Decaflon Clips

No, your code is not so great that it doesn’t need comments

Scrivs — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 23:30:50

It’s not a sensible goal for beginners and inexperienced developers. Tell them that they should write good code without any comments and they will deliver on the second part but struggle with the first. Even among experienced developers, assuming for a moment that it is possible to write perfect code that doesn’t require comments, there will be far fewer who are capable of this than there are who think that they are.

Github - (social) code hosting with Git

hthth — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 03:37:20

Github is a code host based around the Git version control system. There is a free 100mb option and then paid services up to 10GB. Wiki n' stuff included in all plans.

Gobby - Realtime multi-user editor

hthth — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 17:46:04

Gobby is a free collaborative editor supporting multiple documents in one session and a multi-user chat. It runs on Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and other Unix-like platforms.

Kynogon | Kynapse - AI middleware

hthth — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 20:36:57

Kynogon is the developer of Kynapse, an AI middleware solution that was recently brought to my attention. Although their pages do definitely not show it, their Kynapse product is apparently "...the industry leading solution for artificial intelligence in games and has been licensed by 7 of the world's top 10 publishers."

50 Ways To Improve Your Software Project

hiperia3d — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 21:47:35

50 ways for improving your software or be inspired to start programming one.

Adobe to help reveal 'invisible' Flash Web content

Tyme — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 14:47:19

Adobe Systems is helping Google and Yahoo to uncover Web content that was previously "invisible" to Web searches.

Improve Your RSS and Atom Feeds

ShyOne — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 14:31:08

A primer about site syndication.

Ruby creators warn of serious flaws

Tyme — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 22:20:11

The Ruby programming language, which has become popular as the basis for Web 2.0 sites such as Twitter, contains serious security flaws that could allow attackers to take over an organization's Web server, according to the Ruby development team.

92 percent of developers ignoring Vista?

Scrivs — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 23:13:01

Despite Microsoft's efforts, the majority of developers still aren't writing with Windows Vista in mind, a new study by Evans Data says. Only eight percent of software firms surveyed were specifically coding with Vista in mind, while additional data brought together by CNET indicates that 49 percent are still writing for Windows XP; 13 percent are programming for Linux, according to reports.

Great Article Discussing The Cost Of A Bugfix In Webkit

Mike — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 17:47:59

Every fix doesn’t call for a blog post, but this one deserves it. It all started when Jonathon Jongsma found a way to make text disappear in QtWebKit on May 27th. So he raised a bug. He and I started working on fixing it. We rapidly found that WebKitGtk was also affected, but it was unreproducible on the Mac port.

He ends up talking to the engineer at Apple who committed the code that ended up causing the bug and they fix it together. Pretty interesting read.

Two Cardinal Sins of REST API Design

Scrivs — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 22:42:22

After I completed work on the synchronization with NewsGator Online, it was quite clear to me that the developer(s) who designed the NewsGator REST API didn't really understand the principles behind building RESTful services. For the most part, it looks like a big chunk of the work done to create a REST API was to strip the SOAP envelopes from their existing SOAP services and then switch to URL parameters instead of using SOAP messages for requests. This isn't REST, it is POX/HTTP (Plain Old XML over HTTP). Although this approach gets you out of the interoperability and complexity tax which you get from using XSD/SOAP/WS-*, it doesn't give you all of the benefits of conforming to the Web's natural architecture.

How I Built a Working Online Poker Bot, Part 3

Scrivs — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 09:51:37

I'm a big fan of pet projects. You know the ones I mean: the projects we love to start and hate to finish. The two-week remodeling gig that takes two years. The '69 Mustang sitting on cinderblocks in the back yard while seasons rotate. The unfinished novel lurking on the nether regions of your hard drive. And for programmers and poker players around the world, a million unfinished tools and libraries ranging from the ingenious to the depressingly obscure.

Garkov: Garfield + Markov chains

hthth — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 15:02:30

Garfield is a comic strip by Jim Davis, who seems like a pretty good guy.

