Have you heard that in some companies employees are allowed working 20% of their time on the personal projects? It turns out that there is the company that rendered this principle to the absolute. Let’s imagine that you can work 20% out of 100% of the working time on any project that you want. There are no managers, departments and chiefs. The company structure is totally flat, and all employees are equal and voluntary grouping by interests. Only the projects that attract more people have chance to survive.

It turned blue, is something wrong with it?

BSOD is the kernel response to an unsolvable particular situation. If you see it, it means that something has happened and it is definitely wrong.

The kernel environment imposes many restrictions on the programmer's free hand: you consider IRQL, sync access to shared variables, and you do not stay too long in ISR, you should verify any data from the userland… Breaking at least one of the rules, you will receive a bunch of phrases in a standard VGA video with the poor palette.

In fact, this makes sense. If in the user mode the application simply closes without even removing a trail after itself (that the kernel will do that), so it will not break the integrity of the entire system.

The web developer needs a console, but not that much that he/she should drop everything and start reading thick books about Linux. That's why I have learned occasionally some console tricks, and many of my coworkers do the same. I will reveal a few useful secrets without which I cannot live anymore.

1) Use ssh keys!

I discovered the keys a long time, but regularly there are people who never heard about them. SSH keys allow adapting the connection once, and then passwords do not have to be stored to all sites in a notepad.
$ ssh-keygen -t dsa

This article is not a panacea for all security lacks, and it does not reveal any new attack vectors. I just saw a serious implementation of the fake for Google mail and decided to warn all UMumble users.

Recently, I have received an interesting letter, supposedly to confirm / cancel automatic forwarding to my mailbox.

I remember when I was a child I loved playing in the sandbox, and I was lucky too, because my neighbor was a truck driver, who regularly filled the sandbox with the clean river sand. Probably, many of you remember the pleasure of playing with the sand (for example, it is so popular to build the sand castles and sculptures at the beach), therefore, the researchers at the University of California are not exception. Namely, they have created a high-tech sandbox, adding to the normal process of playing with the sand a little augmented reality.

Over a year ago one user of StackOverflow programming site asked for help concerning this issue. Namely, they have the employee with the last name Null at the firm. The problem is that because of his name falls a corporate search application, if the employee’s name will be used as search query (it has happened very often recently). Error:

<soapenv:Fault>
<faultcode>soapenv:Server.userException</faultcode>
<faultstring>coldfusion.xml.rpc.CFCInvocationException: [coldfusion.runtime.MissingArgumentException : The SEARCHSTRING parameter to the getFacultyNames function is required but was not passed in.]</faultstring>

A Canadian game developer, Christopher Albeluhn that has seven years of experience lost his job, but he did not lose his optimism. In his spare time he began to make a new project that was supposed to strengthen his portfolio, namely it is a model of the Earth that is powered by the Unreal engine.

We all remember the classical explanation about the indexes in the database and how they make the task easier to find the right lines. I'm sure most of you visualizes something like this:

It becomes clear right away that it takes much less effort to find two or three right lines throughout the data. It is brilliant, easy, and clear.

Personally, I always thought that there is no room for any improvement regarding this method until I got familiar with the clustered indexes. It turned out that the non-clustered indexes are not that perfect as I though.

So here are some questions: What is exactly a clustered index? Why is it better than the non-clustered one? What’s going on with it in MySQL?

I have little experience (summarily I have been working as a programmer nearly for 16 months), nevertheless, I would like to give some tips to myself in the past, or in other words, to those who are studding now at the university and planning to become a software developer. I do not have a claim on wisdom or experience on no account. While thinking a little, I understand that all these tips are very actual for me more than ever too. I published the first note in my blog last year, and now I am publishing here the list expanded with tips of the readers of this blog.

All tips are independent and their order does not matter.

The article will concern the work of “brains”, which operate the engine of your car or motorbike. I will try to explain as simply as possible and in general, what and how is going on.

What do these “brains” do and what are they for? Electronics is an alternative to other systems performing the same functions. The carburetor used to deal with fuel metering, the ignition used to be operated by the mechanical or vacuum advance measure of the ignition advance. In general it can be realized not by electronics alone and it used to be just this way for quite a long time. On the cars, motorbikes, petrol-powered saws, petrol generators and other places worked and keep working the same systems that are to substitute the injector.
Why was it needed to change anything? Why should the existed, proved and rather reliable system be repealed? It is quite simple – a pursuit of economy, ecology and power. Work accuracy of the written above systems is not enough for the supply of the desired level of ecology and powerfulness, electronic systems of the engine controls began to appear long ago.