The cockroach of writing

A story going around at the moment is how Microsoft Exchange ran into a problem with the new year – somewhere the time was being stored as an integer that reads in base 10 like YYMMDDHHMM, so once YY became 22 it exceeded the maximum of 2147483647 available to a signed 32-bit integer, drama ensued. […]

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Object-oriented programming is littered with long terms that refer to very simple ideas. A lot of the time when you try to find out what they mean, you have to read through multiple pages of wordy explanation that either assumes objects are a foreign concept to you, or just talks so much about theory and […]

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You’ve probably encountered a situation where a “Read/Load more” link takes up as much space as it hides. Maybe a comment is six lines long and it obscures the last one. Come on guys, it’s not hard to do properly. With n as the number of lines you want to show, what should be done […]

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First, the necessary context: an axonometric projection is a type of parallel projection, basically meaning there’s no perspective. Further, it’s a type of orthographic projection, meaning there’s none of the distortion present in an oblique projection (which I hate with a passion). The final necessary context is that the view is rotated to reveal all […]

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Since this site runs WordPress, I was receiving huge amounts of spam. At first I tolerated it, but recently it became too much. I had to start adding more and more phrases to the blacklist, but it still persisted. Fortunately, there was one very useful fact I noticed: it was all coming from the same […]

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Look at any discussion over some shortcoming of Python syntax, and somebody is bound to mention the following guideline: There should be one– and preferably only one –obvious way to do it. Basically, it goes like this: Person: why doesn’t Python have support for <feature x>? This is pretty basic. Python advocate: <feature x> is […]

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