Possibility of thinking of multi-threading design patterns as a way to organize threading code. Some possible patterns include: Fire and Forget (background thread) Periodic (Timer) IO thread Producer/Consumer Worker thread (work queue) Copier thread Pipeline (must be careful) Swarm? The background thread could be joined at a later time or a thread that runs it’s… Read More »
Someone asked a question about updating SVG dynamically from a server on the SVG Developers list this morning. One of the (many) responses pointed to an article on SVG server-side. As usual, I went to check it out to see if it might hold some tidbits I could use. Or maybe, it could be a… Read More »
In attempting to do Test Driven Development, we noticed that one of the problems with testing object validation code was the necessity to have broken objects to test with. This is particularly important in cases where the internals of an object may come from somewhere uncontrolled. For instance, objects that may be read from disk… Read More »
In a natural language, an idiom is a phrase that conveys more information than the individual words combined. In order to understand an idiom, you must have knowledge of the culture of the person using the idiom, as well as a good grasp of the language. Programming idioms are similar. They involve uses of particular… Read More »
Different paradigms are basically different ways of thinking about or looking at problem solving. Programming paradigms usually also include ways of organizing code or design. The main purpose of any paradigm is to reduce the number of possible solutions to a problem from infinity to a small enough number that you have a chance of… Read More »
In some legends and in fantasy, there is the concept of a True Name. Once you know someone’s true name, you have power over them. To guard against problems with this most people would commonly use a use name that everyone actually uses to refer to them to keep their true name safe. In programming,… Read More »
Here are a few basic rules of troubleshooting and debugging. Divide and conquer (always) 50/50 tests are best Verify can’t happen cases with a test Steady progress is better than random guessing If you guess and fail, go back to #1. Don’t try to keep guessing. I’ve been trying to formulate a good set of… Read More »
I’ve been experimenting for a few months with blogging as a way to store URLs, interesting information, and ideas on my local machine in a way that I might be able to find them again. I’ve finally decided that this approach would help me to do some things on my website that I haven’t quite… Read More »