By now most users should have the new Google bar, however if you don’t follow these instructions.

If you are using Google Chrome right click on any whitespace on a Google page and select “Inspect Element”. Click on the Console tab and paste the following text and press enter.

Congratulations, you should now see the new Google bar at the top of the page!

A really interesting in-depth question was posted over at stackoverflow.com asking why 1 loop seems to be so much slower than 2 loops. The discussion on the page goes into great and interesting detail on what’s going on behind the scenes and why there is such a decrease in speed between 1 and 2+ loops. Interestingly, it seems that the answer has something to do with the CPU cache and the way it handles the memory.

Why is one loop so much slower than two loops? (stackoverflow.com)

Now here’s a really interesting feature article on Unix history and how it came to be. It’s quite amazing how successful a piece of software has become and how it came to influence the world of computing in the past (roughly) 40 years.

“They say that when one door closes on you, another opens. People generally offer this bit of wisdom just to lend some solace after a misfortune. But sometimes it’s actually true. It certainly was for Ken Thompson and the late Dennis Ritchie, two of the greats of 20th-century information technology, when they created the Unix operating system, now considered one of the most inspiring and influential pieces of software ever written….”

The Strange Birth and Long Life of Unix (spectrum.ieee.org)

Lately I’ve been struggling with really terrible performance on my VirtualBox virtual machines. I’ve begun to do a bit of research on improving the performance of my VMs and so far the most helpful tip was to switch the VM disk image to SATA instead of IDE. Check out the following link for a detailed set of instructions on how to make this switch: Improving VirtualBox performance (http://matt.bottrell.com.au).

Additional Resources:

• VirtualBox 2.0.2 User Manual (PDF)

Really interesting article from Rob Pike, a member of the Unix team and Plan 9. Here’s a short excerpt from the article:

“Kernighan and Plauger’s The Elements of Programming Style was an important and rightly influential book. But sometimes I feel its concise rules were taken as a cookbook approach to good style instead of the succinct expression of a philosophy they were meant to be. If the book claims that variable names should be chosen meaningfully, doesn’t it then follow that variables whose names are small essays on their use are even better? Isn’t MaximumValueUntilOverflow a better name than maxval? I don’t think so.

What follows is a set of short essays that collectively encourage a philosophy of clarity in programming rather than giving hard rules. I don’t expect you to agree with all of them, because they are opinion and opinions change with the times. But they’ve been accumulating in my head, if not on paper until now, for a long time, and are based on a lot of experience, so I hope they help you understand how to plan the details of a program. (I’ve yet to see a good essay on how to plan the whole thing, but then that’s partly what this course is about.) If you find them idiosyncratic, fine; if you disagree with them, fine; but if they make you think about why you disagree, that’s better. Under no circumstances should you program the way I say to because I say to; program the way you think expresses best what you’re trying to accomplish in the program. And do so consistently and ruthlessly.”

Rob Pike: Notes on Programming in C (doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/pikestyle)

(click for a larger view)

These don’t all really seem to necessarily be “equations” but they are all extremely useful things you should know. The article contains some details on the following:

• Binomial Coefficient
• Demorgan’s Laws
• Eigenvector and Eigenvalue
• Pumping Lemma for Regular Languages
• Information Entropy
• Bayes’ Theorem
• Fermat’s Little Theorem
• Natural Join
• The Fixed-Point (Y) Combinator
• O(N)
• Euler’s Identity

Eleven Equations True Computer Science Geeks Should (at Least Pretend to) Know (via elegantcoding.com)

Just a few excellent responses from Stackoverflow.com to the question: “What programming terms have you coined that have taken off in your own circles (i.e. have heard others repeat it)? It might be within your own team, workplace or garnered greater popularity on the Internet.” Some examples being: “Yoda Conditions” and “Pokemon Exception Handling.”

Dodgy Coder: Programming Classics (via dodgycoder.net)

The Doom 3 source code has recently been released under the GPL license by iD Software and it appears that someone has been able to successfully build it under OS X! There is also a small/partial code review of sorts here too with plans for a complete code review in the future. Check out the article here: Doom3 compilation instructions for Mac OS X (via fabiensanglard.net)

Now here is a good article (mainly for Unix beginners) that outlines some of the most useful basic Unix commands available.  Read the article here: Unix Command Line Fu (via kresimirbojcic.com). The article covers commands such as: cut, grep, sort, uniq, cat, tac, join, tail, head, etc. It also tells you a bit about how to use each one for specific situations.This is by no means a comprehensive list, but there are many useful things here that I definitely didn’t know how to do before!