A Markov chain is a probabilistic model well suited to semi-coherent text synthesis.

Garkov is an application of the Markov model to transcripts of old Garfield strips, plus some extra code to make it all look like a genuine comic strip. Feel free to screenshot and share Garkov output.

jQuery UI v1.5 Released, Focus on Consistent API and Effects

Scrivs — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 07:39:39

When we first started with the UI project, we set out to build a generic, basic, and simple way of adding and extending core interaction to DOM elements. However, we soon found that our approach wasn’t working for UI. Using the “simple” approach, we were only able to serve simple interaction modules, but not full featured UI widgets. The second problem was that some plugins came from external sources making the UI suite seem disjointed and inconsistent.

About Django and the importance of releases

Scrivs — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 22:12:30

Getting out releases will foster users to tell you about their experiences and if you are heading in the right direction with development with regards to what the users actually need.

The Fastest Way To Find UTF-8 String Length

Mike — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 17:22:12

For the past few days there have been articles about this and every person that answers the call has come up with a faster version. This is the fastest yet. Only read if you know C or are extremely geeky.

So, you want to deploy a J2ME app in the US?

Scrivs — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 22:40:23

You have two ways of deploying a mobile service in the US, and for that matter anywhere in the world. One is to go hand in hand with the mobile operators and launch your application on their deck. You can gain marketing cooperation that way, and the fact that you're on their portal, guarantees a fair share of success.

Where did all the PHP programmers go?

Scrivs — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 22:39:38

What I cannot understand is why a person who have (according to him) developed more than two dozens of web projects with PHP and MySQL cannot write the simplest piece of code with pen and pencil. What I cannot undertand is how a “senior web developer” with years of PHP experience and team leading becomes useless when his Dreamweaver is taken away. What I cannot understand is why people with more than one Bachelor Degree in Computer Science recommend using bubble sort. What I cannot understand is why programmers start teaching the potential employer about the interviewing process instead of answering technical questions. And what I don’t understand is why technical people with years of team work, get pissed off or burst into tears when you ask them a technical question, and a simple one at that, during the job interview.

The PHP Benchmark

JoeLencioni — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 22:12:23

a way to open people's eyes to the fact that not every PHP code snippet will run at the same speed

OO C is passable

Scrivs — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 09:36:18

Face it: C++ just isn’t good enough. “If you really care about C++ parsing complexity, check out the FQA yada yada”. I wrote “a whole site” about it, you know. Bottom line: if you generate native code, you want to define your object model such that the generated code can be C code. Assembly is pointlessly low-level and non-portable, and C++ sucks. Believe me, or die waiting for your code to compile.

Announcing AJAX Libraries API: Speed up your Ajax apps with Google’s infrastructure

Scrivs — Wed, 28 May 2008 05:08:04

This is why we have released the AJAX Libraries API. We sat down with a few of the popular open source frameworks and they were all excited about the idea, so we got to work with them, and now you have access to their great work from our servers.

Scaling a Microblogging Service - Part III

Scrivs — Wed, 28 May 2008 04:37:52

Scalability plays a central role when designing the ways in which data can be requested from a service, be it via an API call or HTML page request. Both types fetch raw data, process it, and then format it into a presentation format such as HTML, XML, JSON, etc. In the case of a server-rendered HTML page, all the different requests are made internally, hidden from the user, and a single page is returned. If the page uses AJAX scripts, the browser makes multiple API calls to fetch individual data sets, but the server still has to fetch the raw data, process it, and format it. It is the size of the batch that makes the difference.

Scaling a Microblogging Service - Part II

Scrivs — Wed, 28 May 2008 04:36:53

It is somewhat surprising that in a service space that is all about live updates from a wide range of devices – many of which are mobile – the scaling challenge both locally and distributed is in data lookup and not distribution. The unique nature of microblogging has the characteristics of both email and instant messaging where immediacy is combined with persistency and loosely coupled groups.

