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My printer is unable to clean 51. It won’t work, and all it says is “Unable to Clean 51.” Here’s my suggestion for finding such useless error messages in a code review: Write a script to extract all string literals from your source code, then read over the output. The beauty of this approach is that the reviewer sees the text without the context of the surrounding code, just as the user does. Ideally someone who is not a programmer would review the output strings. I would hope someone who ran across “Unable to Clean 51″ would flag that as something that doesn’t make sense. That sounds like real work. Abort? Retry? Punt to an intern?
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She wasn’t struggling with syntax or logic, she was struggling with her own desire to make it complicated because... well, because it’s programming so it must be hard right? What this really made me realise though is that code looks hard, and as a result a newbie can think that it must be hard and the obvious solution won’t be the best way to do it. Sometimes you just need to loop your way through the problem.
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One of my first Computer Science teachers in college always told us about KISS - Keep It Simple & Stupid 
"Any sort of work in VB6 is bound to provide several WTF moments." - Christian Graus
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Big O notation is used in Computer Science to describe the performance or complexity of an algorithm. Big O specifically describes the worst-case scenario, and can be used to describe the execution time required or the space used (e.g. in memory or on disk) by an algorithm. Anyone who’s read Programming Pearls or any other Computer Science books and doesn’t have a grounding in Mathematics will have hit a wall when they reached chapters that mention O(N log N) or other seemingly crazy syntax. Hopefully this article will help you gain an understanding of the basics of Big O and Logarithms. My initial reaction to this was "Oh!".
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Now need a beginners guide to how to determine the big-O of a problem so they know if they have designed their algorithm right. Just because you have upteen for loops inside one another does not mean that you could not have done better. That is only the upper limit, not necessarily the big-O.
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The original idea is great. It stands for releasing software frequently, with short lags for the implementation of valuable new features and ideas. The productivity of software development increases every year, and in theory you could use the word "agile" to describe many of the things that are light and bright, great and good, fast and fun about our new world. But, if we want to use the word “agile” for this, we have to burn off the stink of stagnation that surrounds the old “agile.” So, here are seven things I hate about “agile.” Let's have a stand-up to discuss this list every morning and update the new things we dislike.
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Yes, seems like should be more agile and less formalized.
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So Andy Singleton hates Agile because some old people like it.
That is probably the best reason to not take this article seriously.
Speaking as an old person, that is.
m.bergman
For Bruce Schneier, quanta only have one state : afraid.
To succeed in the world it is not enough to be stupid, you must also be well-mannered. -- Voltaire
In most cases the only difference between disappointment and depression is your level of commitment. -- Marc Maron
I am not a chatbot
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While digging through dumps generated from the Apple Mac SE ROM images we noticed that there was a large amount of non-code, non-audio data. Adam Mayer tested different stride widths and found that at 67 bytes (536 pixels across) there appeared to be some sort of image data that clearly was a picture of people. The rest of the image was skewed and distorted, so we knew that it wasn’t stored as an uncompressed bitmap. After some investigation, we were able to decode the scrambled mess above and turn it into the full image. Here's how we did it. You know, it just occurred to me that we really haven't had a successful test of this equipment.
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Clickety beware, my organization's web filter sees as category Hacking 
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As a reminder, Microsoft first provided a feature breakdown for the various Window 8 product editions back in April, in a post titled Announcing the Windows 8 Editions. As with similar Microsoft-produced tables for previous Windows versions, however, this this breakdown is woefully inadequate. So in Windows 8 Secrets, we provide a more detailed set of tables based on functional areas such as hardware capabilities, upgrade capabilities, Metro features, desktop features, and so on. Batteries not included. Some assembly code required.
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From e-mails to social networks, the digital traces left by life in the modern world are transforming social science. The emerging field of computational social science is attracting mathematically inclined scientists in ever-increasing numbers. This, in turn, is spurring the creation of academic departments and prompting companies such as the social-network giant Facebook, based in Menlo Park, California, to establish research teams to understand the structure of their networks and how information spreads across them. Academics catch the Big Data craze... and hijinks ensue.
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Long before Internet Explorer became the browser everyone loves to hate, it was the driving force of innovation on the Internet. Sometimes it’s hard to remember all of the good that Internet Explorer did before Internet Explorer 6 became the scourge of web developers everywhere. Believe it or not, Internet Explorer 4-6 is heavily responsible for web development as we know it today. A number of proprietary features became de facto standards and then official standards with some ending up in the HTML5 specification. It may be hard to believe that Internet Explorer is actually to thank for a lot of the features that we take for granted today, but a quick walk through history shows that it’s true. Internet Explorer: interweb trailblazer.
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Microsoft rolled out – in the last couple of weeks – the new web UI (formerly known as METRO UI) for Hotmail (now called Outlook), SkyDrive, Office Web Apps, People and Account. The rest of the Windows Live suite is probably also due to be updated soon. The web UI is very similiar to the one found on Windows 8. You can see the new tiles of each service in the cover photo of this post. But now let’s get straight to the web apps. Does Modern UI require a "modern" browser?
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The memo, distributed to the senior technical staff, contained a ballot asking them to choose a name for a new device invented the previous winter – the semiconductor triode. Several options were presented, including my personal favorite, the Iotatron. In the end, the name “transistor” (“transconductance” + “varistor”) won out over all the others, but it’s still interesting to read the discussion of the other names. Horizontal boosters. Alluvial dampers? Ow! That's not it...
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I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We've created life in our own image.
Stephen Hawking
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Weakest link in the chain syndrome... 
/ravi
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I’m asked do these sorts of “make a recommendation for a solution” presentations all the time. I know how difficult it is. These presentations are different than teaching moments. They need to have a certain structure... Start with donuts and coffee.
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The average Web user maintains 25 separate accounts but uses just 6.5 passwords to protect them, according to a landmark study from 2007. As the Gawker breach demonstrated, such password reuse, combined with the frequent use of e-mail addresses as user names, means that once hackers have plucked login credentials from one site, they often have the means to compromise dozens of other accounts, too. Newer hardware and modern techniques have also helped to contribute to the rise in password cracking. CrackMeIfYouCan!
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Really good article, worth a read. Thanks for posting.
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Very comprehensive article - I've learn't a lot, and amongst other things I think I now understand how "rainbow tables" work (although as the article points out, they are less used these days).
Amongst other things, one of the things I've taken away from this is that if you are hashing users passwords, you should pick your hash carefully, and always use salt. I think it's almost criminal that companies like LinkedIn and Yahoo aren't doing this - considering some of the high profile failures recently I would hope that all big companies have plans to audit how user password hashes are stored in their databases.
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It's that half password that's the problem! Only use whole passwords, they're twice as strong! 
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Actually, its more expenential, not linear.
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If you define a half-password as having half the characters sure. But I have conveniently not defined it, to be able to protect myself in situations such as this!
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