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50 Killer Apps for your USB

These free apps don't require any installation. With portable applications, all you have to do is plug in your USB and run the program without the hassle of installing the program or leaving traces behind. If you like these portable apps, many of them also have an installer allowing you to install the program on your computer for more speed and accessibility.

How to Choose a Computer

Buying a new computer can be an overwhelming task for anyone. But finding the computer that is right for you doesn't have to be hard. You just have to think about what you want the computer to do. Does it have to be portable? Is it just going to be used for homework? Are you a big gamer? This all factors into what type of computer suits you best.

Pirates In Space!

Recently, pirated software as well as the sites that host them have been receiving a lot of criticism for their "lack of morals." The entertainment industry is attempting to stop any and all of the countless torrent sites littering the internet, but to no avail. The most famous (or infamous) and well known website distributing pirated software is The Pirate Bay.

The entertainment industry has been chasing The Pirate Bay for a long time with little to show for their efforts. Although they have won numerous lawsuits opposing what the site is doing, the industry isn't even close to removing the site from existence. The Pirate Bay almost seems impervious to any attempts to get even close.

Tables != Layout

Tables exist in HTML for one reason and one reason only: To display tabular data. That's it. Then border="0" came along and made it possible to make a table to organize data without being able to see the table itself. Which then led to tables being used to lay everything out on all beginner websites and even some professional websites. The time has come for this to stop. Professional websites are now designed in a way that makes the website more flexible and more functional, not to mention the massive increase in the readability of the code. Still on the edge? Let me change that for you.

Qualities of Good Code

Although knowing how to program is obviously the most important quality of being a comptuer scientist, code architecture follows closely behind. The quality of underlying code will have a great impact on the reliability, scalability, security, extensibility, and maintainability of your program. Basically, without good code architecture, you will run into many problems down the road.

Self Repairing Solar Panels

With the goal of transferring the world's energy demands to renewable sources quickly becoming more and more essential to the existence of the human race, scientists at MIT are focusing on creating revolutionary, super-efficient solar panels to harness the sun's power. But there is something extraordinary about these solar panels. They have the uncanny ability to repair themselves.

Lingodroids

Its one thing for a robot to be programmed to understand Japanese or English or any other language that already exists. But it quite a feat for two robots to develop their own language and be able to communicate with each other like these two have.

Created by Ruth Shultz and her colleagues at the University of Queensland and Queensland University of Technology, each of these Lingodroids have developed a specialized language for the sole purpose of navigating their way around obstacles and recognizing where they are.

Less - CSS Preprocessor

Everyone who calls themselves a web designer has quite a bit of experience with Cascading Style Sheets. CSS is extremely simple, including only rulesets and declarations. The only reason CSS exists is to encapsulate the elements to style and how to style them. For the newcomer, it does everything it is supposed to do, but to an experienced developer managing a dynamic website, CSS is a massive limitation on how easily values can be changed and related to one another.

Why Linux (Still) Sucks

Over the past few months, there has been a great increase in the amount of interest in open source options and that isn't limited to software. It also applies to operating systems, specifically to Linux. To Linux activists, Linux is a gift from the gods, saving humanity from the evils of Bill Gates and his cursed Windows operating system. But to everyone else, it is just another attempt by less than 1% of the market to dethrone Windows as the most effective end user operating system currently available on the market.

Ninite: The Universal Installer

Getting a virus and having to reformat your computer wouldn't be so bad if you didn't lose all of your favorite programs. But it happens to everyone. Viruses and malware troll theinternet just waiting for some unexpecting user to come by. Then they attack and there isn't much you can do about it. The virus will ravage your computer until all hope is lost and your only hope of regaining use of your computer is to reformat the computer. And every program you ever installed is gone too.

Qualities of Good Code

By Daniel Taylor on May 28, 2011 20:14

Although knowing how to program is the most important quality of being a computer scientist, code architecture follows closely behind. The quality of the underlying code will have a great impact on the reliability, scalability, security, extensibility, and maintainability of your program. Basically, without good code architecture, you will run into many problems down the road.

Sometimes code is not removed, just commented out. Maybe there are variables that have been left in the code, but are not used at all. There might be closely coupled code or a cyclical class structure. All of this leads to cryptic code that cannot be extended easily making it nearly impossible to come back to in the future to maintain.

This type of code is known as "code bloat," code that is unnecessarily long, slow, or otherwise wasteful of resources. This problem can be solved by refactoring your code or possibly even redesigning your program entirely.

You can find out ways to make your code more efficient by reading this book on refactoring. But for now, let's take a look at some ways to see if your code architecture is well thought out or if it could be improved:

Rip It Apart

Can I rip out large sections of code and move it somewhere else without breaking anything? I have never gotten into doing all of those flow charts, pseudo code and other precoding stuff. I just like to jump right in and get things working. After the framework for every feature is completed, I ask myself where each feature belongs and move it to the correct location. I should be able to move features around easily, taking only a few minutes to fix a few references.

Scalability

Building scalable code doesn't always mean being able to pile more on. Anyone can pile crap on top of crap. All you end up with is a load of crap that is impossible to maintain. This is known as spaghetti code. Scalability involves not only increasing the size of the code, but also simplifying the code. You have to be able to scale your code up and down if you want to be able to maintain it.

Pick Up Where I Left Off

Am I able to come back to the code after a few months of working on another project? Or do I have to spend a few days recalling how everything works. I almost never document my code unless it is a library class that is going to be used by others. A comment here and there should do the job. Make sure you name your methods properly and give your variables useful names. The most important thing to remember is code should comment itself. You shouldn't have to place comments on every other line. But I am not opposed to writing a big comment block above a section of code describing an in-depth algorithm.

These are my top three most important characteristics that contribute to good code architecture.