How many times has the following happened to you? You go to a web site and it asks you to create an account. You fill out a form with all the obvious fields and hit submit. The page refreshes and shows you the form again. Phone Number is required Well, that’s annoying. There was no indication that the site needed…
10 Apr 2014
I was on Sass Bites this week!
9 Apr 2014
Introduction It’s possible to Gibbs sampling in most languages and since I am doing some work in R and some work in Haskell, I thought I’d present a simple example in both languages: estimating the mean from a normal distribution with unknown mean and variance. Although one can do Gibbs sampling directly in R, it … Continue reading Gibbs Sampling…
The author received 3 invites to try Atom.io, a new text editor built by GitHub using Node.js. They find it promising but slower than SublimeText. The post shares the invites with readers who follow the author on social media and comment.
On the TIOBE index, Java and C have been sharing the #1 and #2 rank for a long time now, and with the recent GA release of the JDK 8, things are not going to get any worse for our community. Java simply rocks! And it’s the best platform to build almost any of your … Continue reading Java Rocks…
I am the poster child for writer’s block. I can’t write the #ifdef header guard correctly for a brand new C++ class, I don’t remember the order of the public static void main args incantation in Java, and for the life of me, I can’t start working on an empty presentation. Not even if you promise me pizza. (Please promise…
8 Apr 2014
Ouch. (Logo from heartbleed.com) I start every lecture in my security class by asking the students to give us any interesting security or crypto news they’ve seen recently, preferably with a focus on vulnerabilities. The start of my last class was pretty lame, which meant either (1) we’d finally learned how to make our crypto software … Continue reading Attack…
This post is the answer to yesterday’s brainteaser. As a reminder, I was asking what purpose this code might have: public static class Extensions { public static void Add<T>(this ICollection<T> source, T item) { source.Add(item); } } There are plenty of answers, varying from completely incorrect (sorry!) to pretty much spot on. As many people … Continue reading Extension methods,…
7 Apr 2014
Just a really quick one today… What’s the point of this code? Does it have any point at all? public static class Extensions { public static void Add<T>(this ICollection<T> source, T item) { source.Add(item); } } Bonus marks if you can work out what made me think about it. I suggest you ROT-13 answers to … Continue reading Quick brainteaser…
This is the list we’ve all been waiting for. The top 10 productivity booster techs for programmers that – once you’ve started using them – you can never do without them any longer. Here it is: 1. Git Before, there were various version control systems. Better ones, worse ones. But somehow they all felt wrong … Continue reading The Top…
6 Apr 2014
I can't remember the last time I went a whole day without running into a software bug. For weeks, I couldn't invite anyone to Facebook events due to a bug that caused the invite button to not display on the invite screen. Google Maps has been giving me illegal and sometimes impossible directions ever since I moved to a small…
4 Apr 2014
It’s been a scandalously long time since I’ve blogged about C#, and now that the first C# 6 preview bits are available, that feels like exactly the right thing to set the keys clacking again. Don’t expect anything massively insightful from me just yet; I’d heard Mads and Dustin (individually) talk about some new features … Continue reading C# 6:…
At Data Geekery, we love Java. And as we’re really into jOOQ’s fluent API and query DSL, we’re absolutely thrilled about what Java 8 will bring to our ecosystem. Java 8 Friday Every Friday, we’re showing you a couple of nice new tutorial-style Java 8 features, which take advantage of lambda expressions, extension methods, and … Continue reading Java 8…
3 Apr 2014
Slides for the brief talk that I gave at a Harvard seminar on privacy and user data organized by John Taysom last week. My talk was really more about the “network problem” than the “protocol problem”. Networks breed first- and second-mover winners and others path-dependent powers, until the next disruption. Users or rather their data … Continue reading "The Next…
2 Apr 2014
Here is a fun puzzle. Suppose we have a group of 10 men and 10 women, and each of the men has sorted the women in order of their preference for marriage (that is, a man prefers to marry a woman earlier in his list over a woman later in the list). Likewise, each of the women has sorted the…
subscribe to this newsletter here Tweet of the Day Our customers, users, and followers are sharing their love for jOOQ to the world. Here are: Arturo Tena who simply loves jOOQ 3.3, and expresses this with a creative transformation of our version numbering scheme: https://twitter.com/arturotena/status/434502197217202176 Florin T.Pătraşcu who cannot stop integrating jOOQ with MicroMVC, because he discovers more … Continue…
Introduction The other speaker at the Machine Learning Meetup at which I gave my talk on automatic differentiation gave a very interesting talk on A/B testing. Apparently this is big business these days as attested by the fact I got 3 ads above the wikipedia entry when I googled for it. It seems that people … Continue reading Student’s T…
