aporem.net

Years ago, it there was only one way to update the ports tree: by CVS. Then Colin Percival wrote portsnap and greatly reduced the overhead and time it took to make a checkout.

He also wrote the birthday note.

There is a bug in the new version of Microsoft’s Excel: 77.1*850 should give 65,535 but gives 100,000 instead.

Joel Spolsky explains in great detail and, being a programmer on the Excel team in the past, apologetically the inner workings of the program that lead to this behavior.

If you do not want to read the whole article: it’s merely a bug in the way the numbers are displayed, not calculated.

The Tor network provides anonymity, not security nor privacy. They even state this on their website. But people obviously do not know the difference. Bruce Schneier has a nice story to tell about it.

Ovid wants a new perl book. What he really points out is that with the freedom perl gives the programmer, one needs to really grasp the concept of OO if one wants to avoid the pitfalls he mentions. The topics he suggest are essential for any book on OO, not just for perl:

Responsibility-driven design.

The difference between class and instance data/methods.

How inheritance breaks encapsulation.

When to throw exceptions.

Composition via delegation.

Class consumers versus class cooperators.

Why the Liskov Substitution Principle is important.

Polymorphism and allomorphism.

In theory, programmers always knew that creating monolithical software creates problems on the long run. But the short time gains were so alluring and sometimes one got lucky and the increases in hardware speed concealed the bad design decisions.

But now this is no more. Switching to a distributed system architecture has become inevitable once the amount of data or computation requirements reach a certain limit.

For this, programmers need to accept that they have painted themselves into a corner.