rix0r

It could be a trace of the Human Stack as well (i.e. steps to reproduce).

They're both a list of steps taken to get to a point in the system.

Better get started on implementing Asumov's laws then.

I wonder why he makes a distinction between the MIME types application/xml and text/xml.

An XML document of the former type is parsed for the <?xml encoding="..." ?> tag, but the latter isn't?

I always thought that application/xml and text/xml could be used interchangeably. Is my assumption wrong or is his process flawed?

Just to be pedantic:

What exactly is the value that should be substituted for the variable $AAPL? :P

Another alarm clock bug in a very short time. When such a (seemingly?) simple feature turns out to be buggy, it does start to make you wonder about the quality of the rest of the OS.

Apple must feel the same way. I know they take pride in sweating the details and having stuff "just work", so that makes me wonder if some heads are gonna roll over this...

That could very well be the case, but if that were really the cause you'd expect to see this pattern every year. However, it apparently didn't happen for at least two years in a row[1]. Also, I would have expected Skype engineers to have wised up to the situation by now if it were really a seasonal thing.

[1] Since the last outage was 3 years ago. I can't find a source for that right now -- would be interesting to see if the outage was also around Christmas time.

As far as I know, all networks over a shared medium are vulnerable to ARP poisoning.

So in the old days, that was networks using hubs (instead of switches), these days it's wireless networks.

I'm still pretty happy with Monaco, and on Windows I usually install Proggy when I install Vim.

More specifically, I think the N stands for "Natural number".

A key-value store written in Erlang, stores JSON and executes MapReduce queries, and is accessible as a web service.

Why no mention of CouchDB and how Riak differs?

Mine, too, although I usually do my escaping/encoding in the template itself, so it becomes:

  <?= h($name) ?>

Which isn't that terrible.

The PHP developers don't make this easy though, as "short tags" are officially recommended to be disabled, so to write portable PHP you'd have to do

  <?php= h($name) ?>

Every time, which adds visual noise that gets worse the more tags you write.

> This is how DVDs work: a high res green image and two low-res images, one for red, one for blue.

Not true. MPEG-2 uses the YCbCr colorspace, consisting of a high resolution Luminance signal (brightness) and a low resolution Chrominance signal (color). So in fact, all color information is subsampled, green is not treated specially.

It's a great idea but honestly, I can't see this working in practice: the suggested time frame is simply too small. For all but the most trivial projects, you'd need at least the first night/day to get familiar with the code base before you can start doing anything useful.

Well the variable expansion is quoted, so afaik it could only be interpreted as a single argument to cat.

The first thing that stuck out to me like a sore thumb was the string-concatenation-in-a-loop. Though the author was aware of its consequences he only addressed it late in the article, optimizing relatively trivial stuff like variable lookups first. And then he did so in a rather strange way, instead of adding string fragments to a list and then join()ing them.

Not sure how fast that loop would be in Python compared to the implied loop&join but I sure would have liked to see them compared.

I just had to Google that after reading this comment and WOW, this concept blows my mind.

Of course, my first thought was "How in the hell does that even work" but it turns out there are identifying symbols in the paper so I guess they just have to store a mapping of PAPER POSITION -> TIME INDEX to make it work.

Still a brilliant idea and execution.

Yup, this happened to me too this morning.

I even checked specifically for this last night: I was figuring that Apple would internally store the time in UTC and that my alarm time would have changed to an hour later than the usual time. Wouldn't have been ideal but I could have understood that. But no, when I checked my alarm the (display) time was still 8:00 AM.

This morning, I awoke for other reasons a little past 8 and my alarm hadn't gone off. Then, at 9, it did.

For some reason, there is some mismatch between the display time and the actual time, although I couldn't imagine what it would be. I imagine there is some caching of information involved somewhere...

Well, a quadratic lower bound is better than an exponential lower bound, in the sense that the problem could still turn out to not be in EXPTIME but in PTIME.

It is worse in the sense that it tells us less about the actual complexity class the problem is in, so I guess it depends on what you interpret "better" to mean in this context.

I simply love typing on the keyboard of my MBP. Does anyone know what class of keyboard that is?

I would say building for all platforms to verify you didn't break anything is the perfect job for a continuous build and integration server.

Simply don't accept the changes if the code doesn't build cleanly and passes the test suite on all platforms.

Why bother the programmer to remember to do this?

Which is actually pretty useful and readable, imho (if formatted correctly):

  return a ? b :
         c ? d :
         e ? f :
         g;

Side note: this does not work in PHP, as the operator is left-associative instead of right-associative there. The above in PHP would be evaluated as:

  return ((a ? b : c) ? d : e) ? f : g;

Which is almost never what you want. I can't even format this properly to convey intent.

I'm guessing that you've never had to use svn+ssh:// with a group of developers. The file permissions hell you get into using that with multiple users is very frustrating.

I much prefer the http:// access method, and have never had a locking problem.

I'm thoroughly annoyed by Safari refreshing tabs randomly, too. But I always assume its because of memory restrictions, and that this content has been evicted from memory to make room for web pages that I open in new tabs.

A nice compromise would be:

transformations in CSS (display concerns), animations in JS (behavioral concerns)

WebKit went ahead and did both...

I agree. To me it sounds rather aggressive if people keep repeating my name while they already have my attention.

You can also negotiate the version number in the HTTP header:

  X-protocol-version: 3

That way you don't need to pollute the address space.

This is what keeps me off switching to Dvorak: I have all these keyboard shortcuts wired into my muscle memory that I would have to either relearn or remap when switching to Dvorak that it's just too much of a bother...

As I'm in Google's hiring process right now, it was interesting to read this story.

It does make me a little nervous though, as I'd really like to work there but it seems the chance of rejection is really high and I didn't get the impression that I did exceptionally well on the interviews.

Another stupidly trivial reason:

I can type 'wget' and then do command-V entirely with my left hand, keeping my right hand on the mouse. Having to type 'curl' would require me to move my hand back and forth, slowing me down.