Programming

%f in user-facing strings is dangerous. Depending on the architecture, programming language involved, version of that language and compiler optimization flags, results can vary slightly. And if there are multiple languages involved in the serving stack, it is almost impossible to argue with the outcome. If those variations are immaterial, then use %.1f or %.2f to get one or two digits of precision after the decimal point, respectively. Otherwise, don’t use %f at all....

One argument which some people might give in favor of using tabs is that it allows the viewer to decide how the code should appear to them. And hence, it separates the logic (indentation) from its appearance. The biggest flaw in that argument is that it renders the concept of line length limits meaningless. Line length limits and the associated rules of wrapping bring a good structure to the code. Someone looking at a piece of code with 3-levels of nesting and tab-length set to 8 will see a very different line length from someone using a tab-length of 2....

Java 1 2 3 int getTextFileSize(String fileName) { return (int) (new File(BASE_DIR, fileName).length(); // WRONG } A 32-bit signed int can deal with ~2GB worth of data. And if your code is not going to deal with files larger than 2GB, why worry? But what if someone wants to use the same code for a video file some day? Or What if someone writes another code to iterate over all the files in the BASE_DIR directory?...

Yes, it did happen, and no, I am not stupid enough to execute rm -rf *. It was a bit more convoluted than that. I was trying to prepare a customized SD card image for the Android emulator. The fastest way to do that was to mount the SD card on my GNU/Linux machine and modify the files. The files on the SD card have root as the owner. Therefore, the easiest way to maintain a clean state was to make all modifications using sudo....

Default window management scheme in Mac OS X is not well-polished. For example, till Mac OS 14.6, there is no way to make an application occupy left half of the screen or to make an application always stay on top. To improve on that, my personal setup includes following applications. Better Touch Tool - At the most basic level, it provides “Window snapping” feature, drag the window to top-left and it expands to full screen....

For android projects, some engineers use Android Studio (new), some use Eclipse with ADT (old), few like me still savor command line, this blog post is about handling (building, installing and testing) android projects from command line. To create android project Sh 1 2 $ android create project --target 4 --name TestAndroidApp --path ./test_android_app --activity Main --package net.ashishb.TestAndroidApp --gradle --gradle-version 1.0.+  ... After changing to directory test_android_app (cd test_android_app), fix a bug...

A useful and handy command specially when you during experimentation, you are stuck because of a changing language settings to an undecipherable foreign language. Bash 1 2 3 adb shell am start -n \ 'com.android.settings/.Settings\$LocalePickerActivity'

Android plugin for Gradle does not support Java-style compile time only dependencies. After spending a few hours on trying to build android app targeted for Amazon SDK (without using Amazon’s Android specific plugin but just their jar stubs for maps, ADM and Home widget), I finally found that the one way to support compile-time dependencies is following. For application project Groovy 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 configurations { provided } dependencies { // ....

Booting process The bootloader loads the kernel stored in /mach_kernel. Tip: Use rEFIt as a bootloader for dual booting into GNU/Linux. Kernel launches the launchd process which is equivalent of init in GNU/Linux. launchd loads startup processes from several directories (/System/Library/LaunchAgents, /System/Library/LaunchDeamons, /Library/LaunchAgents, /Library/LaunchAgents and corresponding files in ~/Library directory)

I was trying to make some modifications to android emulator and was unable to find good set of instructions for the compiling the same. Here are mine. Bash 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 # Get the source code. git clone https://android.googlesource.com/platform/external/qemu cd qemu # Install required dependencies. sudo apt-get install gcc-multilib libesd0-dev libx11-dev \ libxext-dev libasound2-dev libpulse-dev \ lib32stdc++-4.8-dev # Install ia32 libraries (missing from default ubuntu 13....