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Our app is finally up and running. We have tried and enhanced the app in three directions: Performance, Design and User Experience.
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Just a bit of a fun puzzle today. Take a moment to look at the following two classes. Given an architecture where an int is four bytes and a character is one, what is the size of an instance of each class? struct Alpha { int x; char ch1; int y; char ch2; } a1; struct Beta { int x; int y; char ch_name[2]; } b2; The most obvious answer would be 4+1+4+1, giving us 10 bytes for the first class, and 4+4+1+1 giving us another 10 bytes with our se..
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I've talked about what Domain Driven Design is and what kind of benefits you can expect from it. The next concept to explore is what the…
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I found that it’s pretty hard to have a project with high test coverage and fast build… if the tests are slow, people will feel the need to skip them to speed up the build, and will probably write fewer tests than they should, afraid that the build will become even slower. You go out for a walk and when you come back no one is running or writing tests anymore…
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Genealogy is a pastime that I occasionally indulge in. There are some very fascinating stories to be learned about the history of one’s genetic forebearers, as the tale of ancestry interweaves with the movements of history. Discovering one’s family history requires investigative skills for combing through resources — many of which are online. Some of those (with Canadian content) are freely available: Library and Archives Canada, FamilySear..
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As Bob Dylan once said, “The times, they are a changin’.” Over the past week, this has proved particularly true for the podcasting space: with the launch of Fiat Lux’s Constellation , we have been given a glimpse into a possible future whereby the greatest emphasis falls on the podcast rather than another, ancillary aspect, and this beloved medium has lost the shackles that once kept it relegated to a small, insular sect. At least within..
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OpenSSH is an incredible tool. Though primarily relied upon as a secure alternative to plaintext remote tools like telnet or rsh, OpenSSH (hereafter referred to as plain old ssh) has become a swiss army knife of functionality for far more than just remote logins. I rely on ssh every day for multiple purposes and feel the need to share the love for this excellent tool. What follows is a list for some of my use cases that leverage the po....
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We were counting down the days until Berlin Buzzwords on May 25, when we realised that it would be great if you came too! With that in mind…
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We were counting down the days until Berlin Buzzwords on May 25, when we realised that it would be great if you came too! With that in mind…
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This week was a ton of performance optimizations and graphics upgrades. Cascading shadow maps! Basically that means all the shadows are much sharper. It was surprisingly easy to implement and barely impacts performance. Here's a screenshot showing off the new shadows, plus a new character modeling experiment. Just testing things out for now. What do you think? Turns out, Blender has something called Rigify that can automatically ..
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I got quite a bit done on the snails yesterday, mostly focusing on creating a snail manager class, displaying snails using Canvas, and saving snails you choose to keep to the database. It’s all implemented really dodgily right now, but it’s mostly functional.
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These are so cool — and all done in CSS, no JavaScipt required. Manoela “Mary Lou” Ilic has to be one of the most talented web developers I have seen in a long while. If I ever decide to take this site in a more graphically-complex direction, I know exactly where I will look for inspiration. Permalink.
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I’ve been playing around with PHP for the past few days. Last year for one of my One Game a Month projects I made Game of Snails . I’ve been wanting to make a snail racing and breeding game for literally years . I first started thinking about it when I discovered that video games were actually a thing - the idea was triggered by a real life snail racing experience I had when I was little in Ukraine, collecting and training snails in the r..
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These days it has become quite common to frame both current events and predictions of the future in terms of the past. Within the technology space, and particularly when talking about Apple, this is especially true — even for me: every time I comment on a rumor, whether in regards to something so trivial as WWDC dates this year all the way up to the much more significant potential screen sizes at which the iPhone 6 could ship, I look to the..
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Hoy me topé con algo de mi día a día: en un viejo disco duro de respaldo tenía unas copias de DVDs en formato bin/cue. Lamentablemente, Mavericks no me dejó montar los archivos bin ya que, técnicamente, Apple no da soporte a los archivos bin/cue de manera nativa en Mac, pero la solución es bastante simple. Existe un programa de consola llamado binchunker que convierte archivos bin/cue a ISO sin mayores inconvenientes. Eso sí, necesitas tene..
