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All programs need some form of logging built in to them, so we can observe what it is doing. This is especially important when things go wrong. One of the differences between a great programmer and a bad programmer is that a great programmer adds logging and tools that make it easy to debug the program when things fail. When the program works as expected, there is often no difference in the quality of the logging. However, as soon as the program fails, or you get the wrong result, you can almost immediately tell the good programmers from the bad. How do you write code to simplify debugging?
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JavaScript is a bubble. Just like the housing bubble. Just like the .COM bubble. And just like any bubble, the JavaScript bubble is bound to pop. Sure, JavaScript is everywhere. It appears to be growing at a rapid pace. But I’m willing to bet that we are getting close to a complete reversal that will throw JavaScript down from its throne, shattering its JQuery scepter with it. JavaScript is bad, so let's rewrite everything in something else. Then we'll go after PHP.
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Quote: Yet, at the same time so many developers get up in the morning, fire up their IDE—or excuse me, lightweight text editor which has 50 plugins installed to give the capabilities of an IDE, but is not an IDE—and write JavaScript code. Why do they do it, unless they think JavaScript really is awesome?
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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When you think of mobile games, you probably think of titles like Angry Birds, Temple Run or Fruit Ninja — not the sort of micromanaging strategy games for which Sid Meier is best known. And yet the creator of the hit Civilization franchise and his company, Firaxis Games (owned by Take-Two Interactive), are moving more troops into mobile after testing the waters with ported games like Pirates! and Civilization Revolution. Rather than just producing, Meier himself was one of three programmers on a new mobile-first Firaxis game, Ace Patrol. Mobile is best suited for a game that’s played at the player’s pace.
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We suggest a simple method for improving the security of hashed passwords: the maintenance of additional honeywords (false passwords) associated with each user's account. An adversary who steals a file of hashed passwords and inverts the hash function cannot tell if he has found the password or a honeyword. The attempted use of a honeyword for login sets off an alarm. An auxiliary server (the honeychecker) can distinguish the user password from honeywords for the login routine, and will set off an alarm if a honeyword is submitted. Passwords are a notoriously weak authentication method. Fake passwords are better?
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Once upon a time, teachers lacked the tools to excite and engage pupils in engineering. And the technological know-how required to put together a juddering robot limited the audience to high-school and university students. That all changed in 1998 when Lego launched its first wave of programmable bots. By the second wave, in 2006, the programming language had become visual and kids could make bots do pretty much anything simply by stringing directives together on a computer. “Today a second grader can make her own wall-avoiding triceratops in 20 minutes,” says Chris Rogers, a professor of mechanical engineering at Tufts University. Go find a Mindstorms education catalog and prepare to have your mind blown.
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Back in the year 1999 Microsoft released it's then brand new and up-to-date browser Internet Explorer 5. How much did happen in the last 14 years regarding web technologies and development? Would it still be possible to use this browser? Let's find out! The web of 2013 through the eyes of a 14 year old browser.
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No surprise there, that Google is the only one that looks correct.
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Bill Gates took a shot at the iPad while explaining Microsoft's rationale for the Surface this morning on CNBC. He was asked about the declining PC market. He said that tablets are growing in popularity, and it's "going to be harder and harder to distinguish products" that are PCs versus tablets.... He then said of people using iPad-like devices, "A lot of those users are frustrated, they can't type, they can't create documents, they don't have Office there." I'm still waiting for that TPS reports app.
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I hate it when Bill Gates starts to behave like Steve Ballmer.
Nihil obstat
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Just stumbled across this site while answering a question in Q&A:
CWE™ International in scope and free for public use, CWE provides a unified, measurable set of software weaknesses that is enabling more effective discussion, description, selection, and use of software security tools and services that can find these weaknesses in source code and operational systems as well as better understanding and management of software weaknesses related to architecture and design.
Interesting site at first view, I think I'll have to take a closer look at this: Common Weakness Enumeration[^]
Regards,
— Manfred
"I had the right to remain silent, but I didn't have the ability!"
Ron White, Comedian
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I don't quite get it Peter Chen ( ), all those links are directly reachable from the home page of that site, which I linked to in my post.