Scaling a Microblogging Service - Part I

Scrivs — Wed, 28 May 2008 04:35:47

The retrieval system is where things are not as simple. Unlike webmail services where refreshing a user’s inbox only queries a very simple data set (is there anything new in MY inbox?), refreshing a user’s home page on Twitter queries a much more complex data set (are there any new updates in ALL my friends’ pages?) and the nature of the service means that the ratio of reads to writes is significantly different from most other web services.

21 Ruby Tricks You Should Be Using In Your Own Code

Tyme — Tue, 27 May 2008 20:34:52

In this post I present 21 different Ruby tricks, from those that most experienced developers already use every day to those that are more obscure.

New Facebook Chat Feature Scales to 70 Million Users Using Erlang

Scrivs — Fri, 23 May 2008 00:00:42

Facebook has the client open a persistent connection to the IM server and uses long polling to send requests and continually get data from the server. Long polling is a mixture of client pull and server push. It works by having the client make a request to the server. The client connection blocks until the server has data to return. When it does data is returned, the client processes it, and then is in position to make another request of the server and get any more data that has queued up in the mean time. Obviously there are all sorts of latency, overhead, and resource issues with this approach.

PHP Sucks, But It Doesn't Matter

Scrivs — Wed, 21 May 2008 21:06:42

I'm no language elitist, but language design is hard. There's a reason that some of the most famous computer scientists in the world are also language designers. And it's a crying shame none of them ever had the opportunity to work on PHP. From what I've seen of it, PHP isn't so much a language as a random collection of arbitrary stuff, a virtual explosion at the keyword and function factory. Bear in mind this is coming from a guy who was weaned on BASIC, a language that gets about as much respect as Rodney Dangerfield. So I am not unfamiliar with the genre.

Is HTML a Humane Markup Language?

Scrivs — Thu, 15 May 2008 09:24:57

I have one iron-clad design guide: this is a site for programmers, so they should be comfortable with basic markup. None of that nancy-boy GUI toolbar handholding nonsense for us, thankyouverymuch. If you can sling code, a little bit of presentation markup is child's play.

Processing visualization library implemented in JavaScript

Scrivs — Fri, 09 May 2008 23:04:11

John Resig has released his JavaScript port of the Processing visualization library today. This is an excellent addition to the world of JavaScript graphics programming, I can't wait to make some visuals with it.

Programmers Don't Read Books, But You Should

Scrivs — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 19:14:28

If programmers don't learn from books today, how do they learn to program? They do it the old-fashioned way: by rolling up their sleeves and writing code -- while harnessing the collective wisdom of the internet in a second window. The internet has rendered programming books obsolete. It's faster, more efficient, and just plain smarter to get your programming information online.

5 Simple Ways To Keep Up With The Rails Community

Tyme — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 02:10:00

There’s a lot going on in the world of Rails these days. This is great for developers, but sometimes it can be difficult to keep up with all latest happenings in the community. In addition to changes in Ruby 1.9 and Edge Rails, there’s a constant stream of news with regards to well-known Rails projects, emerging plugins and development/coding strategies.

Behold WordPress, Destroyer of CPUs

Tyme — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 07:00:43

I've been thoroughly impressed with the community around WordPress, and the software itself is remarkably polished. That's not to say that I haven't run into a few egregious bugs in the 2.5 release, but on the whole, the experience has been good bordering on pleasant.

Or at least it was, until I noticed how much CPU time the PHP FastCGI process was using for modest little old blog.stackoverflow.com.

Google BigTable Database Advocates Denormalization Of Data

Mike — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 06:10:37

Normalization and joins are so 2007.

If A Programming Language Was A Boat

shadowsun7 — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 16:49:10

What would it be?

Things That Are Important: Where Clauses

Scrivs — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 02:20:45

SQL is good for a lot of things, but I’ve always marveled at how easy it is to destroy an entire table simply by forgetting a where clause. And thus, in a few short minutes, every one of our 30 million users had a subtle change applied to their accounts. Did I mention that the single value we displayed on the website for this setting came from the MaxRecv column? Whoops…