SEARCH KEYWORD -- PSEUDO RANDOM



  Successful Web Design: It’s All About The Details

While the tools are out there for almost anyone to build a website, the most successful designs all share a few characteristics. These sites tend to be organized well, have great content and have all the design details in order. Small parts of your site, from alignment and bolding to contrast and color, can make or break the design. Taking care of the details before your project is published will ensure the page has a clean overall feel. Unorganized design and lack of attention to detail ...

   Web design,Details,Success     2012-04-16 13:38:56

  Stop Making Apps

There are a bunch of iPhone apps I own though I have no clue what they do. These apps include but aren’t limited to; FLUD, Apptitude, Cartoonatic, Can’t Wait!, Punch, Pah, Prize Claw, Traveler, Concur, Jajah, Fast Customer, Pimple Popper and many more whose names I can’t even remember.Occupying my valuable homescreen real estate are also a bunch of apps whose purpose I remember only because they were built by people I know or am friends with, but that I sadly never use. And ...

   App,Apple,Android,Stop     2011-11-12 10:54:42

  Valid JavaScript variable names

Did you know var π = Math.PI; is syntactically valid JavaScript? I thought this was pretty cool, so I decided to look into which Unicode glyphs are allowed in JavaScript variable names, or identifiers as the ECMAScript specification calls them. Reserved words The ECMAScript 5.1 spec says: An Identifier is an IdentifierName that is not a ReservedWord. The spec describes four groups of reserved words: keywords, future reserved words, null literals and boolean lite...

   JavaScript,Name convention,Standard     2012-02-22 05:16:53

  All Programming is Web Programming

Michael Braude decries the popularity of web programming:The reason most people want to program for the web is that they're not smart enough to do anything else. They don't understand compilers, concurrency, 3D or class inheritance. They haven't got a clue why I'd use an interface or an abstract class. They don't understand: virtual methods, pointers, references, garbage collection, finalizers, pass-by-reference vs. pass-by-value, virtual C++ destructors, or the differences between C# struc...

   Programming,Web programming,Opposite,Views,Web app     2011-11-12 10:38:00

   Python – parallelizing CPU-bound tasks with multiprocessing

In a previous post on Python threads, I briefly mentioned that threads are unsuitable for CPU-bound tasks, and multiprocessing should be used instead. Here I want to demonstrate this with benchmark numbers, also showing that creating multiple processes in Python is just as simple as creating multiple threads. First, let’s pick a simple computation to use for the benchmarking. I don’t want it to be completely artificial, so I’ll use a dumbed-down version of factorization...

   Python,Multitasking,Multiprocessing,CPU bound     2012-01-17 11:38:22

  How I Learned to Program

Programming is, without a doubt, the most mentally rewarding thing I've ever done. Programming taught me that life should be fun, filled with creativity, and lived to the fullest. Programming taught me that anything is possible; I can do anything I want using only my mind. Programming also taught me that learning is fun. It showed me that the more you know, the more power you have. Programming showed me that a life filled with learning is a life worth living. Programming revealed to me wh...

   Programming,Tips,Write,Practice,Interest     2012-02-04 21:37:12

  Functional Programming For Object Oriented Programmers

After recently remarking about how I finally "got" functional programming I was asked by one of my millions of twitter followers... ¬_¬ to write up an explanation of a small F# program spoken in terms that fellow O-O programmers would understand. Before I become too entrenched into the functional programming way of thinking, that is, and can't explain it anymore. As a former tutor this is one of the major problems with being able to teach something once you understand it. You've ...

   Functional programming,OOP,F#,Pattern     2011-11-25 13:49:16

  How Computers Boot Up

The previous post described motherboards and the memory map in Intel computers to set the scene for the initial phases of boot. Booting is an involved, hacky, multi-stage affair – fun stuff. Here’s an outline of the process: An outline of the boot sequence Things start rolling when you press the power button on the computer (no! do tell!). Once the motherboard is powered up it initializes its own firmware – the chipset and other tidbits – and tries to ...

   Computer,Boot-up,Rationale     2012-04-11 13:43:02

  Coding tricks of game developers

If you've got any real world programming experience then no doubt at some point you've had to resort to some quick and dirty fix to get a problem solved or a feature implemented while a deadline loomed large. Game developers often experience a horrific "crunch" (also known as a "death march"), which happens in the last few months of a project leading up to the game's release date. Failing to meet the deadline can often mean the project gets cancelled or even worse, you lose your job. So w...

   Tricks,Advice,Gamedesign,Plan     2012-02-12 04:50:30

  Asynchronous UIs - the future of web user interfaces

It's an interesting time to be working on the frontend now. We have new technologies such as HTML5, CSS3, Canvas and WebGL; all of which greatly increase the possibilities for web application development. The world is our oyster!However, there's also another trend I've noticed. Web developers are still stuck in the request/response mindset. I call it the 'click and wait' approach - where every UI interaction results in a delay before another interaction can be performed. That's the process they'...

   AJAX,Asynchronous UI,AUI,User interface     2011-11-18 08:55:08