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  If Multitasking Is Impossible, Why Are Some People So Good at It?

"Multitasking means screwing up several things at once," somebody once said, wrongly. In fact, we don't do many things at once, ever. We do many things in quick succession. And some of us are very good at it.Nagy-Bagoly Arpad/ShutterstockEverybody multitasks. We have conversations while driving. We answer email while browsing the Web. It's hard to imagine living any other way. What would be the alternative, removing the seats from your car to ensure you only drive alone? Block every website not ...

   Multitasking,Human,Program,Task switch,Myth     2011-11-18 09:03:22

  Code Refurbishment

Within our industry we use a huge range of terminology.  Unfortunately we don’t all agree on what individual terms actually mean.  I so often hear people misuse the term “Refactoring” which has come to make the business in many organisations recoil in fear.  The reason for this fear I’ve observed is because of what people often mean when misusing this term.I feel we are holding back our industry by not being disciplined in our use of terminology.  If...

   Code Refurbishment,Code design,terminolo     2011-09-05 08:17:14

  A list of English abbreviations

When we read emails or short message on our phone, we will often see some words such as FYI or LOL etc. Do you know their meanings, right? But some of the abbreviations we may not know or cannot remember clearly. Here is a list of English abbreviations which may be useful to you in the future when you want to check them.      Numbers:    &n"sp;   2 = to/too 　　2B or not 2B = To be or not to be 　　4 = for 　　...

   Abbreviation,English,Summary     2012-07-05 23:41:06

  Work is not challenging is just an excuse in interview?

Usually when an interviewer asks the interviewee why he/she wants to change his/her job, one answer may be "My current job is not challenging, I want a more challenging job.". The interviewer may tend to think that there are always challenges everywhere and why the interviewee indulges himself/herself without putting much effort on his/her work.   Here I want to say something to our interviewers. Work challenging is not equal to personal indulgence. The work is challenging which is an...

   Job,Interview,Challenge,Excuse     2012-04-18 07:03:12

  How One Missing `var` Ruined our Launch

Well, that was a veritable shitstorm (sorry for the language).  Long story short, MelonCard was featured today on TechCrunch (along with other500Startups companies, also on VentureBeat, Forbes, …) and everything broke all at once.  Every. little. thing.  We had rolled out a huge change to MelonCard over the last few days to make our site a seamless “everything just updates” look-good / feel-good product using NodeJS lo...

   JavaScript,NodeJs,jQuery,Variable,Scope,Global     2011-11-02 13:01:22

  Creating a PHP 5 Extension with Visual C++ 2005

This article describes the steps to create a custom PHP extension DLL for the Windows platform. The Zend API documentation that comes with PHP 5 on Windows (see php_manual_en.chm) does a good job explaining how to write extension methods, parse method parameters, and return values. But there is not currently a good step-by-step tutorial on how to get your first extension project up and running on Windows. The aim of this article is to fill that gap. Prerequisites Visual Studio 2005 You can...

   PHP,Extension,Writing,Windows,Step by st     2011-07-23 01:56:53

  Why Good Programmers Are Lazy and Dumb

I realized that, paradoxically enough, good programmers need to be both lazy and dumb. Lazy, because only lazy programmers will want to write the kind of tools that might replace them in the end. Lazy, because only a lazy programmer will avoid writing monotonous, repetitive code – thus avoiding redundancy, the enemy of software maintenance and flexible refactoring. Mostly, the tools and processes that come out of this endeavor fired by laziness will speed up the production. This ma...

   Good programmer,Lazy,Reason,Dumb     2012-04-18 07:15:23

  Python internals: how callables work

[The Python version described in this article is 3.x, more specifically - the 3.3 alpha release of CPython.] The concept of a callable is fundamental in Python. When thinking about what can be "called", the immediately obvious answer is functions. Whether it’s user defined functions (written by you), or builtin functions (most probably implemented in C inside the CPython interpreter), functions were meant to be called, right? Well, there are also methods, but they’re not very ...

   Python,Callable work,Rationale     2012-03-24 05:20:27

  Lessons from the Trenches

I believe that making a game is part art and part science, so it's no wonder that managing a game project is also part art and part science. Clearly if it was all science then the industry would get a collective F for not having made any significant progress over the last decade - all one has to do is just glance at the published postmortems to see that the same patterns are repeated over and over.A game has to be fun, engaging, grab users in the first two minutes and also keep their a...

   Game,Trenches,Tips,Game design,pattern     2011-10-10 05:08:50

  Rebirth of Microsoft?

Only from the point of view of design and products, Microsoft may seem like an ongoing decline of the old giant: IE browser market share continues to drop, PC market continues to shrink where Windows depends on and tablet PC market gets rapid expansion, Windows Mobile, Windows phone perform not so well, even CEO Steve Ballmer is often ridiculed and accused. All these seem to indicate that Microsoft's golden era is over. But on the other hand, while its net profit for the past two years has ...

   Microsoft,Rebirth,change     2012-10-05 20:09:15

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