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I can’t imagine my daily work in terminal without multiplexers. I used to use GNU Screen a couple of years ago, then I switched to Tmux. There has been a lot of talks about screen vs tmux, and then vs byubu. I still use both, and I still like both. What I was really missing is session management. Since my laptop’s uptime is normally more than a month - I just created windows manually and started programs manually and then just attached/deta..
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I can’t imagine my daily work in terminal without multiplexers. I used to use GNU Screen a couple of years ago, then I switched to Tmux. There has been a lot of talks about screen vs tmux, and then vs byubu. I still use both, and I still like both. What I was really missing is session management. Since my laptop’s uptime is normally more than a month - I just created windows manually and started programs manually and then just attached/deta..
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Hat-tip to another article from Huckberry, Modern Pioneering , that I just linked to for bringing this one from 2013 to my attention. In the past, I have written extensively about Rohan Anderson’s own work, as well as his escapades: when he felled trees and built an awesome smokehouse by hand, that fantastic video led to a string of four posts — Something to it , walk it off brother , hard at work, living simple , and so simple — ..
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Although I’m still coming to terms with her use of “#ModernPioneering” when promoting this , Huckberry’s recent article on Georgia Pellegrini is great even if it does seem — to me, at least — almost absurd to see the two disparate worlds of pioneering and hashtags collide so inelegantly. Someday, I would love to live the lifestyle she leads: it sounds incredible. Permalink.
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Ben Thompson has been killing it over at Stratechery lately, especially with this piece comparing Apple and Nike through the apt characterization of experience companies. As a recent convert from the Windows world, I can speak to the reality of Apple’s unique (within the technology industry, at least) position as such a corporation from first-hand experience: from the outside looking in, I couldn’t help but want to join this community and b..
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The picture above is the only mall in the Hespeler area of Cambridge (where I grew up). If you look carefully, you’ll see that it’s currently being demolished (at the time of this post, it is almost entirely demolished). I moved back to Hespeler after school to raise my daughter because it was a place I knew well, and I have many fond memories of this mall because I used to work there teaching piano for George H. Jenner.
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The picture above is the only mall in the Hespeler area of Cambridge (where I grew up). If you look carefully, you’ll see that it’s currently being demolished (at the time of this post, it is almost entirely demolished). I moved back to Hespeler after school to raise my daughter because it was a place I knew well, and I have many fond memories of this mall because I used to work there teaching piano for George H. Jenner.
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I doubt it, but who knows — maybe Jeff Bezos has an assistant gather Horace’s articles every evening, print them onto sheets of newspaper, and insert the pages between those of his morning delivery of The Washington Post. Weirder things have happened before, anyway. To Ben’s point though, making the distinction between novelty, creation, invention, and innovation is incredibly important regardless of which side of the fence you fall on, whe..
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When writing Rethinking RSS the other day, I started reflecting on my process for discovering and consuming new and interesting writing. This time around I zeroed in less on the specifics, though — Tweetbot, Instapaper, and Reeder — , more on the jobs I use those and other services to complete, and how that methodology could bode ill for the current metric by which website owners determine success, attain profitability, and measure popu..
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Interesting retrospective by Josh Ginter over at The Newsprint on his time in college and how, then, higher education seemed to approve more of analog note taking than digital, and why. Thankfully, that has largely ceased to be the case: in my last two semesters in college, I can think of only two classes — math and Chinese, for during both those courses a romanized alphabet would have proved virtually worthless — during which no one had a ..
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On April 21st, 2014, a tremor shook the podcasting world. Not a large one, but like an avalanche feeding on itself and growing ever-larger, this quake’s onset marked the beginning of a significant change. Or at least, that’s how I think we will look back on the otherwise unremarkable Monday afternoon Ben Alexander, Jamie Ryan, Lorenzo Guddemi, and Sid O’Neill launched Constellation . Permalink.
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Great article and accompanying advice from Leo Babauta on choosing the hard tasks rather than sticking with the easy ones, and how this approach to every aspect of life — while inarguably more difficult — will inevitably lend itself to greater results than the alternative. “Easier said than done”, one might say, but that’s exactly the point. Permalink.
