New links: 2011

December 2011

→ An example of the CPU caches effects on almost simple loops, see the pictures of the measurements for different sizes and access patterns (and Hacker News discussion). Many thanks to Ace for the link.

→ Gestures instead of passwords: a new way to sign up in Windows 8.

→ File size reported by FindFirstFile can be incorrect (by Raymond Chen).

→ VP trees: A data structure for spatial search by Steve Hanov.

→ Don't let more than one process try to read from stdin at the same time by Raymond Chen.

November 2011

→ Profiling without a Profiler by Lockless Inc.

→ Why Stack Exchange Isn’t in the Cloud by Kyle Brandt.

→ Lossless and Transparency Encoding in WebP: the lossy compression is more effective than JPG and the lossless compression is better than PNG. There is support for animation and transparency.

→ Stop Online Piracy Act is opposed by Google, AOL, eBay, Facebook, LinkedIn, Mozilla, Twitter, Yahoo, and Zynga.

→ List of freely available programming books

→ How to use a hash table to cache the result of conversion from UTC to local time for different time zones by Raymond Chen.

→ Passion Versus Professionalism by Ernest Adams.

→ Asynchronous UIs: don't make your users wait.

→ Adobe is stopping development on Flash Player for mobile browsers; Flash will work in mobile apps through Adobe AIR.

→ Dwolla, a payment network charging $0.25 per transaction.

→ Intel 4004, the first CPU, is 40 years old today.

October 2011

→ John McCarthy, the creator of LISP, died at 84.

→ The Ksplice Pointer Challenge. Test yourself: do you understand the difference between arrays and pointers in C?

→ Herb Sutter and Bjarne Stroustrup about Dennis Ritchie: he created “a high-level, portable, efficient systems programming language. Everyone knew it couldn’t be done, and he did it”.

→ What's New in Visual Studio C++ 11. Auto-vectorization (using SIMD for a loop) and auto-parallelization (splitting a loop into multiple threads) will be supported in the next version of Visual C++.

→ ISO C++11 (formerly known as C++0x) was published. Wikipedia provides a good overview of the new language features.

→ Memory capacity and commercial compiler development. In 1980s, many compilers were written by one person. With the increase in memory capacity, more optimizations became viable, and you cannot write a compiler alone anymore.

→ Steve Jobs has passed away.

→ An interactive tour of Google Go: learn the language by writing programs and running them in your browser.

→ "Algorithm" is Not a Four-Letter Word: algorithms for generating random mazes.

September 2011

→ Don't make objects that end with 'er' by Travis Griggs.

→ PHP 5.4 beta is released. Traits (a language construct that can be used instead of multiple inheritance) are the major new feature.

→ Javascript PC Emulator by Fabrice Bellard, a genius behind ffmpeg, qemu and tcc. Thanks to Ace for the link.

→ Windows 8 Developer Preview is available for download (requires installation on a separate partition, includes Visual Studio 11 and SDKs).

→ Introduction to Artificial Intelligence, a free on-line course from Stanford University taught by Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig. Enrollment is now open.

→ The Programming Languages Beacon: a list of major software products, with details about the programming languages used to implement them.

→ Python 3.2.2 has been released.

August 2011

→ Steve Jobs resigns as Apple CEO

→ Building Windows 8, the next version of Windows (blog).

→ How Browsers Work: Behind the Scenes of Modern Web Browsers

→ Hyperpolyglot: Programming Languages Syntax Comparison

→ What every computer science major should know by Matt Might.

→ PHP 5.3.8 Released with over 90 fixed bugs. Version 5.2 is not supported anymore; the users should upgrade to 5.3.x.

→ Stories about the B5000 and people who were there. The memories of early computer history, specifically the development of the early ALGOL (the origin of Pascal and C) compiler and first computers supporting it, discovering recursive descent and involving, among others, Don Knuth as a student writing a compiler in some three months, earning a yearly pay from it and obtaining masters degree instead of bachelors. Many thanks to Ace for the link.

July 2011

→ CSS Lint: a CSS checker.

→ How To Safely Store A Password: use bcrypt.

→ JavaScript Design Patterns by Addy Osmani.

→ Boost your productivity: Cripple your technology by Matt Might.

→ BrowserID: A better way to sign in (developed at Mozilla Labs).

