A couple of days ago I came across a blog post titled PHP: a fractal of bad design. I honestly don't like programming language debates, but when the flame begins, I usually attempt to show that other languages than PHP have their flaws as well, none of them is perfect. But hey, this post was really shocking! I've been coding in PHP since ages. I've seen many gotchas and WTFs along the way, but I never stopped to summarize how many times I had to workaround PHP anti-features, poorly designed APIs and bugs just ... [Read More]

The personal computer itself is in a trouble these days, that must not be a question to anyone. With the rise of smartphones and tablets, fewer and fewer people use a PC as their primary computer. You can write notes on an iPad just fine, and you can read your mail and have your photos and manage your calendar, and you can facebook. Yes, this a verb. Power users, such as developers and designers are a different breed, though. I've recently read a rant about the ... [Read More]

You may have heard about what happened to GitHub the other day. (BalaBit source codes like Zorp-GPL or syslog-ng codes mirrored at GitHub were not affected.) In short: any user could upload her public key to the account of any other user by exploiting that GitHub uses unprotected mass assignments to instantiate objects responsible for storing public key data. But how the hell can something like that happen in a well-structured, clean architecture? Here's a code snippet using mass assignment: ... [Read More]

Recently as I was getting closer to my birthday I decided to make myself happy and I buy a tablet. At least this was my first intention. I was especially looking for an Android tablet but I read about iPads of course. As usually when I am up to buy something I started to read reviews of tablets from all over the Internet. After I read a couple of reviews I started to feel that they have way too many features an many upgrades are about to be released on this quite new market. Frankly I don't see where this market goes, ... [Read More]

Saturday Nucc and me were attending the Global Day of Code Retreat 2011, Budapest event (#gdcr11) invented by Corey Haines and brought to Hungary by Marton Meszaros. In short, it was great fun and I hope that little community I met that day will come together frequently. In more detail, Coderetreat is a coding dojo based on Conway's Game of Life. In 5 or 6 sessions, each taking 45 minutes, you write code with your pair in order to translate the rules of the game into a working software. It does not have to ... [Read More]

I found this piece of code at the website of the International Obfuscated C Code Contest. (Did you know the contest is open for this year?) Since I read tons of books, papers and even videos about clean code nowadays, I couldn't resist refactoring it, just to see how much a heavy code cleanup can improve a source code that was intentionally written to be obscrure as possible, and of course, to abuse both IOCCC and Clean Code as hard as can be. :-) The original code main(n,i,a,m){while(i=++n) for(a=0;a<i?a=a*8+i%8,i/=8,m=a==i|a/8==i,1:(n-++m||printf("%on",n))&&n%m;);} To ... [Read More]

Today both GMail and Google Reader have come up with a new, similar look. And I don't like them. When I use the web UI of both Reader and GMail, I'm usually sitting with my eee PC in my lap, that's 1024x600 pixels and not a single one more. This means that while I'm infotaining myself, I need every single pixel, so I don't like the idea that I have to waste more than 2/3 of my screen to display that black Google Applications menu that I have never-ever used, the Search bar that I use maybe once or twice in a ... [Read More]

On December 25, 2009 Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab boarded a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit, Michigan and became known as the "underwear" bomber after he came very close to killing 289 people. Despite the $42 billion that has been spent on airport security since 911, he was still able to get through. Why is it that people feel nervous around technology being used in high-stakes situations, such as in airport security? Lets take a look at a pretty important difference between people and computer systems. An employee at a given airport is unlikely to one day without any warning signs just ... [Read More]

I wanted to answer my colleague's blog post right just after he wrote that but I only had the chance recently to write about my thoughts. If you interested in the whole pre sequel of this post then you can find them just right here below. Are we there yet? - The Year of Desktop Linux When did we arrive?! Recently I was thinking about what is really wrong with GNU/Linux based desktop environments, I tried to describe what could be the main problems ... [Read More]

Update: this post is obsolated, the newest version can be found here Although my hobby is the amateur astronomy and I've been watching the sky for a few years, I began to take photos about the sky only a few months ago. After I've got some experiences in this topic, I decided to write a blog, because it was not easy to get the necessary information how to do it or what type of pictures I can take with different cameras and devices. To tell the truth, I didn't want to spend a lot of money while I ... [Read More]