The race to the operating system dominance is in full swing, and the Internet is full of eager fans expressing their opinions why theirs is “the best.” But there is no global “best” for anything in life and an educated choice of an OS is based on an subjective preference. More…
Actually, not much. But there’s plenty wrong with Gnome, KDE, Cinnamon, Xfce, LMDE and other third party additions.
Linux itself is a good platform and it works very well on servers that don’t have any keyboards or monitors attached. But in order for normal humans to use Linux and visually interact with the system, a third party desktop environment must be installed. Like Gnome or KDE. And that’s where problems begin. Major problems. More…
I don’t use a Mac. I use Linux. And it’s a matter of principle.
There’s a little quaint café in Bonn, Germany called Apfelkind. It’s an establishment for “children, coffeee and cake”, where the parents can relax over a cup of coffee while the children play in the adjacent playroom. Just recently the café received a letter from Apple Inc. threatening to sue if Apfelkind does not withdraw the application for trademarking its logo. More…
No, I’m not turning this into a celebrity gossip blog, but there’s one thing I noticed about Shakira that software developers would do well to learn from: her songs come out natively in two languages. The video clips are not just translated, the footage is actually recorded with Shakira singing in Spanish and in English. More…
If your local video store is closed and you are in the mood for watching something scary, I’ve got just the thing for you. Take a modern website and try porting it to Internet Explorer 6 (IE6).
Internet Explorer 6 is over 10 years old, but it’s still used by nearly 12% of the world’s population. And its incompatibility with modern web technologies is legendary. And scary. More…
European Union keeps coming up with new legislations painted with broad brush strokes. Here’s another one: starting on the 25th of May 2011 all websites hosted in the EU will need to obtain permission before storing persistent cookies on the user’s computer. More…
If you are planning to hire a designer, make sure you don’t hire the one who designed these things! More…
As you have read in the previous article on cryptography, encryption algorithms are like complicated mathematical equations that you can solve only if you know the variable X, which represents the password. But if you have ever used a program like PGP, which uses public and private keys, you may be wondering how it is possible to encrypt something with one password and decrypt it with another. Well, the concept is similar, and I’ll explain to you how this works in a moment. More…
It seems like the ability to find talent in people is a talent in itself. Goethe said, “The greatest genius will not be worth much if he pretends to draw exclusively from his own resources.” Those who want to succeed in life should learn to find that hidden potential in other people and then bring it out. Here are a few “hidden potential” examples I found:
Albert Einstein was four before he could speak and seven before he could read. Isaac Newton did very poorly in elementary school. Walt Disney was fired from the newspaper where he worked because “he had no good ideas.” Werner von Braun failed ninth-grade algebra and Leo Tolstoy flunked out of collage. Haydn gave up on teaching Beethoven, who seemed to have “no apparent musical talent.”
Did you ever wonder how encrypting programs scramble your files and render them unreadable? Let’s have a little peek into the fascinating world of cryptography! More…
I was thinking recently about how quickly life passes. One week follows another and before you know it, several months have gone by. It really makes you want to live life to the full. But even if we do, we’re not getting any younger. Now, here’s something positive about getting older:
Not long ago I saw the results of a research that analyzed the histories of about 400 famous people: statesmen, scientists, painters, warriors, poets, etc. Out of the subjects’ greatest achievements, 35% came when they were between 60 and 70 years old; 23% when they were between 70 and 80 and 8% when they were over 80. So 66% of the world’s greatest works have been done by people over 60. I guess the best is yet to come! 
I enjoyed this little cartoon, although having programmed several time estimation dialogs myself for different programs, I have to tell you that sometimes it’s not easy to make them work properly. Even a simple copy operation can depend on different factors that vary the transfer speed, so especially at the very beginning of the operation it’s not easy to come up with precise estimates.
Delphi is a Rapid Application Development language with a long and colorful history. In my opinion it was at its peak when it belonged to Borland at the end of the 1990′s. Since then it changed hands and directions four times, stumbling over every new craze on the market. More…
If you work on the computer a lot, you probably realize that spending many hours in front of a monitor is harmful to the eyes. Here are some basic things you can do to help your eyes stay healthy. More…
We have all seen the Javascript navigate-away warnings that display a message if you try to, well, navigate away from the current page. A lot of sources teach that you need to add an onChange or onClick event to every control on your page to determine whether the controls have been changed or not. If you have a lot of controls on your page this can be cumbersome and create a lot of code clutter. More…
It seems like the freeware software world has in recent years made some good strides of progress, to the point that some freeware alternatives to commercial programs are usable on professional level. In this article I’ll list some freeware programs that I personally found to be good replacements for their commercial counterparts on my laptop that runs Windows. More…
I use trim a lot. It’s available in most programming languages. Except for Javascript. I’m not sure why it’s not there, but since we should always try to look at things from a positive perspective, we can be glad that it can easily be added. And not only as a standalone function, but integrated right into the string class. More…
One difficulty that a lot of web developers face is handling of html entities. If you are a beginner web developer you’ll probably notice that some text partially disappears from your edit controls from time to time. Well, the reason it disappears is that the text that the visitor typed into the control contained some character that conflicted with the html code that handled the display of the text. More…
I just finished upgrading InfoStore to version 3.2, which is supposed to be fully compatible with Windows Vista. In order to do that, I had to take a good look under the hood of the new operating system. There are several major changes that were introduced, and they are generally an improvement, at least in the area of system security, but they certainly require programmers to acquire a new mindset. More…
More pictures of strange design mistakes.