Programming Leftovers
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Parametric Progress
This may seem efficient, because you are doing more work in one go, but it’s not. It’s actually the opposite. It is more efficient to fix only one thing per git commit. Choose one aspect, or one “parameter”, and change only that. Then, see what happens, learn about the effects of your change, and then move on to the next parameter. Thus “Parametric Progress”.
The diagram below illustrates how this may seem counter-intuitive. If you change many things at once (left side in the diagram), it may seem like you are taking shortcuts, and thus arriving at the goal faster. And Parametric Progress (right side) may seem like making detours.
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The two types of C programmers (a provocative thesis)
Back in the days, C was somewhere between your best option or your only real option for doing certain sorts of programming. If you were writing a Unix program, for example, for quite a while C was your only real choice (then later you could consider C++). The people who came to C often found some of its virtues to be attractive, but they weren't necessarily strongly committed to it; they'd picked C as an expedient choice.
Meanwhile, there are people who looked at C and felt (and often still feel) that it was very much the language for them (out of those available at the time). They feel strongly drawn to C's virtues, often explicitly in contrast to other languages, and today they may still program in C out of choice. If and when they switch languages they often pick languages that are as close to the virtues of C (as each person sees them) as possible.
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Building a Kernel From Scratch
Why would you want to build a custom Linux kernel (well, a rootfs, kernel, and a bootloader)? There are two reasons: [...]
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Memoirs from the old web: server-side image maps
There were two kinds of image map technology; of those who used image maps, most probably only remember the newer client-side image maps. However, there was also an older image map technology which is now almost forgotten, in the form of server-side image maps.
Client-side image maps. The newer client-side image maps allowed arbitrary polygons to be defined over an image. This had the advantage that browsers could tab through the various polygons to be activated for accessibility purposes, and didn't require server-side processing. It was fairly common to see client-side image maps being used for navigation purposes, over a single image with a number of different page titles written on it. It was also fairly common for it to be used in conjunction with framesets, using the target attribute on an area element.
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Autocorrecting my Git Commands
I'm going to show you a couple of handy tricks that I use to help Git "Do What I mean".