Monday, January 12, 2009

CWE-609

Double-Checked Locking - a common weakness, enumerated. The complete list can be accessed here.

Thursday, January 01, 2009

Monday, December 29, 2008

Gas Tax

According to wikipedia,
fuel taxes in Germany are €0.4704 per litre for ultra-low sulphur Diesel and €0.6545 per litre for conventional unleaded petrol, plus Value Added Tax (19%) on the fuel itself and the Fuel Tax.

1 US gallon happens to equal 3.78541178 litres. With an exchange rate of 1 Euro = 1.3949 U.S. dollars, this results in a fuel tax (not including the V.A.T.) of $2.4838(3943) / $3.4559(373) per gallon for diesel/unleaded fuel.

Tuesday, December 23, 2008

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Basis point

One basis point is one hundredth of a percent. 1 % = 100 bp. Or, equivalently, 1 bp = 0.01 %.

Monday, December 22, 2008

FICA tax

The FICA tax is the Federal Insurance Contributions Act tax. It is a payroll tax, funding Social Security and Medicare. More details can be found in this wikipedia article.

Tuesday, November 18, 2008

Strong typing

Another nail in the coffin of the weak typist. According to Coding Horror, typing is a core programming discipline. With weak typing skills, a possible recourse might be to use weakly typed languages, or to devote more time to planning before embarking on the next hunting and pecking expedition.
The formula for the amortization schedule payment mentioned in the annual percentage rate wikipedia article is derived in the amortization calculator wikipedia article.

Wednesday, November 12, 2008

Premature optimization and its relation to evil is discussed in a wikipedia article on optimization. Premature optimization may result in traversing many local extrema that turn out to be unacceptable, before reaching the global extremum (or an acceptable local extremum, or running out of time). What is being optimized is the time to execute a program, while neglecting the time it takes to develop it.

Wednesday, November 05, 2008

According to Paul Graham, The distinguishing feature of nasty little problems is that you don't learn anything from them. ... Working on nasty little problems makes you stupid. And this, in turn, makes you more qualified to work on more nasty little problems, resulting in an infinite regression.

Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Air quotes are typically double quotes, or possibly angle quotes (guillemets) according to wikipedia. It is not clear who invented air quotes, and how they relate to sign languages.

Thursday, October 23, 2008

According to Alan Greenspan, there could be
a flaw in the model that I perceived is the critical functioning structure that defines how the world works.
Would this be self-interest, which guarantees the best possible outcome?

Monday, October 20, 2008

The sentence What you are will show in what you do appears in "The Education of the Wage-earners" by Thomas Davidson (1840-1900). This is a quote commonly attributed to Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931).
The Development of Thomas Davidson's Religious and Social Thought

Thursday, September 18, 2008

The acronym RTC can stand for Resolution Trust Corporation. Touch-typists do not have to resort to the use of acronyms, of course.

Thursday, September 11, 2008

Do non-touch-typists use shorter variable names?

Wednesday, June 18, 2008

This article by Randall Hyde discusses the benefits of optimization, if performed at the right time.

Saturday, June 14, 2008

Problem Solving

According to Albert Einstein, A clever person solves a problem. A wise person avoids it. But what would a stupid person do?

Update: Instead of avoiding the problem, it is also possible to give up.

Wednesday, May 21, 2008

Productivity

A good way to magnify productivity differences between software developers is to have them work on the same set of files. Slower developers will have to continually merge changes made by faster developers until being able to commit their changes (without breaking any tests, assuming there are tests that go beyond successfully compiling and linking and a policy that requires to have tests pass before committing changes). Ultimately, their tasks will have to be reassigned to faster developers, or they will never be completed.

Wednesday, April 16, 2008

The performance of Qt's QItemSelectionModel with large numbers of selected items is a known issue.

Tuesday, April 08, 2008

In SMILES, the '/' and '\' symbols are to be interpreted relative to the atom, not the double bond. X/Y(/Z)=R means that X is below the line Y=R and Z is above it. See the OpenSMILES specification for details.