Moving Beyond The Typing Debate?

Maybe the readers of my blog are more astute (and better looking!) than average, but I was happy that several comments to my recent post on type inference were properly dismissive of what one called "the static vs. dynamic holy war." As I said when writing about the myth of …

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Type Inference: Nice, But Environment Support Is Crucial

Bill Venners, recently intrigued by Scala, talks about the \<a href="http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp%3fthread%3d209353"" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">advantages of type inference in this post. Type inference means that type assignments are implicit but static (that is, the programmer need not "finger type …

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Bit Twiddling Hacks

Comes a time in every performance-oriented programmer's life when you can speed things up tremendously by working directly with bits. In such a situation, this page of bit twiddling hacks would be very useful: Bit Twiddling Hacks (via \<a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/%7er/LessIsBetter/%7e3/130989829/drjflam"" target …

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The Electron Sculptor : View Source Reflector tool for .NET Silverlight Sites

Nice: A plug-in for the invaluable \<a href="http://www.aisto.com/roeder/dotnet/"" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Lutz Roeder's Reflector tool that allows you to view Silverlight source:  The Electron Sculptor : View Source Reflector tool for .NET Silverlight Sites (via David Ing)

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From the "Fair Enough, I Guess" Dept.

"7. Windows XP: Switching User During Capture.
Never do this. Very bad things will happen."

-- Pinnacle Studio 11 Readme.doc

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Linux Multitouch: Like Surface, But Probably Less than $10K

Microsoft's [Surface is estimated to cost \\(10K](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/surface) in its first incarnation. I've already had an interesting conversation with an entrepreneur friend who has an application that he thinks would be fantastic on Surface, but \\)10K for the hardware makes it a non-starter. Although I'm …

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Oracle 11g Beta Out: Alan Zeichick Says It's The Leader

Alan Zeichick, commenting on the release of Oracle DB 11G Beta ranks the major databases as:

  1. Oracle
  2. DB2
  3. SQL Server
  4. MySQL

I've never been a fan of DB2, but Oracle DB is a rock and I would never hesitate to recommend it. (This despite my involvement with Oracle's abysmal XML-based …

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Another LiveWriter / dasBlog scheduling experiment

\~8AM Hawaiian == \~7PM UCT


Saved Publish On (Local) Appears At Publish Date 8:50 Today  9AM immediately 9 AM publication 9:25 Today 9:30 immediately   9:26 Today 11:30 immediately   9:30 1:30 immediately   9:32 1:45 ?   9:32 1:35 immediately   9:33 1:45 …

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Jakob Nielsen Says Experts Should Write Articles, Not Blog Posts. I Disagree.

Jakob Nielsen, the usability guru, argues that \<a href="http://www.useit.com/alertbox/articles-not-blogs.html"" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">experts should not blog, as blogging an opinion is a commodity display of knowledge, but rather they should write longer articles, as well-researched and argued articles lie outside the …

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Lava Lake in Pu'u O'o

Lava has reemerged at Pu'u O'o vent, creating a vast, slowly circulating lake of lava, as captured from the USGS cams at dawn on 7/8/07. During the day, it doesn't look like much, but try the \<a href="http://hvo.wr.usgs.gov/cam/"" target="_blank" rel="noopener …

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