greynode

Instead of randomly pasting configuration code from other projects when you decide you want to use automake/autoconf, just check out all you should really know about autoconf and automake. Albeit, it may not be comprehensive, but it should get you started.

Have you checked out HTML 5 yet? If not, here is a neat article explaining some of the basic ideas of HTML 5.

I was just browsing around for some material on ruby and I found this page very helpful:

http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/documentation/ruby-from-other-languages/

It’s not a ruby bible or anything, but I think it is a good intro for experienced programmers.

I have become increasingly frustrated with people refusing to adopt the IEEE 1541-2002 standard. There is no real good reason why it should not be adopted. I think the most common argument I have heard against it is, “That’s stupid! The people who made that up are stupid! You’re stupid for using it!” That is to say, there are no very good arguments against it.

In fact the longer people continue to use the old terminology, the longer the hard drive manufacturers have to use the old terminology to rip off consumers. Did you ever wonder why your hard drive isn’t a full 80GiB? That’s because it said 80GB on the box.

Some argue that it makes no sense to have the extra terminology because computers operate using base 2. The problem with this argument is that the International Bureau of Weights and Measures published a paper in 1998 stating that SI prefixes should only be used with powers of 10.

I think anyone familiar with science understands the necessity for proper measurements. Without them, your data is bad. Let me present a quick example. Let’s say you were looking for a place to store copies of your digital movies. Your computer says they are 4.7GB (but it really means GiB), so you decide to get a 1TB hard drive in which you think you can store 1,000 / 4.7 = 212 full movies. However, the 1TB hard drive is really only 909GiB, which means you can only store about 193 movies. If you leave 20% free space to keep performance up, then that’s only 154 movies.

But the data on the hard drive box was not misrepresented, it was misunderstood. The reason it was misunderstood is because the neglect of the standard passes from the programmer to the average user via the software they use. There I said it, it is your fault programmers.

If you think you have a real reason why not to adopt it, please leave a comment.

A quick explanation of the standard, courtesy of wikipedia:

IEEE 1541 recommends:

• a set of units to refer to quantities used in digital electronics and computing:
  • bit (symbol ‘b’), a binary digit;
  • byte (symbol ‘B’), a set of adjacent bits (usually, but not necessarily, eight) operated on as a group;
  • octet (symbol ‘o’), a group of eight bits;
• a set of prefixes to indicate binary multiples of the aforesaid units:
  • kibi (symbol ‘Ki’), 2¹⁰ = 1024;
  • mebi (symbol ‘Mi’), 2²⁰ = 1048576;
  • gibi (symbol ‘Gi’), 2³⁰ = 1073741824;
  • tebi (symbol ‘Ti’), 2⁴⁰ = 1099511627776;
  • pebi (symbol ‘Pi’), 2⁵⁰ = 1125899906842624;
  • exbi (symbol ‘Ei’), 2⁶⁰ = 1152921504606846976;
• that the first part of the binary prefix is pronounced as the analogous SI prefix, and the second part is pronounced as bee;
• that SI prefixes are not used to indicate binary multiples.

MIT has been offering free videos of various courses for quite a while now. Today I came across this video series on multicore programming. I haven’t watched but a few minutes of it so far, but I am hoping to watch all of them before the next semester starts if it proves to be useful in some way. It uses the PS3 framework — I am not sure if this poses an issue with using the videos yet.