The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 14,544 posts.
My brother is a wonderful photographer , and took 14 gigabytes of photos at my recent graduation from Columbia, some of which I hope to post on PhotoFloat -- my web 2.0 photo gallery done right via static JSON & dynamic javascript .
JSON is a fantastic format, anywhere people in your organization want to reach for XML, it’s always a good thing to ask the question “Why not JSON?”. The question I’d like you to ask the next time you’re reaching for your JSON hammer, is “Why not MessagePack?”.
A little collection of cool unix terminal/console/curses tools Just a list of 20 (now 28) tools for the command line. Some are little-known, some are just too useful to miss, some are pure obscure -- I hope you find something useful that you weren't aware of yet! Use your operating system's package manager to install…
I was just watching a friend of mine work with git, and he'd always type all the git commands in full, like git status and git push. I realized that he must not be the only one to do so, so I decided to write this quick blog post and encourage everyone to create Huffman coded aliases for the most commonly used...
This was passed on to me by Ben Elliston, ex-gcc hacker and good guy. Amusing in context, but the corollary is that working on free software means you'll encounter such people. You may have to work with them. You may have to argue with them (and they may be right). Quite some time ago I was horrified by the private…
In 2011 I wrote the initial version of JSLinux, the first PC/x86 emulator in Javascript running Linux. I reused parts of another of my emulators ( QEMU ) for the x86 helpers and the devices.
You know the Fibonacci numbers: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, … Each number is the sum of the previous two. Let’s say the zeroth Fibonacci number is zero, so: $latex \begin{array}{r@{\…
The power to understand and predict the quantities of the world should not be restricted to those with a freakish knack for manipulating abstract symbols.
Starting with MySQL 5.0.3, the maximum field length for VARCHAR fields was increased from 255 characters to 65,535 characters. This is good news, as VARCHAR fields, as opposed to TEXT fields, are stored in-row for the MyISAM storage engine (InnoDB has different characteristics). TEXT and BLOB fields are not stored…
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Ah source control, if there’s a more essential tool which indiscriminately spans programming languages without favour, I’m yet to see it. It’s an essential component of how so many of us work; the lifeblood of many development teams, if you like. So why do we often get
Context free grammars (CFGs) are a valuable theoretical tool on which the modern compilation theory relies for parsing the code of programming languages. For example, the most popular tool used for parsing – YACC , generates parsers for CFGs. What most people don’t know 1 is that the vast majority of programming…
Objective-C remains an impediment for many programmers coming to the Mac or iPhone platforms — few programmers have ever experienced it before learning Cocoa, forcing two learning curves at once for new Cocoa developers. How did Apple end up with such a weird language? And for a company known to replace CPU…
A summary of Linux profiling/monitoring tools
Less talk, more action – Apple just approved two of my JavaScript games for the AppStore: Biolab Disaster and Drop . Both are free; go check them out. You can also play them in your browser here and here .
I'm fascinated by the myth of the Lisp genius, the eccentric programmer who accomplishes super-human feats writing Lisp. I'm not saying that such geniuses don't exist; they do. Here I'm using "myth" in the sense of a story with archetypical characters that fuels the imagination. I'm thinking myth in the sense of…
One day, you’re browsing through your code, and you notice two big blocks that look almost exactly the same. In fact, they’re exactly the same, except that one block refers to “Sp…
Before studying the iPhone version, it was important for me to understand how Doom engine WAS performing rendition back in 1993. After all the OpenGL port must reuse the same data from the WAD archive. Here are my notes about Doom 1993 renderer, maybe it will help someone to dive in. January 13th, 2010 : Reddit…
