This is a really amazing version of the Daniel H. Pink speech about Motivation. It all into it’s second book, “Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us”. And, best of all, it’s all explained on a white board ;)
I can’t put it any simpler: buy and read those 2 books ASAP. Getting Real Rework This is proper stuff. This is stuff that translates into words what you, THE DEVELOPER, would like to have in your daily work life. And probably the reason for which having a pet project, something where you set the rules, helps remaining sane, and sometimes to dream that, one day, you will be on your own.
This took some patience. Not to take the pictures themselves, but to bear with a group of trip-mates that were either freezing or bored to wait for me to take this 12 pictures -_- Roald Dahl Plass Do you like it? If so, I have a larger (way larger) version.
Show this to as much peoples as possible. It probably something some informed/smart people already know, but I admit that having someone making a video of it, makes it more “rememberable”, so more effective on (my) future behaviour. I’m cheese? I’m controllable through videos? Possibly, but in this case I’m OK with that. More at: The Story of Stuff.
I was writing some code to react at a textarea.onKeyUp. I take the size of the current textarea.val().length, update an element and do some other stuff. yawn The first version of the code looked like: 1 2 3 4 $('#message').keyup(function(e){ $('#chars_num').html( new_len ); $('#sms_num').html( Math.floor($('#message').val().length / 161) +1) ); }); Working good, but was clearly slow: every keystroke was “giving back the cursor” too slowly for a fast typer like me. I went to take a look at twitter, and their text box was WAY FASTER. ...
I believe I don’t have to describe what primes are, what are their properties and what not. This post is more a tribute to geek-ness of 2 friends-and-colleagues (@lucabox) that have fun thinking of algorithms to solve stupid (or less stupid), and always useless problems ;-) . Optimus Prime :-P - yeah yeah, a stupid joke Briefing This code is based on the assumption that we want to generate very very large primes, so it uses unsigned long long to store the values, instead of classical unsigned int. Live with that. ...
Another old-classic problem: the Merge Sort. Merge Sort Algorithm The problem of the classical implementation The whole algorithm is explained in the wikipedia link above, so I’ll focus on the problem here. The Merge Sort is an in-place-sorting-algorithm that requires some support memory to do it’s calculations. At the “merge step”, an amount of memory as large as the current portion of array being merged is allocated to be used as priority queue (again, the why is easy to find on the web). After this memory is used, normally get’s released. ...
Another simple-but-yet-interesting problem that I found challenging solving is the to Write a Fibonacci’s numbers calculator. It’s a REALLY SIMPLE problem, but still can demonstrate how superficial thinking in programming can lead to dramatically bad solutions. What’s a Fibonacci’s number A Fibonacci’s number is an integer number generated using the following function: Assumed that: f(0) = 0 f(1) = 1 for a generic “n” Integer: f(n) = f(n-1) + f(n-2) For example, the first 20 Fibonacci’s number are: 0 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 55 89 144 233 377 610 987 1597 2584 4181 6765 ...
Todays and yesterday search terms bringing people (very few of them) to my blog. Why “Babbo Natale”? In Italian, “Babbo Natale” means “Santa Claus”, btw. I’m fat, but not THAT fat!!! Today  Yesterday  Weird.
What’s Tweetable? It’s a plugin that integrates Twitter into my blog.