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robinh's comments

robinh | 12 years ago | on: On portability of Gnome

This incoherent rant as a response to a single sentence isn't really helping your case.

"All those portability claims and that there somehow good: you're just doing things for lowest common denominator. Requiring a huge amount of effort to change or develop low level bits across BSD and Linux."

I don't even know what you're trying to say here.

robinh | 12 years ago | on: Where should I start learning Assembly?

This is probably the best guide (and I've read a lot of them) to actually writing assembly on your average PC one can get. I definitely recommend reading it.

robinh | 12 years ago | on: Manually Creating an ELF Executable

Author here. And yes, that's a bug. I recently restored most of the pages on my website, and didn't check whether each page was the most recent version. When I first wrote the HOWTO, I for some reason was under the impression that the 'write' system call required the address of the length of the string to be loaded in EDX, which is obviously a bit silly. You're right that EDX should just hold the value 13. I'll change this as soon as I get the time.

robinh | 12 years ago | on: Keyboard innovation is making them worse

"In addition, I'm sure there are hunt and peck typists that still legitimately use caps locks instead of shift because it requires less coordination and hand contortions, so leaving caps lock alone also has accessibility benefits."

A recent poll I posted on HN suggests that I'm in the minority on this one, but I actually don't remap caps lock myself. And I like to think I'm a pretty capable writer, touch typing with a decent WPM.

Consider the following bit of assembly:

  .set MBOOT_PAGE_ALIGN,   1<<0
  .set MBOOT_MEM_INFO,     1<<1 
  .set MBOOT_HEADER_MAGIC, 0x1BADB002 
  .set MBOOT_HEADER_FLAGS, MBOOT_PAGE_ALIGN | MBOOT_MEM_INFO
  .set MBOOT_CHECKSUM,     -(MBOOT_HEADER_MAGIC + MBOOT_HEADER_FLAGS)
(These are multiboot header definitions used by a kernel to get GRUB to load it, for the curious.)

I'm sure there are plenty of programmers who just use the shift key if they were to write code similar to the above, but I simply prefer the caps lock key myself. Habit, perhaps.

robinh | 12 years ago | on: Comments should be sentences

I agree wholeheartedly. The syntax doesn't even have to be extremely obscure, it can be highly useful in lower-level languages such as C as well: Often, I just want to get a quick idea of what the next big block of code is going to do without having to read the entire block of code.

robinh | 12 years ago | on: Poll: What level of math is programming roughly analogous to?

Since I'm not from the US and we don't have 'levels' of math where I live (you take math in high school and get some or all of the above combined), can someone explain to me what each level entails?

While I know the definitions of each term, I'm unclear on what exactly 'Pre Calculus' would be in this case. Also, is Trigonometry higher than Algebra or Algebra 2, if that question even makes much sense? Finally, what are the differences between Algebra and Algebra 2, and Geometry and Geometry 2?

robinh | 12 years ago | on: This Post Took 3 Years to Write

Agreed, although I must say I was positively surprised that I could actually try out the game before having to sign up in the first place. More people should definitely do something like this.

robinh | 12 years ago

It's kinda cute how Google is down for twenty seconds and there's already a thread on the front page with 40+ points and 15+ comments

Edit: and it's up again already (at least for me). No more need to panic, people.

robinh | 13 years ago | on: Facebook buys Parse

I feel inclined to agree. The same thing happened to MySpace, and (in the Netherlands) to Hyves. I'm sure there are more examples.

robinh | 13 years ago | on: Layoffs at EA Today

Not that there's anything wrong with board games - I agree with all the points you mentioned - but have you ever tried some of the text-based games on your netbook? There are a lot of them out there, most of them are free, and some are pretty awesome.

robinh | 13 years ago | on: Schrödinger's 😻 and outside-the-box naming

The ISO-8859-1 ASCII-based character encoding contains an Ö, too. That's not even Unicode. It may not be in the first seven bits of the ASCII alphabet, but it's so widely implemented that not supporting it is just as ridiculous as not supporting the apostrophe.

robinh | 13 years ago | on: The New York bar that takes Bitcoins

I'm not very well-versed in economics, but would setting prices to a relatively non-changing BTC value not actually be a good thing to stabilize its value, if enough people were to do that?

robinh | 13 years ago | on: URLs are for People, not Computers

That was what I was trying to ask: can you do both, or would that be absurdly impractical/impossible? Alternatively, can't they do only a POST and somehow generate URLs dynamically based on the search query?
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