In a society where technology and the Internet have become incredibly prominent elements of our daily lives, being able to program is akin to having a super power. In fact, a programmer is able to not only easily interact with cutting edge technology, but also to take advantage of said technology to transform pure thoughts into something as tangible and useful as software.I would argue that there has never been a more exciting time for being able to program. While being a part of our industry back in the late seventies and early eighties must have been a very exciting time for programmers, I f...

I believe some of us may encounter some strange problems when we expect something normal to happen when we operate on our computer. On Windows 7, we may sometimes want to manage our service or applications by opening service manager.But somehow we may find that we cannot open it by clicking on Start->Right click on Computer->Manage.It may prompt some error message to tell us we cannot open the service manager. Then what to do? Here is a way to open it,goto Start->Run,then type "compmgmt.msc". It will open the Computer Management window.Hope you are good luck!...

I’ve recently realised something. The best place to write code isn’t in front of your computer, with your compiler, IDE and tools. The best place to write code is far, far away from any of these tools – somewhere where you can think properly. For a language with which you are fairly familiar, the mechanics of translating the program in your mind to a program that the compiler can compile (or the interpreter can interpret) is fairly easy – it’s coming up with that program in your mind which is hard.The other day I was on a train journey. I had my lap...

When it comes to designing and building websites, it never seems to happen fast enough.Given this fast pace, many small details that are eventually required to build the website are often left out of the design process. While these details might be minor, they are what take a website from nice to truly awesome.These details are often easy to miss because they don’t drive the overall look and feel of the website. The problem is that as your development team works through the design, it will be forced to design and create these elements for you anyway.You could adjust the production cycle...

In PHP, we can define our own functions which can accept optional number of arguments. In this kind of functions, the optional argument should be set with default value.Fox example, the next code example will illustrate this:<?php function func($name,$type=NULL) { echo "$name $type"; } func("Hello"); echo "<br />"; func("Hello","world"); echo "<br />";?>Here $type is an optional argument. It must be set with a default value either NULL or some other value. Quite simple.Right! In other programming languages, we can achieve similar effects. This is very convenient if we...

I want to take a slight detour from usable privacy and security and discuss issues of design. I was recently at the Microsoft Faculty Summit, an annual event where Microsoft discusses some of the big issues and directions they are headed. In one of the talks, a designer at Microsoft mentioned two data points I've informally heard before but had never confirmed. First, the ratio of developers to user interface designers at Microsoft was 50:1. Second, this ratio was better than any other company out there. As someone who teaches human-computer interaction, I wanted to push on this poin...

Sometimes when we need to use email service provided by WAMP, we need to use some remote mail server such as Gmail. In Gmail, if we want to use the SMTP server to send email and want to use port 465, then the SSL connection should be setup. But by default in WAMP, the ssl is not usable. So to allow use SSL, what we should do is go to system tray and click PHP->PHP Extensions->php_openssl. Then now you can use Gmail to send email easily....

Stop doing this:public boolean foo() { if (true) {   return true;   }  else {   return false;   }}It always amazes me when I dig into an open source project, and I see code written by supposed experts, and reviewed by seasoned professionals, and nobody slaps the wrists of the developer who shoves return statements right in the middle of a method.Tell me, how hard is it to do this:public boolean foo() {   boolean flag = true;   if (true) {    flag=true; }   else {   flag=...