1 Apr 2014
For the occasion of today’s date, I’ve just invented a fun game. The Spring API Bingo! How does it work? Let us write the following little piece of code: So far so good. We could use more terms if we wanted to but for now, these will suffice. Now, let’s shuffle the above list and … Continue reading Spring API…
31 Mar 2014
So far in this series we’ve seen elliptic curves from many perspectives, including the elementary, algebraic, and programmatic ones. We implemented finite field arithmetic and connected it to our elliptic curve code. So we’re in a perfect position to feast on the main course: how do we use elliptic curves to actually do cryptography? History As the reader has heard…
Reddit’s /r/ProgrammerHumor has recently treated us to this politically incorrect and quite childish little Open Source rant Obviously, like most “discussions” on reddit and specifically those discussions about Open Source, things got quickly very serious with people referring to Richard Stallman and how these critiques are childish and immature and what’s-wrong-with-our-industry™ etc. Let’s not delve … Continue reading Open Source…
Stats: a preamble I’ve been reading too much about March Madness brackets, so I thought I had to run some numbers around here like the cool kids do. Get your umbrella out, it’s about to rain cold facts. In the history of time, Chromium has had 205,095 commits made by 1,943 contributors representing 7,431,088 lines of code. In the last…
30 Mar 2014
Learn how to reset a lost MySQL root password by restarting the server with disabled security checks. This allows resetting the password directly in the database. Useful when locked out but reduces security temporarily.
29 Mar 2014
This post is a follow up to Friday’s post on comments in Go. Keith Rarick and Nate Finch pointed out that I had neglected to include two important practical use cases. Build tags I’ve previously written about how to use // +build tags to perform conditional compilation. In light of the previous post it’s probably […]
28 Mar 2014
At Data Geekery, we love Java. And as we’re really into jOOQ’s fluent API and query DSL, we’re absolutely thrilled about what Java 8 will bring to our ecosystem. Java 8 Friday Every Friday, we’re showing you a couple of nice new tutorial-style Java 8 features, which take advantage of lambda expressions, extension methods, and … Continue reading Java 8…
This is a quick post to discuss the rules of comments in Go. To quickly recap, Go comments come in two forms // everything from the double slash to the end of line is a comment /* everything from the opening slash star, to the closing one is a comment */ As the first form […]
26 Mar 2014
I am deeply honored and humbled by the CEO role. I’m also grateful for the messages of support. At the same time, I know there are concerns about my commitment to fostering equality and welcome for LGBT individuals at Mozilla. I hope to lay those concerns to rest, first by making a set of commitments … Continue reading "Inclusiveness at…
We announce MapTiler Desktop 0.5.3 with several exciting new features.
24 Mar 2014
Introduction This post explores the properties of my favourite Go data type, the empty struct. The empty struct is a struct type that has no fields. Here are a few examples in named and anonymous forms type Q struct{} var q struct{} So, if an empty struct contains no fields, contains no data, what use […]
A quick note to update everyone on Mozilla news. Our Board of Directors has appointed me CEO of Mozilla, with immediate effect. I’m honored and humbled, and I promise to do everything I can to lead Mozilla to new heights in this role. I would first like to thank Jay Sullivan for his contributions to … Continue reading "Mozilla News"
When doing reporting or statistics with SQL, you better know your window functions. There are many of them, and few SQL developers know about them. CUME_DIST() is one such function. We’ve recently re-discovered it on Stack Overflow. The following query yields two times the same result for fraction1 and fraction2: The above query then yields: … Continue reading CUME_DIST(), a…
"Build software like a tank." I am not sure where I read this, but I think about it a lot, especially when writing HTTP clients. Tanks are incredible machines - they are designed to move rapidly and protect their inhabitants in any kind of terrain, against enemy gunfire, or worse. HTTP clients often run in […]
23 Mar 2014
Editing binaries is a trick that comes in handy a few times a year. You don't often need to, but when you do, there's no alternative. When I mention patching binaries, I get one of two reactions: complete shock or no reaction at all. As far as I can tell, this is because most people have one of these two…
22 Mar 2014
It has been roughly six months since I wrote about the problems I saw with package management in Go. In the intervening months there has been lots of discussion; the issue continues to be one of the two most continually and hotly debated on the golang-nuts and go-pm mailing lists. No prizes for guessing what […]
21 Mar 2014
This blog post gives you a walkthough on creating a speech to text chatroom using Wit and PubNub.
