filed in Linux, Operating Systems, Programming, Unix on May.02, 2013
Here is a a really very detailed explanation (with examples) of how a program ends up going from code to an executable that your processor can run. This post details all of the steps along the way, from the original code, compiling, compiler optimizations, assembly, machine code, etc.
The Birth and Death of a Running Program (samwho.co.uk/blog)
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Loading ...filed in Programming on May.02, 2013
“How much does your framework choice affect performance? This site helps answer that question.
We’ve compared the performance of baseline functionality in a variety of web application frameworks, each operating in a realistic production configuration. Results are captured on Amazon EC2 and on physical hardware. The project is still evolving, and as it does so, the Github repository for the project is turning into a showcase of sorts for each framework’s best-practices.”
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...filed in Programming on Apr.29, 2013
In the context of code reviews, are checklists useful? Do they work? How do you use them (if you do)? This article poses these questions and gives a couple of checklist examples used for code reviews. I personally prefer using checklists as they help remind me of the most important ‘big’ things to check for.
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...filed in Programming on Apr.29, 2013
What factors impact the comprehensibility of code? Previous research suggests that expectation-congruent programs should take less time to understand and be less prone to errors. We present an experiment in which participants with programming experience predict the exact output of ten small Python programs. We use subtle differences between program versions to demonstrate that seemingly insignificant notational changes can have profound effects on correctness and response times. Our results show that experience increases performance in most cases, but may hurt performance significantly when underlying assumptions about related code statements are violated.
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...filed in Hardware on Apr.19, 2013
The battle between ARM and x86 (Intel) has been gaining steam more and more lately as Intel begins its movement into the mobile space (tablets, smartphones, etc.). Here is an article that provides a detailed analysis of ARM vs x86 in regards to performance and power consumption. Surprisingly, the paper concludes that the current Atom processor and the ARM Cortex A9 are mostly equivalent at the current moment.
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...filed in Tips on Jan.29, 2013
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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...filed in Gaming on Jan.28, 2013
“The Duck Hunt gun, officially called the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) Zapper, seems downright primitive next to the Nintendo’s Wii and Microsoft’s Kinect, but in the late 80s, it filled plenty of young heads with wonder. How did that thing work?
The Zapper’s ancestry goes back to the mid 1930s, when the first so-called “light guns” appeared after the development of light-sensing vacuum tubes. In the first light gun game, Ray-O-Lite (developed in 1936 by Seeburg, a company that made parts and systems for jukeboxes), players shot at small moving targets mounted with light sensors using a gun that emitted a beam of light. When the beam struck a sensor, the targets – ducks, coincidentally – registered the “hit” and a point was scored.
Light guns hit home video game consoles with Shooting Gallery on the Magnavox Odyssey in 1972. Because the included shotgun-style light gun was only usable on a Magnavox television, the game flopped. The Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) Zapper then fell into the hands of American kids in October 1985, when it was released in a bundle with the NES, a controller and a few games. Early versions of the peripheral were dark gray, but the color of the sci-fi ray gun-inspired Zapper was changed a few years later when a federal regulation required that toy and imitation firearms be “blaze orange” (color #12199, to be exact) so they wouldn’t be mistaken for the real deal.
While there were a number of Zapper-compatible games released for the NES (when I was a kid and my dad worked from home, we wasted plenty of afternoons away playing Hogan’s Alley), most lived in the shadow of the iconic Duck Hunt, the most recognizable and popular Zapper game……(full article is linked below)”
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...filed in PHP, Programming on Jan.20, 2013
“PHP is one unique language where the array data type has been highly generalized to suit a very broad set of use cases. For example, in PHP you can use an array to create both ordered lists as well as dicts (key/value pairs or maps) with a single data type. A PHP array isn’t an array in the traditional sense, but in fact it’s actually implemented as an ordered hashmap. There are good reasons for this. One of those reasons is that arrays traditionally do not allow you to mix types. They also don’t normally provide a simple means of random access such as mapping a key to it’s value. At least not in the sense that we’re used to doing in PHP. So I’m going to share with you some of the underlying details of how the PHP array data type works, why it works the way that it does, how it’s different from other languages, and what behaviors the PHP array has that you may not be fully aware of… (article continues via the link below)”
Full Article: A Closer Look Into PHP Arrays: What You Don’t See (sheriframadan.com)
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...filed in Javascript, Programming, Tips on Jan.20, 2013
If you are a beginner to JavaScript you might find this article quite useful. It mentions a few common JavaScript quirks that you may not understand at first, including: details on the global namespace, the this object, knowing the difference between ECMAScript 3 and ECMAScript 5, asynchronous operations, prototypes, and simple JavaScript inheritance.
Full Article: Common JavaScript “Gotchas” (jblotus.com)
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