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I know I speak for many when I say that some disruption among the service providers of the mobile phone industry would be very interesting indeed. Unfortunately, as Benedict Evans explains here, this will prove quite the monumental task. Not impossible, but perhaps at the very least prohibitively difficult. Permalink.
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This is absolutely incredible. Using only JavaScript to manage the toggles, Julian Garnier made this fantastic interactive solar system powered by nothing more than CSS and some HTML structure code. Even cooler, it’s not just a pretty animation: it has a lot of interesting information to show as well. Awesome. Permalink.
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Better late than never, but we wanted to share a video from last fall’s AWS re:Invent conference where our own chief architect Valentino Volonghi shared the stage with Amazon CTO Werner Vogels for a fireside chat. Valentino discusses AdRoll’s use of DynamoDB , one of the core technologies we leverage to build our real-time bidding system that handles more than 50 billion bid requests per day. The resulting system is a highly-reliable, ..
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This post is about explaining what we have already done, our first decisions about the upcoming development and sketching an approximative timeline of the project.
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The ability for PHP programs to execute asynchronous functions… Yeah, I said it and now it exists. By coding in Facebook’s new Hack Language, using your CPU’s cycles correctly has never been so easy. Let’s delve into this new language head first! 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 /** * This function calls async functions */ function main () ....
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Earlier this month I published Owning Their Words , an article I named for and wrote in response to Matt Gemmell’s then-recent essay titled Own your words . In that piece, Matt explained the reasons he continues to write and publish on his own website rather than using a more streamlined venue such as Medium or another, similar service potentially more conducive to greater traffic that his own setup. Doing my best not to spoil his conclus..
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Great counter-point to The decline of the mobile web by Ben Thompson, guest posting on Matthew Mullenweg’s site about the value of the web in a world dominated by apps. An infinite number of apps could be made for infinite number of use cases, but they will still only be designed for those specific use cases; beyond those, there must be something more flexible, able to handle every other possible need. That something is the web. Permal..
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Had an interesting question posed to me the other day from David Ruttka: Did I have a favorite way to list all of the directories that have been deleted from a folder in git? Admittedly, this took a bit of thought. No arcane git command came to mind. Nothing did. Google wasn't that much help either. Not only did I not have a favorite way, I didn't have a way at all!
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In preparing to read this article, rather than read it on Chris Dixon’s website, I first tried in Instapaper. Instapaper failed to accurately parse the article though, so I then created an account at Pocket where I ultimately read and finished the piece before writing about it in Drafts and posting the end result from my computer. Now, as I have explained in the past , this is not usual: for the most part, I prefer to read articles in thei..
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In a previous post we introduced a learning model called Probably Approximately Correct (PAC). We saw an example of a concept class that was easy to learn: intervals on the real line (and more generally, if you did the exercise, axis-aligned rectangles in a fixed dimension). One of the primary goals of studying models of learning is to figure out what is learnable and what is not learnable in the various models.
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In a previous post we introduced a learning model called Probably Approximately Correct (PAC). We saw an example of a concept class that was easy to learn: intervals on the real line (and more generally, if you did the exercise, axis-aligned rectangles in a fixed dimension). One of the primary goals of studying models of learning is to figure out what is learnable and what is not learnable in the various models.
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In a previous post we introduced a learning model called Probably Approximately Correct (PAC). We saw an example of a concept class that was easy to learn: intervals on the real line (and more generally, if you did the exercise, axis-aligned rectangles in a fixed dimension). One of the primary goals of studying models of learning is to figure out what is learnable and what is not learnable in the various models.
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Driving home from a weekend with the family? Boy, have I got just what you need to spice up a few hours of monotonous turns and straightaways: the following list contains all the best podcasts I have had the privilege of listening to within the past week. Whether you’re out on the open road or simply looking for the diamonds in the rough, look no further than this week’s installment of my ongoing series, This Week in Podcasts. Permalink.
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Shawt! is a social, location-aware chat application. It gives you insights about what you want to know based on where you are.
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Have I got your attention? It's a sensationalist title, but this is important and developers/administrators still get it wrong. Both online and professionally, I encounter technical people still turning to traditional hashing algorithms like SHA or, Schneier forbid, MD5 when making decisions about scrambling user credentials. Even this recent question on Stack Overflow Exchange has yielded inaccurate answers. While choosing some....
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