The Digital Lumber Jack

Surviving Core Data Just like me, other people got all exited when Apple announced some extra support for Core Data with nested contexs, but they also found out it was not ready yet for deployment. Now, that seems a lot of false hopes from Apple, specially when following their recommendations you just get slow and buggy code. This new nested context functionality has a deeper annoyance for C++ and Qt programmers because they expose one of our Cocoa...

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The importance of being obsessed with UX and graphical design It is time to confess my most loved Apple feature, which by the way, I think is a great example to show the importance of good UX design. This could also throw some light on the mistery about Apple fanboys getting hook up on such expensive toys. Here is a screenshot of my home folder. The labels are in German but it is still easy to understand what's all about my favorite Mac feature. Notice...

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You Are The Evil One Last weekend shopping with a friend in the supermarket I had a revelation right in front of the meat section about how hard is being a fair person. The following dinner was such a bloody discussion about the stupid belief of people in fairytales, unicorns or that politicians and banks are the most evil forces of this world. Our fight just started because of some stupid chicken breast. While I was looking at the prices...

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Your Credit or Your Life During the last months I've been exposing myself more to the entrepreneur world. I am not sure if this is one reason for which more people is asking me about becoming a freelancer or building a new startup. Todays post is not only for all of you wannabe independent out there, it also applies to anyone concerned about how money affect life. If you are planning to take the lead of your career you will...

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Misunderstanding Software Quality The word quality applied to software is full of false stereotypes and misconceptions. You should blame the materialistic view of other engineering disciplines have forced unto us. People hear quality and instantly they make a connection with high quality materials. All high quality building, car, machines, etc. have high quality steel. The main expectation from a high quality restaurant is a tasty dish with fresh ingredients and from a high quality hotel a big room...

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Apple's Dirty Secret No matter how much you hate it or love it (or both), Apple is one of the most amazing companies out there. Even most amazing still is how its greatest achievements are completely ignored. Of course they are the ones selling iPhones, iPads, MacBooks and making megabucks out of them, but it is not the most amazing thing they have made. The first and foremost complaint about its products is how overpriced they are. Many...

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Posting with Jekyll Transform your text into a monster (Jekyll website) I always knew I should be posting more on my blog, but it was always so alien to me. I managed to set up first a WordPress blog, shortly after I switched to Drupal and that was it, almost no more dedication. The thing is that it was really painful to write posts. All these click here and click there, with all the content spread across a...

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What is the most compatible way to install python modules on a Mac? The following post is an extract from a Stack Overflow question and was automatically generated with the web scraping scripts at scraps. Question Question Source I'm starting to learn python and loving it. I work on a Mac mainly as well as Linux. I'm finding that on Linux (Ubuntu 9.04 mostly) when I install a python module using apt-get it works fine. I can import it with no trouble. On the Mac, I'm used to...

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A modern backup idea for your Unix system Backups are just like flossing your teeth: you should do it often, but at the end, you only do it during some weeks after you are into deep trouble. What is the best solution for things you never like to do? The one that is as fast and effortless as possible, ideally fully automated. Because of that I usually suggest people to go for a USB powered disk. Don't get one with a power supply,...

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Is it reasonable for modern applications to consume large amounts of memory? The following post is an extract from a Stack Overflow question and was automatically generated with the web scraping scripts at scraps. Question Question Source Applications like Microsoft Outlook and the Eclipse IDE consume RAM, as much as 200MB. Is it OK for a modern application to consume that much memory, given that few years back we had only 256MB of RAM? Also, why this is happening? Are we taking the resources for granted? Answer...

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The Monk and The Philosopher My scientific career was the result of a passion for discovery ... In short, science, however interesting, wasn't enough to give meaning to my life. I came to see research, as I experienced it myself, as an endless dispersion into detail, and dedicating my whole life to it was something I could no longer envisage Those were the first words from Matthieu Ricard that catch my attention. Finally I found an outstanding book from a...

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Fast comparison of char arrays? The following post is an extract from a Stack Overflow question and was automatically generated with the web scraping scripts at scraps. Question Question Source I'm currently working in a codebase where IPv4 addresses are represented as pointers to u_int8. The equality operator is implemented like this: bool Ipv4Address::operator==(const u_int8 * inAddress) const { return (*(u_int32*) this->myBytes == *(u_int32*) inAddress); } This is probably the fasted solution, but it causes the GCC compiler warning: ipv4address.cpp:65:...

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The Most Important Language for a Programmer Software engineers with low coding karma choose their favorite language based on money and job stability expectations. As a result you will often hear C++ or Java. Fortunatelly there is a big group of people out there who take programming back to their homes as a hobby who will wisely reply back something like Python, Ruby or Scheme. I love this type of people and it is great working with them, but there is one...

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XML for Compilers Thinking about how to implement a tool for measuring source code smelliness, my main concern was extracting the syntactic elements I wanted from a programming language. Obviously plain regular expression matching are not the way to go. I decided to opt for a reduced AST representing the common elements of most imperative languages: functions, variables and some type of packaging (name spaces, files and/or classes). Even when I could easily build an AST on my...

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The Smell of Your Code You should not be surprised that a guy who deals with garbage also feels concerned about the smell of your code. If you want to save the click to the Wikipedia article, I can summarize the concept rather quick: Code smell is all those symptons or things you see in code that raises a warning flag in your mind. If you ever used a static analysis tool to verify your code, you already have covered...

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Inforich or Infobloated? In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it Herbert Simon (1916 – 2001) Around 1996 I had my first...

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The Flight from Truth The foremost of all the forces that drive the world is falsehood. More than any before it, twentieth-century civilization has depended on information, teaching, science, culture - in short, on knowledge as well as on a system of government which, by its very definition, seeks to make knowledge availabe to all: democracy. [snip]Those who act have better data on which to base their actions, and those on the receiving end are much better informed about...

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Ada Love Story Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute Abelson & Sussman, SICP Right before my first programming assignment at my University, we all had big expectations regarding the language we had to work with. Back then Visual Basic, C++ and Delphi were the big guys, but I as much as my colleagues agreed, maybe that was a too much for starting. C seemed the most promising option, it...

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Why Garbage Collection? Lisp has jokingly been called "the most intelligent way to misuse a computer". I think that description is a great compliment because it transmits the full flavor of liberation: it has assisted a number of our most gifted fellow humans in thinking previously impossible thoughts Edsger Dijkstra, CACM, 15:10 Just as filthy as garbage collection sounds, it is the annoying feature many computer scientists disregard. The most common opinions are that it encourages bad programming...

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Those Nutheads Writting Blogs... Oh, My! The greatest hope of internet generation is that you can share your thoughts with everybody in the world. The greatest letdown of the same generation is that nobody cares. Still, that doesn't keep us from trying.Ted Dziuba I don't have any doubt that the first thought of many of my friends reaching this blog will be something like "I knew this guy was nuts!" Yeah right. Why would any normal person keep a blog? Don't...

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The Magic of the Blogosphere When the Internet was born many people understood how important it was the ability to publish any content and reach the whole world at almost no cost. The freedom and the resources have ever since been there, but maybe this was never really exploited until the blogs appeared. A blog by definition, is just a personal journal published on the internet. Usually they are focused in one specific subject. Think one word about any hobby,...

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Dear John, the machines are already taking control Year 2029, the world as we know today no longer exists. Intelligent machines with human form have taken control and only a small human resistance group struggles to survive. Are we there yet? Well, not quite, but a similar fight is already going on. After reading Is Google making us stupid? by Nicholas Carr I realized about our current struggle in the Great Invisible War Against Technology. It was the triggering point that gave me...

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