Shelve your pending changes when you are not ready to or cannot check in a set of pending … Continue reading
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Bjarne Stroupstrup on The Problem with Programming
This is a fairly interesting interview with the creator of the C++ programming language. TR: How do you account for the fact that C++ is both widely criticized and resented by many programmers but at the same time very broadly … Continue reading
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