At Data Geekery, we love Java. And as we’re really into jOOQ’s fluent API and query DSL, we’re absolutely thrilled about what Java 8 will bring to our ecosystem. For our Java 8 series, we’re honoured to host a very relevant guest post by Dr. Ming-Yee Iu. Dr. Ming-Yee Iu completed a PhD on Database … Continue reading Java 8…
20 Mar 2014
Introduction This is meant to be shorter blog post than normal with the expectation that the material will be developed further in future blog posts. A Bayesian will have a prior view of the distribution of some data and then based on data, update that view. Mostly the updated distribution, the posterior, will not be … Continue reading Bayesian Analysis:…
19 Mar 2014
No matter how much cryptographers accomplish, we’re always building on a questionable foundation. (illustration: Marc S. Rousseau) Last week, Edward Snowden spoke to a packed crowd at SXSW about the many problems (and limited solutions) facing those of us who want to keep our communications private. Snowden said a number of things — including a … Continue reading How do…
Leland Richardson, Founder of Tech.Pro has recently published a very interesting article about BQL, his visions of a better query language (than SQL). The deciding feat of his new language proposal is the fact that it is really a superset of SQL itself. SQL is a very rich and expressive language to query relational databases. … Continue reading A Better…
So here we are. We’ve studied the general properties of elliptic curves, written a program for elliptic curve arithmetic over the rational numbers, and taken a long detour to get some familiarity with finite fields (the mathematical background and a program that implements arbitrary finite field arithmetic). And now we want to get back on track and hook our elliptic…
Most new Go programmers quickly grasp the idea of a channel as a queue of values and are comfortable with the notion that channel operations may block when full or empty. This post explores four of the less common properties of channels: A send to a nil channel blocks forever A receive from a nil […]
18 Mar 2014
MSSQL: Database * already exists. Choose a different database name. Cannot attach the file * as database.
SchakkoI am currently playing around with ASP.NET and its Entity Framework. At some point I wanted to execute all my migrations against a new local SQL Express database. After I had dropped the database in SQL Management Studio, the Update-Database command of the Entity Framework failed with the error “Database ‘$path.mdf’ […] The post MSSQL: Database * already exists. Choose…
At the company I work Pull Requests are part of our culture.
17 Mar 2014
There are a tremendous amount of SQL APIs natively written in Scala. Manuel Bernhardt has summarised a nice collection in his a post. Another collection of Scala SQL APIs can be seen in this Stack Overflow question. One API that we want to focus on in particular is ScalikeJDBC (licensed ASL 2.0), which has recently … Continue reading A SQL…
Two years ago, Erik Demaine and three other researchers published a fun paper to the arXiv proving that most incarnations of classic nintendo games are NP-hard. This includes almost every Super Mario Brothers, Donkey Kong, and Pokemon title. Back then I wrote a blog post summarizing the technical aspects of their work, and even gave a talk on it to…
16 Mar 2014
This blog post was originally a comment on a Google Plus page, but apparently one cannot create a href to a comment so it was suggested I rewrite it as a blog post. Go pointers, like C pointers, are values that, uh, point to other values. This is a tremendously important concept and shouldn’t be […]
15 Mar 2014
This article shows how to build a simple command line application using the Symfony Console component and Pimple dependency injection container. It provides a step-by-step guide on structuring the code, defining services, configuring parameters and wiring everything together to create a executable console app.