I thought that would be the best place to start.
Cheers!
"I had the right to remain silent, but I didn't have the ability!"
Ron White, Comedian
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The home page contains a lot of somewhat generic-ish, abstract-ish strategizing meeting talk which is often repelling developers.
So I tried to suggest an improvement to your submission by posting links that I think more developers can relate to.
(Objectively, yes, they are on the front page, wiht dozens of others leading to what could be considered "more gibberish".)
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peterchen wrote: So I tried to suggest an improvement to your submission by posting links that I think more developers can relate to.
OK, that's a good point you've made there!
peterchen wrote: wiht dozens of others leading to what could be considered "more gibberish"
Cheers!
"I had the right to remain silent, but I didn't have the ability!"
Ron White, Comedian
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Cool!
Gryphons Are Awesome! Gryphons Are Awesome!
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If you are wondering about the binary format, that is what this post is all about. We actually start from the end. We have the last 48 bytes of the file are dedicated to the footer.... Part of a series by Oren Eini on the storage format used by RavenDB.
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Today, I will be discussing recent happy developments in the profitable and entertaining field of stealing other people's Internet passwords. This used to be quite annoying. Every now and then some idiot would leave ftp.someidiot.com/secret/passwords.txt just sitting there in plaintext, not the salted password hashes that they should have saved. But usually it wasn't easy to get the hashed passwords, and then it was unacceptably computationally expensive for us to brute-force our way through passwords of ever-increasing length until we found some that matched the hashes. Brute-force cracking is getting faster and faster, but if the brute-forcing time for an 80486 was "one googolplex years", then even if modern hardware can do it a million times as fast, you're still not appreciably closer to the target. How the h4xx0ring is getting easier, and safe p4sswordZ shouldn't be so difficult.
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This post is the first in a series on the difficult task of rounding a floating-point number to an integer. Laugh not! The easiest-looking questions can hide unforeseen difficulties, and the most widely accepted solutions can be wrong. This is part 0.99999999999999 of a series.
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I started using a Samsung 550 Chromebook as my on-the-go machine two semesters ago. It worked nicely for taking notes, but I remained a skeptic: how could I ever write code from a glorified web browser? Fast forward 6 months: today, I love hacking on my Chromebook, and I have no problems working offline. It took some effort to get everything set up, so I’ve put together my recommendations to get other folks up to speed. Not for those of you who prefer IDEs - the main tools here are a terminal and web browser.
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You have an idea for a program. It’s the best program idea you’ve ever had so you quickly prototype something in C... A work of genius. You quickly compile and run it to make sure all is good... Boom! But wait… What has happened? How has it gone from being quite an understandable high level program into being something that your processor can understand and run. Let’s go through what’s happening step by step. From compiling to cleaning up what you forgot to free(), and all the steps in between.
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As told in a previous post, I like to watch the RDS-TMC traffic messages every now and then, just for fun. Even though I've never had a car. Actually I haven't done it for years now, but thought I'd share with you the joy of solving the enigma. RDS-TMC is used in car navigators to inform the driver about traffic jams, roadworks and urgent stuff like that. It's being broadcast on a subcarrier of a public radio FM transmission. It's encrypted in many countries, including mine, so that it could be monetized by selling the encryption keys. Cracking traffic message encryption is more fun than sitting in traffic.
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The Jawbone UP fitness tracker is a lot more useful now that Jawbone has opened the API to third-party developers. One of the most exciting companies tapping into the UP platform is online automation tool, IFTTT. In the article below, I will talk a little bit about connecting your UP to IFTTT and then list some of my favorite recipes. Yes, there are APIs for network-connected fitness trackers. We live in the future.
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I read scientific biographies hopeful that I might understand how they achieved scientific greatness, in order obviously, that I might emulate it. The outcome is, inevitably, that I better appreciate just how exceptional the individuals are and how unlikely any strategy dependent upon emulation might be. Only one practical lesson shines through, the requirement for a sustained and unblinking focus on a challenge that is worthy of the effort that must be devoted to it. Scientific greatness is earned, but it is also chosen. The habits of 11 highly brilliant people.
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