Grey Panthers Savannah

Category: programming

  • Can good programmers be part of a SDLC?

    From the security balance blog. SDLC is the Security Development Lifecycle for all of you non-acronym junkies :-). I disagree with the definition of “good programmer”. In my opinion being a good programmer is not just about being able to bang out X lines of quality code per hour. It’s about knowing your limits, and…

  • Nice validation technique

    Reading the Paint.NET blog I found this post about parameter validation. It is a very cool one for at least three reasons: Makes the code more readable. Making the code such that readers can infer (correctly!) what the code does without additional comments is very useful. Makes the code shorter. Can be easily adapted into…

  • Dynamic or static typing?

    Working is Java (Eclipse more precisely), I came to value very much the features which it offers related to exploring / manipulating the source code. I’m talking about things like “take me to definition”, “show me where it is used”, refactoring features, etc. This made me thinking: isn’t really the difference between static and dynamic…

  • How can you be certain that your code works?

    You can’t. Read this great article from Peter Harkins.

  • Story cards

    This is really nice: From the Atlassian Developer Blogs

  • Multi-threaded Visual C rand

    I was helping out a friend who was trying to generate random numbers in several threads and he was expecting those numbers to be (at least somewhat) different. After getting the obvious problem resolved (you must call srand to initialize the seed – using for example the current time), we were still getting threads which…

  • Avoiding the dogpile effect

    When using caching to speed up webpages (or other request-response oriented protocols), it is very common to tie the update of the cache to a new request, meaning that every request checks if the cache is too old first. If not, it returns the value from the cache. If it is, it tries to recompute…

  • Checking out CVS and creating patches

    Update: Qemu moved from CVS to SVN. While the CVS repository is (and will be) available for some time, you should look at the new checkout instructions. Lately I started to dive into open-source development, specifically Qemu. Since I’m relatively new, here are some commands I found useful: cvs -z3 -d:pserver:[email protected]:/sources/qemu co qemu – to…

  • Starting to program

    Today I was asked if somebody who is getting into programming should start out with Perl? First of all I would like to say that I feel honored that somebody would consider taking my advice. Second of all, I don’t really feel that I can give an objective answer, since I’ve been doing it so…

  • What am I reading?

    I’ve read two and a half 🙂 really interesting posts today (warning, they are pretty long) about computer languages: Bambi Meets Godzilla a little anti-anti-hype The departure of the hyper-enthusiasts And I thought I share some of my opinions about languages. I’m polyglot myself and have some experience with many types on languages. GWBasic /…