14 Mar 2014
At Data Geekery, we love Java. And as we’re really into jOOQ’s fluent API and query DSL, we’re absolutely thrilled about what Java 8 will bring to our ecosystem. We have blogged a couple of times about some nice Java 8 goodies, and now we feel it’s time to start a new blog series, the… … Continue reading Java 8…
We announce a new open-source web service with a database of coordinates systems used in maps worldwide.
13 Mar 2014
Back when I was first exposed to programming language design, I decided it would be really cool if there were a language that let you define your own number types and then do all your programming within those number types. And since I get excited about math, I think of really exotic number types (Boolean rings, Gaussian integers, Octonions, oh…
12 Mar 2014
The World Wide Web is 25 years old today. The Web is a big deal (as is the Internet on which it is built), I don’t need to tell you! But I did have a few thoughts, solicited by a friend who asked “where [do] you think the future of the Internet will take us … Continue reading "The Web…
Patterns 34:29 As Turing descended from Mount Compute – with the two iPads of the testimony in his hands as he descended the mountain – he did not realize that the skin of his blog shone as a result of his Compiling the Code. Patterns 35:1 Turing assembled the entire Geek community and said to … Continue reading The 10…
Subscribe to the newsletter here Tweet of the Day Our customers, users, and followers are sharing their love for jOOQ to the world. Here are: Dominik Dorn who finds jOOQ awesome. As simple as that! #JOOQ is awesome! — Dominik Dorn (@domdorn) February 14, 2014 Mariusz Nosiński who cannot believe he hasn’t discovered jOOQ before. How's … Continue reading jOOQ…
9 Mar 2014
Last week, Quartz published an article titled “There is no gender gap in tech salaries”. That resulted in linkbait copycat posts all over the internet, from obscure livejournals to Smithsonian.com. The claims are awfully strong, considering that the main study cited only looked at people who graduated with a B.S. exactly one year ago, not to mention the fact that…
8 Mar 2014
Just over a week ago, I left Barcelona and Mobile World Congress 2014, where Mozilla had a huge third year with Firefox OS. We announced the $25 Firefox OS smartphone with Spreadtrum Communications, targeting retail channels in emerging markets, and attracting operator interest to boot. This is an upgrade for those channels at about the … Continue reading "MWC 2014,…
In addition to developing avr11, a software simulation of a PDP-11/40, I also wrote a Go version of the simulator. I recently had an opportunity to talk about the Go based version at the Sydney and Melbourne Go meetups. The link to the slides are Sydney Melbourne The code itself is not really ready for […]
I’m excited to announce that SoundCloud is sponsoring the development of CocoaPods through a Travis Foundation grant. CocoaPods is an open…
7 Mar 2014
At Data Geekery, we love Java. And as we’re really into jOOQ’s fluent API and query DSL, we’re absolutely thrilled about what Java 8 will bring to our ecosystem. We have blogged a couple of times about some nice Java 8 goodies, and now we feel it’s time to start a new blog series, the… … Continue reading Java 8…
6 Mar 2014
How to build a real-time, interactive 3D game using WebGL and PubNub with data streams to sync player position and actions.
Lets Start With What the USD is backed by The USD is no longer backed by gold1, but by a promise that the US Government will pay its debt (in the form of payment the interest on (and sometime redeem) government securities when due). If these payments are not made to the debt holders (Corporations, China, treasury-bond holders) then a…
I encouraged people to start using git, showing some of its features.
5 Mar 2014
In 1983, at the University of Wisconsin, Dina Bitton, David DeWitt, and Carolyn Turbyfill created a database benchmarking framework. Some of their results included (lower is better): Join without indices table {border-collapse:collapse;margin:0px auto;}table,th,td {border: 1px solid black;}td {text-align:center;} system joinAselB joinABprime joinCselAselB U-INGRES 10.2 9.6 9.4 C-INGRES 1.8 2.6 2.1 ORACLE > 300 > 300 > 300 IDMnodac > 300…
3 Mar 2014
Many of us geeks don’t really care about users, tractions, etc. when we spam GitHub with our little toy projects. I mean, who knows if we really have the time to maintain them? Certainly, there’s almost no money in it anyway, so we might just as well give it away for free (e.g. jOOX). Nonetheless, … Continue reading An Open…
This is a guest post by my colleague Adam Lelkes. The goal of this primer is to introduce an important and beautiful tool from probability theory, a model of fair betting games called martingales. In this post I will assume that the reader is familiar with the basics of probability theory. For those that need to refresh their knowledge, Jeremy’s…
1 Mar 2014
Diving Deep: Exploring Go's IP Layer Capabilities
Unlock the secrets of programming with these three essential reads!
