Articles published in 2013

As the host OS I use Windows 8 (just upgraded to 8.1), well why ? one might ask.Is rather simple: Steam and after some dreadful searching and configuring tools I managed to install the basics for writing and deploying code: Vim, Git, PuTTy and a decent console replacement like Console2 [0]. Of course those aren't enough ...

Anyone that has written a little PHP knows what the flush() family of functions do. The ideal usage scenario for using chunked transfer[0] is when we have something costly to render e.g. the first three most recent articles on a blog. Why ? one might ask. Is rather simple: in a normal request where the server responds ...

Modules are useful for highly specialized code that can be injected into other classes for fun and profit or for creating Namespaces. An interesting approach is to use modules as an alternative to classical inheritance (without its the usual trade-offs) : the core idea is to share an abstracted role that can be included ...

There are words in programming that look like jokes. Zygohistomorphic prepromorphism is one of them. The first time you encounter it, you assume one of two things must have happened. Either someone lost a bet, or category theorists were left unsupervised for too long. Both explanations feel plausible. And yet the term ...

I was cruising around my Github notifications and I found an interesting open issue created by Jim Weirich : “The Semantic Rule for { } VS do/end” in the Ruby style guide repository . The semantic rule says use { } for blocks where the primary purpose of the block is to return a value, use do/end for blocks where the ...

On UNIX-like operating systems (e.g. Linux) there's the concept of process forking via the fork() system call. When one calls fork from a parent-process it will spawn a new child-process - that is a copy of its parent, then both processes return from fork. The child-process has an exact copy of the parent's memory in a ...

Back in the day (i.e. when Firefox's version was a single digit) font rendering was at its best on Mozilla's browser. I remember comparing Firefox's anti-aliasing to the new-kid-on-the-block Chrome : the difference was huge. Time went by and we all know what happened : most web developers found themselves using Chrome ...

When I look upon my day to day behavior the pattern that pops out is that of abstracted sets of ideas interchanging one another or making connection to other entities, bringing them in the foreground, into my field of subjectivity. We try to to make perception ours thus abstracting it away in nicely grouped entities ...

Every artisan at a certain point in time just stops and starts thinking about the inner-workings of his craft. He ponders on the whole process from an Outside while trying to make connections between apparently dissimilar entities that his craft is made of. One might argue that this is a purely subjective endeavor: ...