IT Companies
Steve Jobs Has Died
Media reports confirm the death of Steve Jobs, former CEO of Apple. A compilation of tributes from tech industry leaders, presidents, and colleagues.
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Node.js
Node.js Is a Cancer
A provocative critique of Node.js examining its scalability claims, violation of Unix philosophy, and the pitfalls of using JavaScript on the server side.
DIY
Extracting Images from an Optical Mouse Sensor Using Arduino
How to capture 18x18 pixel images directly from an optical mouse sensor chip using Arduino — and build a cheap barcode scanner in the process.
Humour
Happy Programmer's Day!
A short toast to all programmers on the 256th day of the year — the professional holiday of Programmer's Day in Russia.
Algorithms
Reading QR Codes by Hand
A detailed guide on how to manually decode QR codes without a smartphone, covering the structure of QR codes, system information, masks, encoding modes, and step-by-step data extraction.
IT History
Story of a Game: Wheel of Fortune
A personal memoir about creating the legendary Russian computer game 'Pole Chudes' (Wheel of Fortune) in the early 1990s at a closed Soviet nuclear research city, and its unexpected journey across the world.
History
Toy Story: Field of Wonders — How a Game from a Secret Soviet City Spread Across the World
A Soviet programmer from a closed nuclear research city recalls how he built a Wheel of Fortune clone in a week using Turbo Pascal, embedded his home phone number in the code, and accidentally had it spread to half the computers in the former USSR — and beyond.
Social Networks
Pornography from the Perspective of Evolutionary Psychology
A scientific look at pornography through the lens of evolutionary psychology — why it exists, how it works on the human mind, and what science actually says about its effects on individuals and society.
Operating Systems
Writing Your Own OS: Issue 1
A beginner-friendly tutorial on writing your own operating system from scratch, covering bootloader basics, BIOS interrupts, real mode programming, and getting your first "Hello World" message on screen.
C++
Wake Up, It's the 21st Century — On Modern Programming Standards
A plea to C++ developers to stop writing code as if it were the 1990s, covering TR1, C++0x features, the futility of manual optimizations, reinventing the wheel, and unnecessary memory savings.
CSS
The Cicada Principle and Why It Matters for Web Designers
Periodical cicadas emerge every 7, 11, 13, or 17 years — all prime numbers that minimize synchronization with predator cycles. This same principle can be applied in CSS to generate naturally random-looking textures from tiny tiling images using prime-number-sized layers.
Design
Simple Textured Background in 5 Seconds
A quick Photoshop technique to create elegant textured backgrounds using noise layers, blend modes, and color tinting — in just a few simple steps.