For me I think it has to be the scripting language of an old proprietary telephony platform I used in the early 2000s. The language itself was not so bad, but the fact that it was meant to be edited with a drag-and-drop GUI, which did not expose all the functionality I needed, was quite frustrating. I also remember having to manually imp...
Where can I find lists of practical programming problems for a novice? Something similar to http://www.projecteuler.net, but for practical problems. I am asking for problems even less complex than this question ...
I studied TSP in college in the context of NP Completeness. I have never actually had a situation where it would apply to a practical problem. A little bit of research shows that it has been used to pick the cheapest path to move a drill around, that is making holes in circuit boards. That is pretty much all I could find. Are you ...
Why are interfaces useful? Actually, I have a [small] idea of why interfaces are useful/necessary but... What are [interesting or realistic] applications of interfaces? ...
I've been programming small things in C/C++ and even a little Java for a while now. However, I can't seem to break the barrier into programming something that could be considered practical. None of my programs have ever exceeded even 200 lines (and no, I'm not saying that small programs are useless). What is the quickest way to start p...
I'm a hobbyist programmer, wanting to contribute to some open source projects, and hopefully write my own (semi-popular) ones too. I have a decent 'academic' knowledge of CS and programming business, but am finding that there's a large void between "knowing how to program", and knowing how to efficiently help out with a project. What I...
Difference between a bus error and a segmentation fault? Can it happen that a program gives a seg fault and stops for the first time and for the second time it may give a bus error and exit ? ...
What is Ajax ? How does it work ? How to use it ? What are the performance and security concerns and how to avoid them ? ...
I have been looking into different algorithms lately and have read quite alot about perlin noise. It seems like the only thing people use it for is to generate textures (clouds/wood grain) or to distribute trees. What else can Perlin Noise be used for? ...
I understand the principles but i have a hard time seeing where the practical applications are outside of a few. Please enlighten me ;) ...
Hi, I am trying to formalize my programming practices in preparation to do it professionally (I have been doing it as a hobby for 18 years). Unfortunately they didn’t really teach us useful stuff in school, so I am trying to learn these things on my own. One aspect that I am trying to learn is unit-testing. I have read various things a...
It seems to me from my experimenting with Haskell, Erlang and Scheme that functional programming languages are a fantastic way to answer scientific questions. For example, taking a small set of data and performing some extensive analysis on it to return a significant answer. It's great for working through some tough Project Euler questio...
Microformats feel as though they want to be popular but I'm not hearing too much about them; maybe I travel in the wrong circles. I'm keen to know if you are using them on your site and whether they have proven popular. I'm also keen to understand how you track their uptake/usage and how they have worked for you in your particular scen...
i a writing my master thesis on the subject of dynamic keystroke authentication. to support ongoing research, i am writing code to test out different methods of feature extraction and feature matching. my current simple approach just checks if the reference password keycodes matches the currently typed in keycodes and also checks if the...
We're designing a database in which I need to consider some FK(foreign key) constraints. But it is not limited to formal structuring and normalization. We go for it only if it provides any performance or scalability benefits. I've been going thru some interesting articles and googling for practical benefits. Here are some links: http:/...
What would be the most practical online tutorial(s) for quickly getting up to speed with Haskell? I have a decent amount of programming experience with PHP, Java ja Javascript, so there is something to build on. I have checked out the Haskell official homepage @haskell.org but the materials there are a bit ..well.. a bit difficult to fo...
While I agree reading books is always a learning experience, sometimes you'd like to skip the theory and just jump till you reach the practical aspects. For example, I'd like to see a book that tells me that by writing: char* a = "a string"; the value of a will (usually) get stored in the readonly portion of an executable, and explain...
I have been thinking and learning a lot about forms lately trying to add advanced extensions to the Spree ECommerce Platform: Subscriptions, Events, Donations, and all kinds of Surveys. Every example I have ever encountered (in blogs, in the docs, in screencasts, in source code, etc.) make forms out of Models, but they never go to anyth...
I work with Zend Framework a lot and I just took a peek at Kohana, and it strikes me as odd that this is a typical scenario in these frameworks: throw Some_Components_Exception( 'invalid argument' ); Where I believe this wouldn't be much more useful: throw Some_Components_InvalidArgumentException( 'whatever discription' ); Because ...
I recently had a phone job interview with a 1 hour Programming practical. It had two questions on it and I know I answered one completely correct and got most of the second correct. Should I worry about getting the Job just based on that? The actual phone job interview went very well and they told me that I answered their questions well ...