Viewing profile — rabidgnat

My path to programming, as a product of the internet generation: As a child, I loved the idea of computer programming. I got books at the library that told you how, but they always…

Unfortunately, bad browser support :/ http://www.quirksmode.org/css/display.html

I run into plenty of situations where I have multiple lines, and I'd like the respective elements to align. It's not limited to tabular data, but it's the easiest example

There are plenty of problems with CSS. You can't specify the width of an inline element, for one. That alone prevents a lot of reasonable layouts, like tables. Also problematic is …

The police investigates crimes that have already been observed. Journalists have the freedom to investigate potential crimes based on their gut feeling. Recall Enron - a police off…

But my original point is that there's one dev team in the middle of this dealing with concurrency, and any number of remote applications that can use it through a library because s…

It's not some silly vision of the future, but an oversimplified version of today! A brief and incomplete list of applications I use in a typical day: Remote storage and/or processi…

Most application developers won't worry about concurrent program design. Ever. More and more applications are becoming layered each year, and all of the hard work is done on the se…

Rejewski and Turing's Enigma cracking accomplishments were staggeringly significant, but they won nothing. If the Allies bombed every submarine that radioed a position, the Germans…

I disagree with your perspective. Scientists don't need to understand everything about life to make meaningful contributions to our lifespan. This stuff isn't magic - there are sou…

Red-Black Trees in a Functional Setting Chris Okasaki http://www.eecs.usma.edu/webs/people/okasaki/jfp99.ps It shows how to construct Red-Black trees in an extremely simple manner …

If I feel extra contact with someone is inevitable, I usually try to request that the person email me some helpful info that I need. If they say they'll "just call," I point out th…

A friend of mine gave up drugs completely after watching "Requiem for a Dream"

You could take the beginning of habit 5 as complementary to Emacs. Has another program ever been extended to do more? Towards the end of point 5, Bram really points out the strengt…

Keeping your email under control requires an unreasonable amount of discipline. I've managed to avoid 'defaulting' on my email so far, but at a decent overhead rate: Every hour or …

Easily! First, I'd stare at the Clojure webpage, and try some examples in the REPL. I'd feel like I'm not grokking idiomatic Clojure, so I'd try some Google searches, but find noth…

I was reminded of this: "There's nothing sadder to me than associations held together by nothing but the glue of postage stamps. If you can't see or hear or touch a man, it's best …

I lightly approve of anecdotal posts like these. Facebook controls all of the data needed to make informed decisions, and they're not going to share if the OP's claims are accurate…

You don't even need a program. The TI-83Plus lets you create backups that survive wipes http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=weBNfd26_r0

"I sure as hell don't remember being showered with praise or getting athletic trophies just for turning up" I experienced a lot of that, but in retrospect my parents managed it pre…

Before now, I assumed that teaching programming meant giving exercises where students figure out how to piece together the fundamentals of programming languages, and then try to bu…

"What happens to Lisp if Google buys ITA Software?" Over the years, subsystems will get converted one-by-one to C++/Python/Java, and programmers will get converted one-by-one to C+…

I follow the Git mailing list, and he's even-keeled and surprisingly helpful in discussions. The tone of the original post is representative of what he normally writes. I'm sure he…

If you have RSI typing pain and haven't treated it, spend a whole day typing with wrist braces. It convinced me to switch CTRL and CAPS LOCK on my keyboard. I love keyboard shortcu…

"I really hope you are a Steve Jobs sockpuppet account" Probably not. The Jobs-o-grams that I've seen are terse. Jobs probably would have written something like: "Mark should not b…