June 2011

→ Google launched a social network called Google+

→ Intel released AVX2 instruction reference, including 256-bit wide SIMD, a hardware random number generator (the RDRAND instruction), vectorized table-lookup (VGATHERxx), bit-manipulation instructions (LZCNT, which is already supported by AMD, parallel extract and deposit, ANDN, etc.). The new instructions will be available in future Intel processors (Haswell microarchitecture). Agner Fog commented the new instructions.

→ Firefox 5 was released.

→ A list of Advanced Computer Science Courses.

→ The Architecture of Open Source Applications by Amy Brown and Greg Wilson. How do Audacity, Bash, Eclipse, LLVM, Mercurial, sendmail, and other OSS work.

→ Experience porting 4k lines of C code to Google Go by Krzysztof Kowalczyk. He was able to port them in a few days and found an out-of-bounds bug along the way.

→ Windows 8 user interface presented by Jensen Harris.

May 2011

→ Practical Cryptography Corrected by Bram Cohen (the guy who created BitTorrent): one-page advice to implementers.

April 2011

→ Amazon web services outage.

→ Incompetent Research Skills Curb Users' Problem Solving by Jakob Nielsen. Users rarely change search strategy or critically evaluate search results.

→ Lock-free algorithms by Raymond Chen.

March 2011

→ What I like and don't like to see in a technical presentation by Grig Gheorghiu.

→ Optimizing a Screen for Mobile Use by Jakob Nielsen. A great example of redesigning for increased usability.

→ Mirah: Ruby-like syntax which translates directly to pure Java (no additional run time libs). Thanks to Ace for the link.

→ Firefox 4.0 was released. New features: faster JavaScript engine (JIT compiler), accelerated graphics (Direct-X on Windows), and revamped user interface. With the new version, you can share your bookmarks and settings across multiple computers or mobile devices. The WebM codec, XMLHttpRequest 2, WebGL (3D graphics in JavaScript), HTML5 forms, and CSS3 transitions are now supported; support for SVG and OpenType font format was greatly improved. The parser now conforms to HTML5 standard. Sources: What's new in Firefox 4, When can I use.

→ The final version of Internet Explorer 9 was released.

→ Easy Perfect Minimal Hashing (Python implementation and measurements) and Succinct Data Structures by Steve Hanov.

→ XML is really, really slow by Krzysztof Kowalczyk.

February 2011

→ Final five IPv4 blocks are allocated to registries. No unallocated blocks remain.

→ How to optimize the Euclidean Algorithm by Lockless Inc.

→ The case of the inconsistent right shift results by Larry Osterman. When you shift a 64-bit variable by more than 64 bits, the result will be different on 32-bit and 64-bit compilers.

January 2011

→ PHP crashed because of excess precision (80-bit long double instead of 64-bit double) in x87 registers. The problem was solved by forcing to store the value in memory in lower precision (using 'volatile'). Rasmus Lerdorf pointed to a similar bug report for GCC and a good paper on floating point (pdf). Later, the same bug was discovered in Java.

→ Underhanded C. Hiding malicious behavior in innocent-looking C code.

→ The history of MOS 6502: the chip was laid out by hand and it worked the first time.

→ Using averages — a common performance measurement mistake. Using the time of the fastest run is more accurate.

→ You're On The News. Get an instant email when your blog is submitted to Hacker News.

→ Understanding Hash Functions and Keeping Passwords Safe: how to use salted passwords and crypt() in PHP.

→ Responsive Web Design: adapting to screen resolution by resizing images, moving or hiding content (important for mobile users).

→ Fast and Easy Levenshtein distance using a Trie by Steve Hanov (see also Compressing dictionaries with a DAWG).

→ Why Is Eric Schmidt Stepping Down at Google? Larry Page will head the company.

→ The polynomial algorithm for 3-SAT problem (if it's correct, then P=NP).

→ Simple Email Service, Amazon's solution for sending newsletters and notifications by email.

→ Test results for Intel's Sandy Bridge processor by Agner Fog. Old bottlenecks were removed, but throughput of the decoders is usually too low.

→ Test-Taking Enhances Learning by Jakob Nielsen. People who took a free-recall test remembered 145% more; it's also useful to add quizzes to educational websites.

New items are in bold typeface. Feel free to add your links below.