So, everyone is discussing the $19B Facebook / Whatsapp deal, discussing it on every media. And Zuck says it was actually a bargain. Yeah right. A bargain. Read CNN’s 10 other things Facebook could have bought with $19 billion. We at Data Geekery are more down to earth, selling actual value to our own customers. … Continue reading Modern Shareholder…
Your application just broke, oh no! It couldn’t have been your code, right? I’ve always had trouble spotting mistakes in my own work such as spelling, grammar, mathematical, or even in programming. With spelling or grammar, office applications quickly pick up on my mistakes and underline them for me, but most of my mistakes come from my own hubris. I’m…
28 Feb 2014
The post explains how to integrate twig.js with BazingaJsTranslationBundle to handle translations consistently between PHP and JavaScript. It shows how to build a custom Twig extension to translate strings with the Bazinga Translator object and handle differences in parameter formatting.
At Data Geekery, we love Java. And as we’re really into jOOQ’s fluent API and query DSL, we’re absolutely thrilled about what Java 8 will bring to our ecosystem. We have blogged a couple of times about some nice Java 8 goodies, and now we feel it’s time to start a new blog series, the… … Continue reading Java 8…
27 Feb 2014
PubNub in the Terminal! Check out our terminal client for fast terminal testing and debugging from any computer for your PubNub app.
26 Feb 2014
Intuition tells us that methods like these ones suffer from a distinct code smell: Why is that so? Let’s delve into this intuition. Here is an example from the JavaCompiler Javadoc: So what’s wrong here? We have a lot of very disjunctly typed parameters that are very likely to be set to null. This decreases … Continue reading How to…
Subscribe to the newsletter here Tweet of the Day Our followers, users and customers are shouting their love for jOOQ to the world. Here are: Ben Hood who is constantly discovering new useful features in jOOQ. @JavaOOQ Just when you when you think you need some custom hack, along comes some handy abstraction that you weren't … Continue reading jOOQ…
So far on this blog we’ve given some introductory notes on a few kinds of algebraic structures in mathematics (most notably groups and rings, but also monoids). Fields are the next natural step in the progression. If the reader is comfortable with rings, then a field is extremely simple to describe: they’re just commutative rings with 0 and 1, where…
In January 2014, my 30 day challenge was to limit my social media. That was a productive month. In February 2014, my 30 day challenge was to eat more slowly. I did that by counting to ten between chewing bites of my food. I tend to wolf down my food, which doesn’t give my stomach […]
New MapTiler Video tutorial “How to load a geographical location from KML” is online on Youtube
25 Feb 2014
Interestingly, boolean types have been introduced only late in the SQL standard, namely in SQL:1999. Even today, not all databases natively support BOOLEAN or BIT types. Most importantly, we can still wait for them in Oracle for a while. Here’s “Ask Tom”‘s point of view from 2002 on the subject: https://asktom.oracle.com/pls/apex/f?p=100:11:0::::P11_QUESTION_ID:6263249199595 Oracle. Why U No … Continue reading The JDBC…
Imagine this: you have forked a repo a long time ago and have since been in a happily committed relationship with the master branch, modifying files and committing from the hip. In case you have doubts about the likelihood of this scenario, we’re talking about my notwaldorf.github.com blog branch, which I forked from holman/left. All my changes are on the…
One of the hardships about being Canadian is that most programming languages are quite simply, rude. Descriptions like ‘imperative’ and ‘declarative’ are enough to fill even the most impolite of Canadians with a vague sense of discomfort. Fear no more! Ruby is the sort of language that addresses all these concerns, and adds a familiar, maple-syrupy feel to your code.…
24 Feb 2014
Java 7 has eased some pain in the area of exception handling when the new try-with-resources and multi-catch syntaxes were introduced. The latter is very interesting from a syntax perspective because it is the only place in Java where formal union types are allowed, similar to what Ceylon offers. Remember, a union type A | … Continue reading Feature Request…
