Long time ago, i read an article dealing with how women's brain was good at multi task compared to men's one. Now I often think about it. As far as I have noticed, I can do several things at the same time (almost) because of a good scheduling. I was wondering how you guys do, what are some of the hard things you can do at the same time...
The command-line can be powerful but it can also be risky, which is why it is never recommended to login as root for your day-to-day work. Sometimes the command line can catch you out if you're not careful. So for example rm -rf . /dir instead of rm -rf ./dir can have a completely different result to what you intended. Here is a great c...
killall -r -9 . sends the 9 signal to all processes matching the . regular expression (i.e. it kills all processes). As it kills itself, the question is, will it kill itself last, therefore doing what it is documented to do, or maybe it will kill himself before finishing the work, leaving processes alive. Following @David's answer, it m...
What is the biggest library/tool/framework/etc you wrote only to discover that it is freely available or already exists somewhere? ...
I was re-reading Joel's Strategy Letter II: Chicken and Egg problems and came across this fun quote: In fact, WordStar was ported to DOS by changing one single byte in the code. (Real Programmers can tell you what that byte was, I've long since forgotten). I couldn't find any other references to this with a quick Google se...
As software developers we all know that motivation matters. Without it we could just stare into the monitor all day long and do nothing. There are some tricks to get yourself motivated like talking to people or doing the fun part of the project, but they do not always work. In the mean time I started to notice that I am most productive ...
What days of the years should I know about as a programmer? As Pi Day just passed, I was wondering if there are any other days relevant to programmers. This is a good place to list them all... ...
What are your favorite online lectures, presentations and talks? A few rules: Must be programming or software related. try to keep this non-academic. There are many online academic lectures, but let's try and keep this fun. try to post freely available stuff (YouTube, etc...) try to post specific talks, not just "google talks have goo...
Do you have any clever pseudo-code phrases? Maybe a common phrase that has analogous pseudo-code? What's your best one? For example, one I've seen, from bash.org: A programmer started to cuss Because getting to sleep was a fuss As he lay there in bed Looping 'round in his head was: while(!asleep()) sheep++ One I thought of/use: "...
I've come very close, I think, but can't seem to cover every single one of the fronts listed below: disable use of backspace, delete, left arrow key, home key, and ctrl for various reasons (all of which prove difficult once you factor in the confusion caused by holding down two at the same time) make certain that the user cannot exit t...
This is an abstracted form of the bug that led me into the code that formed the basis of my prior question. It's obvious once you see it, but several professional programmers familiar with the original problem and original language looked over the code and overlooked the bug before we caught it (admittedly, in its native environment it ...
I want to talk like I'm in the military of NUnit, but don't like the term "Green grass" as used by Rob Conery. Do you know any others? ...
I was writing some code in C#, and I found myself writing: return new MyClass(... when I noticed that both the return and the new were both C# keywords. So I wondered what is the longest legal sequence of keywords in C#. All I could think of is: internal static override void MyFunc(... Where internal static override void are all ke...
I was in 6th or 7th grade when I first started coding on an 8088 with DOS and Turbo C. The first real program I ever wanted to write was a reminder app for DOS to use for a little business I came up with and I never finished it. The idea was that the app would let you enter people, phone numbers, and details about what you should r...
I'm getting married on April 4th, 2009. My future wife has agreed to let me have actual code on top of the wedding cake. Woot! There isn't very much room, four, maybe five lines (it's only a 6" cake because the main cake is a bunch of cupcakes). Any language is okay, Java, JavaScript, XML. A lot of the people attending the wedding hav...
Have you ever used any funniest/coolest image/icon in your application? If yes, which is your's best? ...
I know this is subjective and not really a question. I won't feel bad if it is closed, but I'm curious about this. I was recently learning some details about a project that uses Microsoft Sharepoint as the development platform and honestly I don't know if they are doing something very wrong or the product itself is just a pain to develo...
I would like to program an application for the Amiga, just for fun! Please could someone post a step by step howto based on the following? Exactly what programming tools I should use, are there any already installed? Am I limited to plain text editors, or are there IDEs and debugging tools available? If no tools are already installed,...
Recently on the Perl5 Porters list a spelling error in a doc patch made me laugh: use warnins; I now feel compelled to write a "warnins" pragma which such sage advice as Yer usin' a variable that ain't got a value in addition (+) at z.pl line 8. instead of Use of uninitialized value in addition (+) at z.pl line 8. What ot...
Users sometimes come up with the most amusing, weird and wonderful requirements for programmers to design and implement. Today I read a memo from my boss that we need the "ability to import any excel or access data, irrespective of size, easily and quickly." From the same memo, we have a requirement to "know if anyone unauthorized acce...