16Bit

stuff for programmers

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Once in a while you may try to get together with an old buddy and play some sort of video game across the internet. As a way of troubleshooting, you may end up relying on trusty ol’ ping. Ping can lead you astray. This post is not about troubleshooting why you can’t get the games [...]

So, as many of your know, I’m on the job market at the moment. In addition to reaching out to folks and cruising the traditional job boards, I also keep an eye on Craigs List. I saw this today. It’s awesome: I love the code in it! It reminds me of the Google interview code [...]

Once upon a time, the Internet didn’t exist.  As crazy as that sounds, people once survived without it.  The beginnings of the Internet came on the 29th of October 1969 at about 10:30 PM.  40 years ago today.  Of course it was called ARPANET back then. The plan was for UCLA (University of California – [...]

About Revision Control If you are working on a team to produce an application, you will quickly discover that managing everyone’s edits to the project is a difficult task.  In fact, if the team is of any reasonable size, it will soon become impossible to manually track the changes. Luckily for developers, there’s a huge [...]

Hosts files are a handy thing that every web developer should take advantage of. Here’s the setting: you have a web site, for facespace.com, that you’re developing on your local. It references something from, say, mybook.com, which is another site of yours, but one which resides at a different domain. Let’s say that facespace.com/index.htm references [...]

Alright, this blog is only a few days old, and I’m already on my second windows-exclusive post. I’m risking being labeled as the blog’s resident “Microsoft FanBoy”. Oh well, I like to live dangerously! Windows services. They’re executable code that runs in the background. A fair amount of them are part of the windows operating [...]

It seems like a while ago, my voicemail always used to tell me “You have 1 new messages, and 4 old messages.”  Thanks Voicemail.   You sound so intelligent when you say “1 messages”. I was thinking that this kind of thing was going away.  Until today.  I was just using Google Reader and saw this message: [...]

I can’t count the number of times that I’ve heard someone say “As soon as you buy a new computer it is obsolete.”  While I’m sure this is a slight exaggeration, we are all aware of how fast technology changes. Software developers, like anyone in the technology industry, need to be fully aware of what [...]

To ride on the heels of the previous post on redirecting standard input, batch files are another useful thing. Batch files are a MS Windows deal. Unix systems have something similar called a shell script, but that’s for another day. A batch file, *.bat, is essentially a collection of commands that you’d otherwise type directly [...]

I recently planned a competition for programmers, similar to the Inter-Collegiate Programming Competition (ICPC).  We created a number of problems for the contestants to complete which each required getting input, processing it, and producing output.  Rather than dealing with a pile of code for reading from and writing to files, we told them to read [...]

I can’t express how strongly I feel that every programmer be involved with either an interest group or a project. There are a few reasons for this: Resume Building It sharpens your skills, as you learn from others Others learn from you The resume building one is a pretty selfish non-altruistic one. But it’s true. [...]