I gave another talk at my local LUG this week. The idea was to set the scene so I could then move onto more useful things like git, perl, javascript, etc. I wanted to begin by getting everybody comfortable and familiar with the command line.
All Rational Approximations of Pi Are Useless—Wolfram BlogWhen I first learned about p, I was told that a good approximation was 22/7. Even when I was 12 years old, I thought this was utterly pointless. 22/7 agrees with p to two decimal places (so three matching digits):
Two Responsibilities in the .NET TPL Scheduler ClassI like parallel programming. Most of my experience comes from developing on Windows in C/C++ and C#. I haven’t yet had the pleasure of doing so functionally (which I plan to correct).
Things That Turbo Pascal is Smaller ThanThe entire Turbo Pascal 3.02 executable--the compiler and IDE--was 39,731 bytes. How does that stack up in 2011 terms? Here are some things that Turbo Pascal is smaller than, as of October 30, 2011: The minified version of jquery 1.6 (90,518 bytes).
W.T.F.M: Write The Freaking ManualI will take this moment to reflect on what has been an epic exercise in utter frustration: Sifting through poorly written documentation or tutorials for an otherwise excellent programming language, framework, project, etc. It seems that nowadays, the original phrase R.T.F.M.
Nate Silver’s ‘The Signal and the Noise’Normally, when a new book rolls into our office, we subject it to Marshall McLuhan’s page 69 test. Flip to page 69, read what’s there. If the passage is any good, then the book’s worth a deeper browse.
Secret Microsoft policy limited Hotmail passwords to 16 charactersFor years, Microsoft engineers have quietly limited Hotmail passwords to 16 characters, a revelation that has surprised and concerned some users who have long entered passcodes twice that long to access accounts.
Announcing Source Code ProThe public reception of the release of Source Sans Pro last month was very encouraging. My colleague, Ken Lunde, pointed out that this was not Adobe’s first open source font as Kenten Generic has been available for some time now.
Google Spanner's Most Surprising Revelation: NoSQL is Out and NewSQL is InGoogle recently released a paper on Spanner, their planet enveloping tool for organizing the world’s monetizable information. Reading the Spanner paper I felt it had that chiseled in stone feel that all of Google’s best papers have. An instant classic.
Errors vs. Bugs and the End of StupidityI learned that from Phil Cohn, my piano teacher's piano teacher. Once in a while, when I was in high school, she'd arrange for me to have a master class with him. He was a diminutive man who looked exactly like Dr. Strangelove, and had a gentle way of guiding your hands and body while you played.
This Read-It-Later-list is just that, bookmarks of stuff I intend to read or have read. I do not necessarily agree with opinions or statements in the bookmarked articles.
This list is compiled from my Pocket list.