Last time we saw a geometric version of the algorithm to add points on elliptic curves. We went quite deep into the formal setting for it (projective space $ \mathbb{P}^2$), and we spent a lot of time talking about the right way to define the “zero” object in our elliptic curve so that our issues with vertical lines would disappear.…
22 Feb 2014
MySQL does not include a function to split a delimited string. However, it’s very easy to create your own function. Create function syntax A user-defined function is a way to extend MySQL with a new function that works like a native MySQL function. To create a function, you must have the INSERT privilege for the […]
21 Feb 2014
At Data Geekery, we love Java. And as we’re really into jOOQ’s fluent API and query DSL, we’re absolutely thrilled about what Java 8 will bring to our ecosystem. We have blogged a couple of times about some nice Java 8 goodies, and now we feel it’s time to start a new blog series, the… … Continue reading Java 8…
I’m pleased to announce that another paper of mine is finished. This one just got accepted to MFCS 2014, which is being held in Budapest this year (this whole research thing is exciting!). This is joint work with my advisor, Lev Reyzin. As with my first paper, I’d like to explain things here on my blog a bit more informally…
I have a thing for over-the-top cryptography headlines — mostly because I enjoy watching steam come out of researchers’ ears when their work gets totally misrepresented. And although I’ve seen quite a few good ones, last week WIRED managed a doozy. The headline in question, Cryptography Breakthrough Could Make Software Unhackable, managed to accomplish something that few … Continue reading…
20 Feb 2014
The site is a single-page application that displays a multitude of users’ images. At SoundCloud, we use a technique to make the loading of…
19 Feb 2014
Recently, we’ve added support for the MS Access database in jOOQ 3.3. This may well have been our hardest integration so far. The MS Access database has its ways, and many of them, too. But luckily, jOOQ’s internal SQL transformation abilities are already very advanced, as we’ve shown previously in a blog post about the … Continue reading An MS…
When I first heard about unit testing using a framework like JUnit, I thought it was such a simple and powerful concept. Instead of ad hoc testing, you save your tests, and they can be run as often as you … Continue reading →
18 Feb 2014
AngularJS goes real-time with PubNub! In Part 2 of our AngularJS series, we cover using our AngularJS SDK with Presence and Storage & Playback.
Sometimes you have to hack. You just have to. Don’t listen to XKCD. You don’t always regret hacking. On our blog, we’ve shown a couple of hacks before: Throw checked exceptions like runtime exceptions in Java A dirt-ugly hack to modify private final fields in Java But we’ve just been scratching the surface. Our friends at ZeroTurnaround … Continue reading…
The internet needs more cats. DNS servers are the authority on all things internet. Therefore, the best DNS server is the one that resolves everything to cats. Guess what kind of DNS server this is (Hint: it’s the cat kind). Making it go First, get the code, and the npm packages you need (the instructions are with the code). To…
17 Feb 2014
Do you profile your code using JProfiler or YourKit? You should, because their licenses are worth every penny when you can find a very hidden and subtle bottleneck deep down in your application. For instance, the following chart shows nicely that there was a significant performance issue in jOOQ related to reflection: I’ll spare you … Continue reading Free Java…
16 Feb 2014
Last time we looked at the elementary formulation of an elliptic curve as the solutions to the equation $$y^2 = x^3 + ax + b$$ where $ a,b$ are such that the discriminant is nonzero: $$-16(4a^3 + 27b^2) \neq 0$$ We have yet to explain why we want our equation in this form, and we will get to that, but…
Mea culpa In my first post I said that I believed the simulator performance was 10x slower than a real PDP-11/40, sadly it looks like that estimate was well off by at least another factor of 10. Yup, 100x slower than the machine I tried to simulate. At least. More accurate profiling After my last […]
14 Feb 2014
This post collects resources and provides a graph to understand how Symfony authentication works behind the scenes, from the initial request to the final authenticated token. It clarifies the relationships between key classes like firewall, authentication provider and authentication listener.